Volume 6 Issue 11, November 2021

The scientific research environment struggles to be an inclusive and diverse place. Initiatives such as the Minority Carriers event at the Photovoltaics Specialists Conference not only support marginalized researchers but also delineate the changes that need to be made and actions that should be taken to make the research space inclusive.

Curbing carbon emissions will require electrification of transport, but until now most of the innovations have been deployed in the car industry. In a recent article researchers focus on the electrification of another crucial sector, freight trains, but not with the traditional approach of overhead lines — rather with batteries.

Highly selective CO₂ reduction electrodes are essential for the viability of CO₂ electrolysis as a carbon utilization technology. New research demonstrates a strategy to control the selectivity of CO₂ conversion by coating the electrocatalyst with thin bilayers of ionomers to tune the electrode microenvironment.

Printing of large-area organic solar cells using green solvents often results in reduced crystallinity and uniformity of the photovoltaic film and consequently a significant performance loss. Now, a solid additive strategy is developed to control the film morphology at the nanoscale and tackle these limitations.

Without additional support policies, clean cooking could become unaffordable for about 470 million people by 2030 if a post-pandemic recovery is slow, and about 200 million people by 2030 under ambitious climate mitigation action. Acceleration of clean cooking transitions by tapping into pandemic recovery and climate funds to target the poorest people and regions globally is urgently needed.

High-socioeconomic-status individuals have a disproportionate effect on greenhouse gas emissions as consumers and through four other key roles they play in society. This Perspective examines the effect and suggests how future research could seek to reduce the resulting energy and climate impact.

More efficient and cheaper battery technology has the potential to transform not just automobile but other kinds of transport. Popovich et al. do a techno-economic analysis of battery-electric trains and find potential for both economic benefits and emissions reduction.

Copper catalyses electrochemical reduction of CO₂ to valuable multicarbon products, but its selectivity depends on the local microenvironment near the catalyst surface. Here, the authors explore and optimize this environment to improve performance using bilayer ionomer coatings to control the local pH and CO₂/H₂O ratio.

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere are widely used in climate policy scenarios, but their real-world impacts are not well understood. A life-cycle assessment by Madhu et al. compares two main DAC approaches and quantifies their environmental impact and resource needs.

Organic solar cells processed from green solvents are easier to implement in manufacturing yet their efficiency is low. Chen et al. devise a guest molecule to improve the molecular packing, enabling devices with over 17% efficiency.

Oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts often comprise multiple metal ions in various configurations, hampering mechanistic understanding of how catalysis proceeds. Now, researchers prepare a series of double-atom OER catalysts based on Ni, Fe and Co, which act as molecular-like models and are more amenable to mechanistic study.

Many socioeconomic growth and low-emission energy scenarios do not consider impacts on clean cooking access and have yet to account for the COVID pandemic. Pachauri et al. now examine how clean cooking access evolves under various scenarios post COVID and find the need for policy focused on increasing access more urgent.

Achieving ambitious climate goals requires the development of new technologies at rapid pace. Probst et al. analyse global patent data and find that a growth period of inventions from 1995 to 2012 was followed by a decline of ~6% annually, while invention remains concentrated in just a few countries.