Volume 4 Issue 10, October 2019

The world is becoming more complex for policymakers and researchers alike as climate change, new technology and digitalization drive unprecedented energy-system change. Understanding one another is paramount if we are to address the challenges they present.

For the well informed, taking actions to curb energy consumption from household appliances is uncomplicated. Now, research shows that simple information provision interventions can correct consumer misperceptions of the energy consumed by common appliances, offering hope to the rest of us.

Copper-doped cadmium telluride thin-film solar cells have high efficiency, but limited hole density and Cu diffusion allow little room for further improvements in device performance. Now, arsenic-doped cadmium telluride thin films show enhanced hole density and lower dopant diffusivity leading to 20.8%-efficient solar cells.

In the development of Li metal solid-state batteries, understanding the mechanism that governs fundamental processes such as Li stripping and plating is pivotal. Now, researchers uncover a pressure dependence on Li stripping and higher pressures are suggested for faster discharging.

New network tariffs designed to recover grid operating costs can introduce up to a 500% increase in charges for some households. A transition from volumetric to peak-load-based tariffs will require targeted policy measures such as clear price signals, information about household electricity consumption and temporary compensation or mitigation mechanisms.

Hotel guests changed their resource-use behaviour when they received feedback on their consumption in real time, even though they did not know that they were part of a study and had no financial incentives. Behavioural interventions provided by digital technologies are a scalable and cost-effective policy instrument for fostering resource conservation.

Hardware costs, cost of labour, favourable cost of capital, low taxes and low, but positive, profit margins all contributed to lowering the price of utility solar power in the Middle East. These prices and policies can be replicated elsewhere without direct subsidies and prices will continue to reduce in the future.

Financing costs for renewable energy technologies have decreased substantially over the past 18 years, helping make renewables more cost competitive. Leveraging the effect of financial learning and continuing the policies that facilitated favourable financing conditions are key for greater renewable energy adoption in the future.

CdTe solar cells have relied for decades on copper, which creates limited hole density, stability issues and a ceiling for voltage and efficiency. Now, Metzger et al. demonstrate As-doped Cu-free polycrystalline CdTe cells with enhanced hole density and dopant stability, achieving 20.8% efficiency.

CO₂ electrolysers store electricity as CO or other chemical fuels, but can suffer from carbon deposition at the electrodes. Skafte et al. identify a mechanistic route to inhibiting carbon build-up in ceria-based electrolysers and build a cell that operates beyond the thermodynamic carbon deposition threshold.

A German government commission recently proposed to phase out coal by 2038, which implies that the country will miss its 2020 climate target. This study shows that a more ambitious timeline for phasing out coal by 2025 would have been better aligned with citizens’ preferences.

Improvements in the efficiency and stability of low-bandgap perovskite solar cells are key to enabling all-perovskite solar cells. Here, Lin et al. use metallic tin to prevent oxidation in such low-gap perovskite and demonstrate 24.8%-efficient tandems that are stable for over 400 h under operating conditions.

People make systematic errors when estimating the energy used by household appliances. This study shows that providing numerical information about extremes improves the use of the response scale, while a heuristic addressing a common misperception improves the underlying understanding of relative energy use.

Batteries generally do not perform well at extreme temperatures, and electrolytes are mainly to blame. Here, the authors dissolve fluorinated electrolytes in highly fluorinated non-polar solvents, enabling batteries that can operate at a wide temperature range (−125 to +70 °C).