Three years ago, Abengoa thermal energy storage engineer Cristina Prieto exchanged the relatively secretive world of commercial CSP for academia. Now, as the professor for a newly created thermal energy storage discipline at the School of Engineering at the University of Seville, she can be creative at the research level. Returning to academia enabled her to leverage her experience in thermal energy storage to innovate an entirely new storage concept based on four different phase-changing materials (PCM) cascaded in series. Prieto is now coordinating the EU’s $3 million, 4-year HYBRIDplus project involving three universities and four businesses, which began ...