Volume 2 Issue 8, August 2017

The UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 aims to deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Tracking progress towards the targets under this goal can spur better energy statistics and data gathering capacity, and will require new indicators that also consider the interplay with other goals.

Renewable energy policies enjoy greater support compared to policies focused explicitly on climate change, and thus present a politically plausible path toward carbon emission reduction. However, new research shows that renewable energy policy support declines when people are informed about the policy costs for home energy bills.

Electrically controlled windows require power to switch between transparent and tinted states. Now, an ultraviolet light-harvesting solar cell can power smart windows without compromising their control over heat and light.

Wind turbines have been a go-to technology for addressing climate change, but they are increasingly a source of frustration for all stakeholders. While community ownership is often lauded as a panacea for maximizing turbine acceptance, a new study suggests that decision-making involvement — procedural fairness — matters most.

Distributed energy resources will play a fundamental role in providing low-carbon electricity in a smart, flexible way. A new study develops a cross-disciplinary planning tool showing that ‘going distributed’ always pays.

Thermal effects on batteries, both due to external variations and internal fluctuations, significantly impact their performance. Ajayan and colleagues survey recent advances in understanding the thermal effects on individual battery components.

Unlike ubiquitous axial-flow turbines, cross-flow turbines have rotation axes perpendicular to the flow they sit in. This study presents a control scheme that optimizes blade angular velocity as a function of blade position with no extra degrees of freedom, yielding a 59% increase in power output.

Smart windows are used to regulate the amount of visible and near-infrared light entering buildings or cars. Here, Davy et al. develop near-UV harvesting organic solar cells, scalable up to 10 cm², for powering electrochromic windows without competing for photons in the visible or near-infrared.

Public opinion may inform legislation of renewable energy policies. This study shows that public opinion and strength of renewable energy policy are correlated across US states, but a majority of the public actually supports these policies if public health benefits and job creation are emphasized.

Pseudocapacitors based on redox-active materials have relatively high energy density but suffer from low power capability. Here the authors report that two-dimensional transition metal carbides exhibit high gravimetric, volumetric and areal capacitance values at high charge/discharge rates.

Climate change will affect future water availability and temperature and hence thermoelectric power generation, which uses water for cooling. This study explores future usable capacity for existing thermoelectric power under different scenarios, including US state-level environmental regulations.

Electrical energy storage is expected to be important for decarbonizing personal transport and enabling highly renewable electricity systems. This study analyses data on 11 storage technologies, constructing experience curves to project future prices, and explores feasible timelines for their economic competitiveness.

Metal alloys possessing core–shell structures have potential as low-Pt catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction in fuel cells, but can suffer from poor stability. Using high-resolution microscopy, Li et al. find that a Pt–Pd–Au catalyst undergoes surface atomic rearrangement and becomes more active on electrochemical cycling.

Planning of distributed energy resources requires careful consideration of many socio-technical factors to ensure that it is optimally built. Jain et al. present a model that incorporates numerous such factors and use it to find cost-effective resources for a sample of 10,000 consumers in California.

Concentrator photovoltaics achieve high efficiency but have so far been impractical for use on rooftops. Here, Price et al. develop a flat-panel concentrating photovoltaic system based on a triple-junction solar cell that operates at fixed tilt over a full day with >30% peak efficiency.

Climate change affects the availability of water for cooling thermoelectric power plants, causing curtailments in generation. This study models how future changes in water availability due to climate and water usage impacts power generation across the EU, and assesses different adaptation strategies.