Battery and energy storage technologies are moving into a new phase defined less by proof of concept and more by scale, integration, and system performance. As deployment accelerates across defense, electric mobility, grid infrastructure, and digital systems, the limiting factors are increasingly technical, organizational, and structural. The 2026 Volta leadership forum taking place on February 25 to 27 at Stanford University is designed around that reality.
Reducing risk, accelerating deployment
Co-convened by Volta Foundation and STEER, Volta 2026 brings senior decision-makers, operators, and technical experts together across the battery value chain to focus on the enablers of scale – where alignment, shared methods, and clearer interfaces can materially reduce risk and accelerate deployment.
Five cross-sector panels
Volta 2026 features panels spanning Defense, Energy Storage Systems (BESS), Data Centers & AI, materials supply chains, and electric vehicles. These sessions focus on real-world constraints and opportunities – capacity build-out, performance requirements, supply assurance, and infrastructure integration – grounded in operational experience rather than theory. With the first speakers already announced, the panels reflect perspectives from leaders actively shaping how batteries are manufactured, qualified, financed, and deployed at scale.
Action-oriented working groups
A major expansion of the Volta program in 2026 is the advancement of working groups in the shape of multi-stakeholder forums designed to move beyond discussion toward coordinated action. The groups focus on technical and strategic bottlenecks that cut across sectors, including materials qualification and validation pathways, form factor decisions and system-level trade-offs, ESS alternative markets and standards, workforce development for manufacturing and deployment, power infrastructure requirements for data centers and AI, as well as policy coordination and regulatory alignment. These working groups are structured to produce practical outputs – common language, reference methods, and shared 100-day plan frameworks – that can inform policy design, capital allocation, and operational decision-making across defense, BESS, electric vehicles, and digital infrastructure.
Shaping frameworks for the industry
As battery technologies become foundational infrastructure components, fragmentation in standards, qualification timelines, and assumptions increasingly translates into cost, delay, and risk. Volta 2026 is designed to create space for alignment – bringing the right stakeholders into the same room to compare approaches, identify gaps, and clarify pathways forward. For participants, the value is not only in insight, but also in contributing to frameworks that shape how the industry scales over the next decade.
Registration is now open: https://learn.volta.foundation/volta-2026-registration
