Volume 3 Issue 5, May 2018

Most scenarios to meet the Paris Agreement require negative emissions technologies. The EU has assumed a global leadership role in mitigation action and low-carbon energy technology development and deployment, but carbon dioxide removal presents a serious challenge to its low-carbon policy paradigm and experience.

Quantitative scenarios from energy–economic models inform decision-making about uncertain futures. Now, research shows the different ways these scenarios are subsequently used by users not involved in their initial development. In the absence of clear guidance from modellers, users may place too much or too little confidence in scenario assumptions and results.

Membrane technologies for carbon capture can offer economic and environmental advantages over conventional amine-based absorption, but can suffer from limited gas flux and selectivity to CO₂. Now, a membrane based on enzymes embedded in hydrophilic pores is shown to exhibit combined flux and selectivity that challenges the state of the art.

Photovoltaic electricity is increasingly competitive with conventional electricity generation, and cost analyses are now being developed for early-stage technologies. A recent techno-economic analysis looks at thin-film tandem photovoltaics to inform research directions.

Battery charging and discharging regimes mostly attempt to maximize potential profit by following price signals. Combining a technical understanding of batteries with financial theory, researchers now present a framework that allows optimization of economic benefits considering both potential revenues and battery degradation.

Coal-generated electricity forms a significant contribution to global carbon emissions. This Perspective explores the factors behind Great Britain's recent rapid switch from coal power to natural gas, which brought a large decrease in emissions, and discusses savings potential for other coal-using nations.

The discovery of anionic redox chemistry in Li-rich cathode materials provides much hope for enhancing battery performance. Tarascon and Assat analyse the underlying science behind anionic redox and discuss its practical limitations as well as the routes to overcome the application barriers.

Multijunction solar cells are more efficient and more expensive than single-junction photovoltaic cells, but their cost-effectiveness remains unclear. Here, Sofia et al. study the manufacturing costs of thin-film devices to analyse the levelized cost of electricity of single and multijunctions in the United States.

The rising share of variable renewable energy sources in the grid makes planning future power systems more complex. Zeyringer et al. present an approach that uses multiple weather-years of data and highlights the need to incorporate inter-annual weather variability into planning decisions.

Application-specific duty profiles can have a substantial effect on the degradation of utility-scale electrochemical batteries. Here, the researchers propose a framework for controlling battery use in a manner that maximizes the life-cycle benefit of batteries, taking both tariffs and long- and short-term battery degradation into account.

Electric vehicles offer a route to decarbonization of transport but only under the right electricity source and charging conditions. To shed light on this, Chen et al. model the environmental impacts of different electric vehicles and charging modes in Beijing under a range of wind power scenarios.

Organic tandem solar cells combining solution- and vapour-deposited layers are difficult to fabricate due to the degradation of the underlying subcell during the deposition of the next subcell. Here, Che et al. design a charge recombination layer that protects the underlying cell and leads to 15% average PCE for 2 mm² devices and 11.5% PCE for 1 cm² devices.

There is an intensive effort to develop stationary energy storage technologies. Now, Yi Cui and colleagues develop a Mn–H battery that functions with redox couples of Mn²⁺/MnO₂ and H₂/H₂O, and demonstrate its potential for grid-scale storage.