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A pro-health fuels and stoves agenda based on the World Health Organization standards can realign lagging progress toward meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7’s call for universal energy and clean cooking access by 2030, combat the household energy crisis, and promote health and social justice.

At this September’s Global Clean Energy Action Forum, delegates should consider ways to expand innovation goals while protecting collaborations amid a changed energy landscape.

Ahead of the Global Clean Energy Action Forum, a joint convening of the 13th Clean Energy Ministerial and 7th Mission Innovation Ministerial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this September, Nature Energy spoke with three members of the Mission Innovation Steering Committee — Drew Leyburne, MI Steering Committee Chair and Assistant Deputy Minister, Energy Efficiency and Technology Sector, Natural Resources Canada; Julie Cerqueira, incoming MI Steering Committee Chair and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of International Affairs, US Department of Energy; Rosalinde van der Vlies, Vice-Chair of the MI Steering Committee and Director, Clean Planet Directorate in the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation for the European Commission — to hear their thoughts about the next phase of clean energy technology development.

Mission Innovation seeks to accelerate deployment of clean energy and make it affordable, attractive and accessible to all. Fully succeeding in these aims will require greater attention to the needs and context of developing countries, concerted focus on capacity building, and increased emphasis on energy access and justice.

In its next phase, Mission Innovation plans to further develop multinational collaborations that include a variety of entities. This may require new governance structures to shield the new collaborations from increasingly protectionist domestic politics while incorporating renewed concerns about climate change and energy security.

In September, ministers will gather in Pittsburgh to consider how their governments should respond to the energy and climate innovation imperative. Building on Glasgow, the meeting should strive to fill critical gaps in areas such as capital-intensive demonstration projects and innovation-friendly trade in carbon-intensive goods.

Public funding and institutions for energy innovation are critical to achieving climate goals, but our understanding of their evolution, variation and drivers is limited. Meckling et al. compile funding and institutional data across major economies and examine how they changed after the financial crisis, Mission Innovation and expanded competition with China.

Understanding how beliefs about renewable energy sources are influenced by exposure to information is important for the successful implementation of policies to combat climate change. New longitudinal research shows that messages emphasizing specific benefits of renewable energy can exert a lasting impact on partisans’ beliefs.

Communication is an important tool in combating climate change and building support for new energy policy. Here Gustafson et al. measure the longitudinal effect of three message frames around the benefits of renewable energy on Democrat and Republican beliefs and support for such technology in the United States.

Green hydrogen is a crucial part of plans to achieve climate targets, yet how quickly supply will scale is unclear. Using a technology diffusion model, Odenweller et al. suggest that even if electrolysis capacity grows as quickly as wind and solar power, green hydrogen supply will suffer from short-term scarcity and long-term uncertainty.

Development of oxygen reduction catalysts is of key importance to a range of energy technologies; however, the process has long relied on slow trial-and-error approaches. Now, accelerated discovery of perovskite oxides for use as air electrodes in solid-oxide fuel cells is achieved with machine learning.

Heat pumps are widely recognized as a key clean energy technology in the energy transition. While the global heat pump market has expanded significantly, more than doubling in some countries in a single year, expanded policy support will be needed to build confidence in the technology and meet climate goals.

Cobalt-free cathodes are highly desirable for the sustainable development of rechargeable batteries. Here the authors report a high-performance cathode by introducing a small amount of Mo into a layered Li(Ni_0.9Mn_0.1)O₂ material that enables a long-term, high-voltage Li-ion battery.

The slow research cycle of material design, characterization and testing has hampered the development of new cathode materials for solid oxide fuel cells. Here the authors develop a machine-learning approach, which makes use of ionic Lewis acid strength as a descriptor, for discovery of improved perovskite oxide cathodes.

The rapid and large-scale changes required to decarbonize energy systems will have varying impacts on different societal groups, making decisions hard. This Perspective calls for greater attention to the use of realist approaches to research, which can help understand what works for whom, under what circumstances and why.

Scaling up all-perovskite tandem solar modules is challenging due to the degradation of the low-bandgap subcell during processing in ambient conditions. Here Dai et al. devise an additive- and hot gas-assisted blade-coating process that enables modules with 21.6% efficiency over an aperture area of 14.3 cm².

Aerodynamic wake interactions between wind turbines reduce the total energy produced by wind farms. A flow-physics model, which predicts these negative interactions and the control strategy that minimizes them, is developed and validated. The collective operational strategy produced by optimizing this model increased energy production when implemented at a utility-scale wind farm.

Different policies to decarbonize transport are often enacted at once, such that it can be hard to know whether any particular mix is effective. Koch et al. search for structural breaks in CO₂ emissions for European nations as a way of detecting impacts of known and a priori unknown policies.