Volume 9 Issue 7, July 2024

Achieving good electrical contact without damaging underlying layers is critical to the performance of photovoltaic modules. Research now reports a silver electrode embedded into a polymer matrix and a silver/chromium protection layer, enabling over 14%-efficient flexible organic photovoltaic modules with improved stability under illumination.

The solvation structure of an electrolyte and the resulting interphase are crucial for lithium-metal battery performance. Now, an electrochemically inert diluent, designed to selectively interact with electrolyte anions, aids in the formation of an inorganic-rich bilayer interphase, thereby improving cyclability and extending calendar life.

Large scale cellulosic biofuel production involves complex interactions between biomass supply, biorefineries and the networks that connect them. New fine-scale spatially explicit modelling seeks to better understand how these components could best integrate with carbon capture to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and optimize biofuel supply chains.

Investment in climate and energy (climate-tech) startups is growing in the US and worldwide, with public grants backing high-risk sectors and publicly funded startups exiting at higher rates with corporate investment. Public policies to incentivize corporate investment in these startups can therefore be an important, yet sometimes underestimated, part of meeting net-zero goals.

A key issue in net energy analysis is the omission of the effects of end-use efficiencies on the energy returns of technologies. Now, an analysis shows that these effects strongly favour the energy returns of wind power and solar photovoltaics, which are found to be higher than those of fossil fuels.

Achieving net zero implies the electrification of heat and transport, causing challenges for electricity networks. We used geographically disaggregated data to map estimated network impacts across 40,000 local areas across Great Britain and explore ways of avoiding them through local flexibility.

Ammonium salts are used to passivate defects in perovskite solar cells, yet they can either assemble as molecular layers or induce the formation of low-dimensional perovskites. Teale et al. review and discuss the formation and properties of these two different structures and their impact on devices.

Organic solar modules suffer from poor electrical contacts. Lu et al. embed the silver electrode into a polymer matrix and add chromium to enhance its electrical contact, achieving improved stability and a 14.04% efficiency on flexible modules with an active area of 41 cm².

Net energy implications of the energy transition have primarily been assessed at the final energy stage to date. New research considers the useful-stage energy return on investment and finds that wind and solar photovoltaics outperform fossil fuels, shedding light on their investment potential.

Lithium battery performance hinges significantly on the solvation structure of the electrolyte and the resulting interphase. Here the authors introduce a fluorinated ether with minimal lithium-ion coordination and enhanced electrochemical stability, thus improving both cyclability and calendar life.

The US Midwest is a promising region for the production of cellulosic biofuel, yet a greater understanding of the interactions between landscape-related decisions, biorefinery design and carbon capture integration is still needed. O’Neill et al. use fine-scale spatially explicit modelling to analyse the cost and greenhouse gas mitigation potential for such fuels in this region.

It is challenging to design anti-freezing electrolytes for extremely low-temperature aqueous batteries. This study proposes a general guideline for designing anti-freezing electrolytes by choosing H₂O–solute systems with low eutectic temperature and strong super-cooling ability, and demonstrates aqueous Na-ion batteries that can operate at the ultralow temperature of −85 °C.

High-temperature operation of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells has some advantages but is also challenging due to the instability of proton transport above 160 °C. Here the authors report a polymer electrolyte membrane comprising well-dispersed and interconnected cerium hydrogen phosphate particles within a polymer matrix that performs well in a fuel cell at up to 250 °C.

Elastocaloric cooling, an emerging refrigeration technology, has so far yielded limited performance in devices. Zhou et al. increase the temperature lift of such devices to 75 K by combining three NiTi elastocaloric materials with different phase-transition temperatures.

Increased deployment of electrification through solar power, heat pumps and electric vehicles requires power-network upgrades, but their full impacts are unclear. Few et al. take a local-level approach to examine network upgrade needs, finding large regional variations, and explore how flexibility can minimize impacts.

Investment in climate and energy startups is growing in the United States. Here the authors show that public grants back high-risk areas, and that publicly funded startups exit at higher rates with corporate backing than with other private investment.

Global climate models are challenging to integrate in energy system models because their output data resolution is too coarse. Buster et al. generate high-resolution meteorological data with climate change impacts from global climate model datasets using generative machine learning.