Volume 7 Issue 9, September 2022

In September, ministers will gather in Pittsburgh to consider how their governments should respond to the energy and climate innovation imperative. Building on Glasgow, the meeting should strive to fill critical gaps in areas such as capital-intensive demonstration projects and innovation-friendly trade in carbon-intensive goods.

In its next phase, Mission Innovation plans to further develop multinational collaborations that include a variety of entities. This may require new governance structures to shield the new collaborations from increasingly protectionist domestic politics while incorporating renewed concerns about climate change and energy security.

Mission Innovation seeks to accelerate deployment of clean energy and make it affordable, attractive and accessible to all. Fully succeeding in these aims will require greater attention to the needs and context of developing countries, concerted focus on capacity building, and increased emphasis on energy access and justice.

Ahead of the Global Clean Energy Action Forum, a joint convening of the 13th Clean Energy Ministerial and 7th Mission Innovation Ministerial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this September, Nature Energy spoke with three members of the Mission Innovation Steering Committee — Drew Leyburne, MI Steering Committee Chair and Assistant Deputy Minister, Energy Efficiency and Technology Sector, Natural Resources Canada; Julie Cerqueira, incoming MI Steering Committee Chair and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of International Affairs, US Department of Energy; Rosalinde van der Vlies, Vice-Chair of the MI Steering Committee and Director, Clean Planet Directorate in the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation for the European Commission — to hear their thoughts about the next phase of clean energy technology development.

Understanding what drives household-level decisions to keep cooking with polluting cookstoves and fuels must be grounded in theory for sustained change to occur. New research examines the literature through a behavioural model and finds that affordability, technical aspects, and fuel supply are the main drivers of fuel stacking.

Development of oxygen reduction catalysts is of key importance to a range of energy technologies; however, the process has long relied on slow trial-and-error approaches. Now, accelerated discovery of perovskite oxides for use as air electrodes in solid-oxide fuel cells is achieved with machine learning.

Aerodynamic wake interactions between wind turbines reduce the total energy produced by wind farms. A flow-physics model, which predicts these negative interactions and the control strategy that minimizes them, is developed and validated. The collective operational strategy produced by optimizing this model increased energy production when implemented at a utility-scale wind farm.

The microstructure of metal halide perovskite films has profound implications for solar cells. Here, Zhou et al. analyse the impact of three microstructure types on perovskites’ optoelectronics and on device efficiency and stability, outlining future opportunities for microstructural engineering.

Oxygen redox instability at high voltages hinders the application of high-energy battery cathodes. Here the authors report that elimination of domain boundaries in single-crystal cathodes improves the redox stability and consequently the electrochemical performance in extended high-voltage cycling.

Individual operation of turbines in wind farms results in energy losses from wake interactions. Here Howland et al. report on an experimentally validated model to implement collective operation of turbines, which increases the farm’s energy production.

Manufacturing of perovskite solar cells would benefit from the avoidance of hazardous solvents and multistep processing. Now, Yun et al. report an ethanol-based perovskite precursor solution that does not need an antisolvent step, enabling devices with 25% efficiency.

Solid-state polymers are promising electrolytes for CO₂ electrolysers, but when pure water is used as the feed, they typically cannot create a sufficiently alkaline environment to favour multicarbon products. Here the authors use bifunctional ionomers as polymer electrolytes that activate CO₂ at the catalyst–electrolyte interface, favouring ethylene synthesis, while running on pure water.

Different policies to decarbonize transport are often enacted at once, such that it can be hard to know whether any particular mix is effective. Koch et al. search for structural breaks in CO₂ emissions for European nations as a way of detecting impacts of known and a priori unknown policies.

Green hydrogen is a crucial part of plans to achieve climate targets, yet how quickly supply will scale is unclear. Using a technology diffusion model, Odenweller et al. suggest that even if electrolysis capacity grows as quickly as wind and solar power, green hydrogen supply will suffer from short-term scarcity and long-term uncertainty.

The slow research cycle of material design, characterization and testing has hampered the development of new cathode materials for solid oxide fuel cells. Here the authors develop a machine-learning approach, which makes use of ionic Lewis acid strength as a descriptor, for discovery of improved perovskite oxide cathodes.

Public funding and institutions for energy innovation are critical to achieving climate goals, but our understanding of their evolution, variation and drivers is limited. Meckling et al. compile funding and institutional data across major economies and examine how they changed after the financial crisis, Mission Innovation and expanded competition with China.

Realizing the full potential of clean cooking transitions requires an understanding of fuel stacking in which multiple fuels and stoves are used. Towards this end, Perros et al. analyse the literature on clean cooking interventions through a behavioural model and identify underlying drivers of stacking.