Volume 5 Issue 8, August 2020

Digital and physical games are now widely used to support learning and engagement, including in the domains of climate change and energy. We believe games have a further, underappreciated role: helping us as researchers to reflect on our own research, generating deeper understanding and, hopefully, more impactful research projects.

Offshore wind projects are being deployed at an increasing rate, and as the scale of these projects has grown, costs have tumbled. A new study indicates that some new European projects may no longer require support from state subsidy mechanisms to be competitive.

Efforts to electrochemically produce ammonia have mainly focused on dinitrogen as a feedstock. Now, an electrocatalyst composed of Cu embedded in an organic molecular solid is designed, which efficiently and selectively converts nitrate ions to ammonia, paving a way to nutrient recovery and recycling.

Antimony selenosulfides are promising photovoltaic materials but obtaining high-quality absorber layers is challenging. Researchers now show that layers deposited using a hydrothermal method have optimal bandgap, good morphology and favourable growth orientation, enabling solar cells with 10% efficiency.

Coulombic efficiency (CE) has been frequently used to assess the cyclability of newly developed materials for lithium metal batteries. The authors argue that caution must be exercised during the assessment of CE, and propose a CE testing protocol for the development of lithium metal batteries.

The costs and benefits of clean energy transitions will not be equally distributed. This Review of the literature on potential adverse impacts for specific communities highlights opportunities for future research to contribute to the design of policies and programmes that address these disparities.

Understanding Li transport is important in the development of fast-rate batteries. Here the authors uncover an ultrafast charge transfer across a cathode–electrolyte interface with the aid of single-particle measurements and ascribe the solvation of electrolyte salts to be key for the interfacial kinetics.

Antimony chalcogenides are emerging photovoltaic materials, yet difficulties in fabricating high-quality films limit device performance. We show that hydrothermal synthesis affords good morphology and reduced defects in antimony selenosulfide films, enabling solar cells with an efficiency of 10%.

The upscaling of layer treatments and processing that afford high efficiency and stability in small-area perovskite solar cells remains challenging. Liu et al. show how the efficiency and stability of perovskite modules can be improved using an integrated approach to interface and layer engineering.

Electrochemically reducing nitrogen-containing molecules could provide less energy-intense routes to produce ammonia than the traditional Haber–Bosh process. Here the authors use a catalyst comprising Cu embedded in an organic molecular solid to synthesize ammonia from nitrate ions.

Offshore wind power has often been assumed to be costly and dependent on subsidies to survive. Using the latest auction data from five European countries Jansen et al. show that in mature markets offshore wind is already competitive without subsidies.

Electrocatalytically reducing CO₂ to ethanol can provide renewably generated fuel, but catalysts are often poorly selective for this conversion. Here the authors use a Cu catalyst to produce ethanol with high selectivity. Cu dispersion is key to the performance and operando studies indicate that it changes under reaction conditions.