Volume 6 Issue 10, October 2021

When thinking of career progression, community-building is often overlooked in academia. Derya Baran discusses how creating strong and cross-disciplinary relationships is pivotal to flourish in your career.

Creating a gender-inclusive environment is of the utmost importance in scientific research. Zakya Kafafi and Mónica Lira-Cantú talk about how their initiative, Women in Renewable Energy, promotes a stronger presence of female scientists at conferences and in the workplace.

Nancy Ryan Gray, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC), talks to Nature Energy about her career and The GRC Power Hour, a forum for discussions about inclusivity within the scientific community.

As the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow nears, calls for politicians to heed the warnings on climate change increase. We talked to Atte Harjanne, a member of parliament in Finland, to hear how some politicians are trying to incorporate scientific findings in their decisions.

Understanding support for or opposition to energy developments — and how it varies with proximity — is important for effective planning. A new study using public comments on a regulatory review casts further light on the geography of discourse and how it might shape action on siting energy technology.

When prices are adjusted for quality, electric vehicles stood their ground to petrol cars in the early twentieth century United States. If the electricity grid had developed twenty years earlier, they might have reached a 68–79% market share and CO₂ emissions per car could have declined by 60%, a new study finds.

Electrolytes are a major bottleneck in the development of solid-state batteries. Now, a molecularly engineered cellulose electrolyte is reported to have high ionic conductivity and excellent compatibility with electrodes, offering promise for high-performance solid-state batteries.

Irreversibility is one of the biggest obstacles in realizing practical Li-metal batteries. This Review surveys the trends in Coulombic efficiency (CE)—a reversibility indicator—reported for Li-metal batteries over the last five decades, abstracts key CE descriptors and analyses promising strategies to improve CE.

Public response to energy projects plays a critical role in the development of energy technologies. Fedor Dokshin analyses individually authored comments submitted during a regulatory review of fracking in New York to understand the diversity of public discourse and how it varies with project proximity.

The dominance of gasoline vehicles in the automotive market has been attributed to techno-economic factors, though the role of infrastructure development remains understudied. Taalbi and Nielsen quantify the impact of rates of highway and electricity infrastructure development in the technology choice in the early automotive industry

Understanding degradation mechanisms in perovskite solar cells is key to their development. Now, Guo et al. show a greater degradation of the perovskite structure and morphology for devices operated under vacuum than under nitrogen.

Li electrodeposition is a fundamental process in Li metal batteries and its reversibility is crucial for battery operation. The authors investigate the effects of stack pressure on Li deposition and associated processes and discuss strategies for achieving dense Li deposits and practical Li metal batteries.

Silicon has around ten times the specific capacity of graphite but its application as an anode in post-lithium-ion batteries presents huge challenges. After decades of development, silicon-based batteries are now on the verge of large-scale commercial success.