Comment

Decision makers need sector-specific, policy-focused, dynamic economic models with rich representations of technological progress. These allow them to understand how the energy transition is likely to unfold with different policies and what its impacts might be. A new generation of models is emerging to meet these demands, but more action is needed.

Where host communities are marginalized by industry practices, energy social science researchers must ensure that their research does not doubly exacerbate extractive practices. Place-based reflexivity provides a set of principles and concrete practices for researchers to avoid extractive relations with host communities and promote contextually relevant and democratic processes in pursuit of a just transition.

A differentiated natural gas market is emerging as a key mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across global natural gas supply chains. Trust in such voluntary markets across civil society, industry and governments depends on a transparent framework for reporting independently verifiable and accurate emissions data.

Access to clean energy is essential to sustainable human development. We thus have a responsibility and an opportunity to meet the global goal of ending energy poverty by 2030. We propose the creation of a new Mission Energy Access programme to support this aim.

The shift away from mining presents substantial livelihood security challenges for mining communities, but documented mining closures offer insights into how to ensure a successful transition. Secure community transitions require support from governments in the form of proactive planning, locally led collaborative responses and targeted investments.

As the stability of organic and perovskite solar cells improves, accelerated ageing methods become increasingly essential to elucidate their long-term degradation mechanisms and to predict their real-world operational lifetimes. By effectively applying these underutilized tests, emerging photovoltaic technologies can be de-risked and their time to market can be expedited.

Europe’s approach to energy security has been historically split between the East and West. Given the rapidly evolving geopolitical energy security landscape on the continent, we argue that a comprehensive and shared approach to energy security — which incorporates hard security considerations — is needed.

The growing importance of long-term planning in European Union member states’ energy poverty policies makes it necessary to develop forecasting techniques to support related policy decision-making. The combination of machine learning and econometrics holds promise in the field provided that several crucial challenges are tackled.

Australia’s newly announced national Net Zero Authority offers an opportunity to constructively engage coal communities in planning for a decarbonized future. After years of toxic and dysfunctional climate politics, it is essential that the Authority engages with the complexity of coal and the communities at the heart of transition.

Despite increased attention, residential energy insecurity is a widespread and persistent problem in the USA. We commend ongoing investigations, urge scholars to continue to examine why some households disproportionately experience energy insecurity, and offer several lines of inquiry that may help reduce energy insecurity’s incidence and impact.

Today’s sodium-ion batteries can not only be used in stationary energy storage applications, but also in 160–280 mile driving-range five-passenger electric vehicles. This technology will alleviate some of the supply-chain issues arising from limited resources of materials used in the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries.

Differences in the approach to community acceptance of energy technologies can muddy visions of energy futures. Acknowledgement of the tensions around justice perspectives and the degree of desired change can improve scholarship and policy dialogue.

Comprehensive and meaningful inclusion of marginalized communities within the research enterprise will be critical to ensuring an equitable, technology-informed, clean energy transition. We provide five key action items for government agencies and philanthropic institutions to operationalize the commitment to an equitable energy transition.

Ammonia has been proposed as a shipping fuel, yet potential adverse side-effects are poorly understood. We argue that if nitrogen releases from ammonia are not tightly controlled, the scale of the demands of maritime transport are such that the global nitrogen cycle could be substantially altered.

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.

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.

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.

Hard to decarbonize homes represent a complex problem that has historically been neglected in favour of the lower hanging fruit of easier to treat properties. To enable an equitable net zero transition, we must understand these homes in a holistic manner take into account the impacts of different routes to decarbonization on occupants.