Reviews & Analysis

Filter By:

  • Recycling spent batteries is crucial for a circular battery economy, yet knowledge of solid-state battery (SSB) recycling lags behind that of lithium-ion batteries. This study evaluates SSB recycling techniques, emphasizing the need for specific, energy-efficient methods tailored to distinct electrolytes.

    • Marco Ahuis
    • Stefan Doose
    • Arno Kwade
    Review Article
  • Factors such as wealth might be expected to affect the transition to clean cooking, specifically the transition choices of uptake, primary use, and exclusive use of liquefied petroleum gas. Data from Ghana’s largest household energy survey show, however, that eleven out of thirteen factors considered do not have a significant or consistent role across these transition choices.

    Research Briefing
  • Copper catalysts hold promise for producing multi-carbon chemicals through electrochemical CO2 reduction, but improving performance is challenging due to the limited tunability of the copper surface. Now, research uses organic functionalization to modify the surface oxidation state of copper, yielding improved energy efficiency for ethylene production.

    • Hyewon Yun
    • Yun Jeong Hwang
    News & Views
  • To date, organic-based redox flow batteries (RFBs) have relatively low open-circuit voltages (OCVs), limiting their commercial viability. Achieving higher OCVs with pH-decoupled RFBs faces challenges due to severe ion crossover, prompting new research that proposes an acid–base regeneration cell to address this limitation.

    • Mike L. Perry
    News & Views
  • Surface reconstruction, chemo-mechanical degradation, and interfacial side reactions are major factors limiting the cyclability of Ni-rich cathodes. A strategy based on entropy-assisted epitaxial coating is now shown to effectively mitigate these issues, leading to improved battery performance and promising advances in electrochemical energy storage.

    • Simon Schweidler
    • Torsten Brezesinski
    • Ben Breitung
    News & Views
  • Non-flammable electrolytes are essential for ensuring the safe operation of sodium-metal batteries; however, challenges arise in applications due to limited stability between the electrolytes and electrodes. Now, an electrolyte engineering approach using salts as a diluent is proposed to achieve both high interfacial stability and improved safety.

    • Heng Zhang
    • Michel Armand
    News & Views
  • Injecting hydrogen into subsurface environments could provide seasonal energy storage, but understanding of technical feasibility is limited as large-scale demonstrations are scarce. Now, field tests show that hydrogen can be stored and microbially converted to methane in a depleted underground hydrocarbon reservoir.

    • Marc Strous
    News & Views
  • The scarcity of raw materials and complex synthesis procedures have impeded the development of electrolytes for Mg and Ca metal batteries. Research now reports a facile synthesis of organoborate electrolytes through cation replacement reactions, offering highly reversible Mg or Ca electrochemistry.

    • Chunmei Ban
    News & Views
  • Inhomogeneities in the optoelectronic properties of polycrystalline Cu(In,Ga)Se2 absorbers can limit solar cell performance. Now, researchers quantify the spatial distribution of charge carrier concentration with nanometre resolution and show how different alkali-metal post-deposition treatments reduce the grain-to-grain fluctuations.

    • Alex Redinger
    News & Views
  • Carbon monoxide can be reacted with water to synthesize hydrocarbons, but low activity and poor selectivity has plagued the conventional thermal catalytic route. Now, leveraging photocatalytic and thermocatalytic effects, a TiO2–x/Ni catalyst is shown to produce C2+ hydrocarbons directly from carbon monoxide and water with high yield and selectivity.

    • Zhiliang Wang
    • Lianzhou Wang
    News & Views
  • Polymer nanocomposite-based dielectric capacitors are promising candidates for high- power-density energy storage devices. However, they exhibit poor performance at high temperatures. A polymer nanocomposite based on sub-nanosheets shows high energy density at elevated temperatures due to the unique structure, geometry, and high surface area to volume ratio of the nanosheets.

    • Maninderjeet Singh
    • Saurabh Kr Tiwary
    • Alamgir Karim
    News & Views
  • Not all Australian communities are equally protected by consumer electricity retail regulations, with remote and Indigenous communities more likely to be underserved on multiple fronts. Communities in regions potentially critical to energy transition are often underserved by regulations that would otherwise ensure their own energy needs, hindering progress toward a just transition.

    • Lee V. White
    • Bradley Riley
    • Vanessa Napaltjari Davis
    Policy Brief
  • The emissions impact of the time-matching requirement between grid-connected electrolytic hydrogen production and contracted renewables has been the focus of a vigorous policy debate. Energy system model-based analysis of grid-connected hydrogen production demonstrates that emissions impacts under any time-matching requirement are highly sensitive to the definition of additionality and region-specific policies.

    Research Briefing
  • The operational stability of perovskite solar cells is often tested in the laboratory environment but its correlation to real-world operation is still unclear. New research shows that the outdoor ageing behaviour of the devices can be modelled with temperature-dependent degradation rates from laboratory stability tests that apply both heat and light stressors.

    • Mark Khenkin
    • Steve Albrecht
    News & Views
  • Bipolar membranes are emerging as an enabling component in numerous energy-relevant electrochemical devices, but a greater understanding of how they operate in complex electrolytes is needed. Research now reveals that ionic species in mixed-ion electrolytes can block the heart of the membrane, the bipolar junction, hampering its performance.

    • Sebastian Z. Oener
    News & Views
  • An interlayer of aluminium oxide with fixed charges is shown to boost perovskite solar cell performance. The open-circuit voltage is increased by 60 meV, and there is no significant efficiency drop after 2,000 hours under one sun illumination at 85 °C.

    Research Briefing