I will admit I do not know a ton about these specific energy topics however I tend to immerse myself in new topics for a few weeks and have had very good results. I have been working on some concepts that I know I can pitch to my contacts and I have 1 very novel experiment to conduct in solar which I'm not holding my breath on but if it works it would be pretty damn cool. Basically if it's worth learning I'm down to go at it 100% whether or not it's specifically commercializable - now that you've mentioned these thing surely I'll be taking a closer look. I just love to make things really - and I find it incredibly amusing how simple it is to experiment with new advanced concepts.
My lab is completely random but I have a focus on keeping a huge and well cataloged material inventory as well as electronic components.
I am huge on the conceptual side. I don't consider myself any sort of genius but some of my ideas have blown me away and I know they are feasible and worth trying. I realize I have some hard skills to work on, especially my advanced mathematics - this is where I'd like to have someone to learn from.
There's a lot of really brilliant people who are completely happy building 20th century tech for $100 that was 1,000,000 back in the day - but I focus almost all of my time coming up with new concepts.
Traditionally, expertise in a nice has been praised - it's great for iterative improvements but it makes it tough to innovate without a huge team. I have worked on my core skills however over the past few years I have done a lot of work expanding my breadth.
But as for the lab I guess I'd say I have a lot of low voltage components/ tons of SMD components, a handful of high voltage components and HV safety gear - I'm good to work up to around 40kv with my equipment and probes. ,tons of metals and alloys, a very good basic inorganic chem setup, a basic organic chem setup, basic laser system, vacuum system with a lot of components, high voltage setup (I love tubes, electron guns, piezoceramics and piezocrystals, plasma, etc). I love tear down things for their components, etc.
My current work partner is really smart but he's really only interested in machine learning - he will stay on but I need someone who can help me validate some of my ideas and I can help provide whatever skills I have that may be useful for your projects.
I was in software development for a long time solo... then I joined a team, became a partner, made a respectable sum for a year or 2 and then realized... money is so much fun but I was left feeling completely empty until I returned to roots.
Anyway the ideal person is someone who will push me to learn and do more, and someone I can learn from, and someone who wants to do the same and someone I can help in that regard as well.