Blog

Comment & Opinion

Comment | 20 October 2021

Building resilience will require compromise on efficiency

As increasingly complex and optimized energy systems prepare to cope with a variety of risks including climate shocks and extreme weather events, a myopic focus on economic efficiency can significantly jeopardize critical energy services.

• Andrew S. Jin
• Benjamin D. Trump
• Igor Linkov

Comment | 03 November 2021

Implementing diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at conferences

The scientific research environment struggles to be an inclusive and diverse place. Initiatives such as the Minority Carriers event at the Photovoltaics Specialists Conference not only support marginalized researchers but also delineate the changes that need to be made and actions that should be taken to make the research space inclusive.

• Lyndsey McMillon-Brown

News & Views

News & Views | 11 November 2021

Battery-powered freight trains

Curbing carbon emissions will require electrification of transport, but until now most of the innovations have been deployed in the car industry. In a recent article researchers focus on the electrification of another crucial sector, freight trains, but not with the traditional approach of overhead lines — rather with batteries.

• Federico Zenith

News & Views | 03 November 2021

Creating the right environment

Highly selective CO2 reduction electrodes are essential for the viability of CO2 electrolysis as a carbon utilization technology. New research demonstrates a strategy to control the selectivity of CO2 conversion by coating the electrocatalyst with thin bilayers of ionomers to tune the electrode microenvironment.

• Kentaro U. Hansen
• Feng Jiao

News & Views | 04 November 2021

Going green at large

Printing of large-area organic solar cells using green solvents often results in reduced crystallinity and uniformity of the photovoltaic film and consequently a significant performance loss. Now, a solid additive strategy is developed to control the film morphology at the nanoscale and tackle these limitations.

• Tayebeh Ameri

Policy Brief

Policy Brief | 15 November 2021

Clean cooking access may stall under slow post-pandemic recovery and ambitious climate mitigation without explicit focus

Without additional support policies, clean cooking could become unaffordable for about 470 million people by 2030 if a post-pandemic recovery is slow, and about 200 million people by 2030 under ambitious climate mitigation action. Acceleration of clean cooking transitions by tapping into pandemic recovery and climate funds to target the poorest people and regions globally is urgently needed.

• Shonali Pachauri
• Miguel Poblete-Cazenave
• Matthew J. Gidden

Reviews

Perspective | 30 September 2021

The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions

High-socioeconomic-status individuals have a disproportionate effect on greenhouse gas emissions as consumers and through four other key roles they play in society. This Perspective examines the effect and suggests how future research could seek to reduce the resulting energy and climate impact.

• Kristian S. Nielsen
• Kimberly A. Nicholas
• Paul C. Stern

Research

Article | 11 November 2021

Economic, environmental and grid-resilience benefits of converting diesel trains to battery-electric

More efficient and cheaper battery technology has the potential to transform not just automobile but other kinds of transport. Popovich et al. do a techno-economic analysis of battery-electric trains and find potential for both economic benefits and emissions reduction.

• Natalie D. Popovich
• Deepak Rajagopal
• Amol Phadke

Article | 28 October 2021

Tailored catalyst microenvironments for CO2 electroreduction to multicarbon products on copper using bilayer ionomer coatings

Copper catalyses electrochemical reduction of CO2 to valuable multicarbon products, but its selectivity depends on the local microenvironment near the catalyst surface. Here, the authors explore and optimize this environment to improve performance using bilayer ionomer coatings to control the local pH and CO2/H2O ratio.

• Chanyeon Kim
• Justin C. Bui
• Alexis T. Bell

Article | 28 October 2021

Understanding environmental trade-offs and resource demand of direct air capture technologies through comparative life-cycle assessment

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere are widely used in climate policy scenarios, but their real-world impacts are not well understood. A life-cycle assessment by Madhu et al. compares two main DAC approaches and quantifies their environmental impact and resource needs.

• Kavya Madhu
• Stefan Pauliuk
• Felix Creutzig

Article | 01 November 2021

A guest-assisted molecular-organization approach for >17% efficiency organic solar cells using environmentally friendly solvents

Organic solar cells processed from green solvents are easier to implement in manufacturing yet their efficiency is low. Chen et al. devise a guest molecule to improve the molecular packing, enabling devices with over 17% efficiency.

• Haiyang Chen
• Rui Zhang
• Yongfang Li

Article | 01 November 2021

Double-atom catalysts as a molecular platform for heterogeneous oxygen evolution electrocatalysis

Oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts often comprise multiple metal ions in various configurations, hampering mechanistic understanding of how catalysis proceeds. Now, researchers prepare a series of double-atom OER catalysts based on Ni, Fe and Co, which act as molecular-like models and are more amenable to mechanistic study.

• Lichen Bai
• Chia-Shuo Hsu
• Xile Hu

Analysis | 28 October 2021

Access to clean cooking services in energy and emission scenarios after COVID-19

Many socioeconomic growth and low-emission energy scenarios do not consider impacts on clean cooking access and have yet to account for the COVID pandemic. Pachauri et al. now examine how clean cooking access evolves under various scenarios post COVID and find the need for policy focused on increasing access more urgent.

• Shonali Pachauri
• Miguel Poblete-Cazenave
• Matthew J. Gidden

Analysis | 18 November 2021

Global trends in the invention and diffusion of climate change mitigation technologies

Achieving ambitious climate goals requires the development of new technologies at rapid pace. Probst et al. analyse global patent data and find that a growth period of inventions from 1995 to 2012 was followed by a decline of ~6% annually, while invention remains concentrated in just a few countries.

• Benedict Probst
• Simon Touboul
• Antoine Dechezleprêtre