News & Comment

Mounting calls for action on low-carbon heating and cooling systems are welcome, but we must move beyond only talking about it.

In April 2018, the Mini-Grid Innovation Lab was launched by The Rockefeller Foundation and CrossBoundary. Working with partners across Africa, and supported by Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the lab will test business solutions for mini-grids based in Africa to find the most cost-effective and scalable solutions. In doing so, it aims to demonstrate to governments, policymakers, investors and donors that mini-grids can play a key role in providing energy access to 600 million people without power in Africa. Nature Energy spoke to Gabriel Davies of CrossBoundary about the objectives and achievements of the lab so far.

Enacting structural changes to systems that reinforce existing gender norms is a critical step that we must undertake in academia.

Smart in-home devices, if integrated with the capability to transact energy with one another and with the electric grid, can offer a disruptive solution to managing energy supply and demand. Such transactive energy networks could turn homes from passive energy consumers into intelligent, active energy storage and service providers for the future grid.

The need to include gender in energy policy, practice and research is largely accepted. However, when research that merely disaggregates by sex is used to inform energy efficiency initiatives, it often reproduces stereotypical understandings of sex differences, which can harm rather than promote gender equality.