Volume 5 Issue 2, February 2020

The number of plaintiffs taking energy firms to court for ignoring climate-related risks is growing. By revealing how the sector is not prepared — and not preparing — for what is coming, their cases are pressing the energy sector to treat those risks as a cost of doing business.

Despite increased awareness among investors, physical climate risk from extreme weather remains surprisingly unaccounted for in financial markets. Without better knowledge of this risk, the average energy investor can only hope that the next extreme event will not trigger a sudden correction to the market values of energy firms.

Energy firms struggle to incorporate climate risks in their planning and public disclosures. This lack of information is increasing the chances that herd behaviour in finance could potentially lead to sudden disruptions in energy supply and exacerbate consequences of climate-related extreme events.

Scenarios are the primary tool for examining how current decisions shape the future, but the future is affected as much by out-of-ordinary extremes as by generally expected trends. Energy modellers can study extremes both by incorporating them directly within models and by using complementary off-model analyses.

Anomalous seasons such as extremely cold winters or low-wind summers can seriously disrupt renewable energy productivity and reliability. Better seasonal forecasts providing more accurate information tailored to stakeholder needs can help the renewable energy industry prepare for such extremes.

Climate change entails an intensification of extreme weather events that can potentially trigger socioeconomic and energy system disruptions. As we approach 1 °C of global warming we should start learning from historical extremes and explicitly incorporate such events in integrated climate–economy and energy systems models.

Community energy projects may be pivotal in low-carbon transitions, yet little empirical evidence exists about their financing. Now, research sheds light on the financial mechanisms and performance of community energy projects in the UK.

Carbon capture typically relies on pressure or temperature swings for uptake and release of CO₂. Researchers now present a device exploiting electrochemistry to drive these processes in an electro-swing approach that grants flexibility for coupling to intermittent energy resources and may have broad applications for carbon capture.

Perovskite solar cells with an inverted configuration hold great promise for multi-junction applications, but their power conversion efficiency is low. Now, a long-chain alkylamine ligand-assisted strategy has been demonstrated to enable an efficiency of 22.34%.

Although India’s Ujjwala programme has encouraged adoption of modern cooking gas, households have not shifted away from using highly polluting solid fuels. Additional incentives to encourage regular use of cooking gas are necessary to enable a more rapid and complete transition to clean cooking fuel among poor rural households.

Community energy groups can raise citizen finance for renewable energy projects at lower interest rates than from commercial lenders, but they often depend on price guarantee schemes. Policies providing price stability and business model innovations are needed to realize the sector’s potential contribution to the zero-carbon energy transition.

Non-market effects, such as strategic decisions by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, energy legislation and speculative bubbles, move crude oil prices away from the level implied by supply and demand for extended periods. These effects should be more proactively monitored and regulated to suit national and international objectives.

While perovskite solar cells with an inverted architecture hold great promise for operation stability, their power conversion efficiency lags behind that of conventional cells. Here, Zheng et al. achieve a certified 22.34% efficiency, exploiting alkylamine ligands as grain and interface modifiers.

Oil prices are thought to be affected by speculation but the exact impact of speculation on price is not known. Kaufmann and Connelly quantify this effect and identify its beneficiaries by building a price model based on supply and demand, market fundamentals and associating deviations with historical geopolitical events.

Climate change will induce not just a change in average temperature but higher frequency of extreme weather events, whose impacts are hard to quantify. Perera et al. quantify the impacts of climate induced extreme and regular weather variations on energy systems determining requirements for system reliability.

The volumetric performance of supercapacitors needs to be improved, but the usual trade-off between porosity and density is a problem. Here the authors develop a graphene laminate film with tunable porosity that leads to a volumetric energy density of 88.1 Wh l⁻¹ at the device level.

Community energy is a promising alternative to large-scale energy provision that could support decarbonization efforts. This study analyses business models, financing mechanisms and the financial performance of community energy projects in the UK to understand what is needed to better support the sector.