Most of today's batteries are made up of rare lithium mined from the mountains of South America. If the world depletes this source, then battery production could stagnate.

In February 2018, Donald Trump signed into law new tax credits that reward oil companies for capturing carbon dioxide and preventing it from entering the atmosphere – either by burying the gas underground or by pumping it into wells to boost production. These tax credits, which have bipartisan support, are encouraging for those who believe that trapping CO2 from the fossil fuel industry – though no substitute for deploying cleaner energy sources – could help combat runaway climate change while society remains reliant on oil, gas and coal.

Variations in power generation using renewable sources, such as solar and wind power, lead to control problems in the electricity grid. The technology of lithium batteries is a candidate offering great potential in solving these problems. An industrial engineer at the Public University of Navarre (NUP/UPNA) has come up with a new management system that allows good performance of these batteries to be achieved and their useful service life to be preserved when they are connected to a renewable facility for the purposes of storing the electrical power produced.

Giving people information about how much gas or electricity their neighbours use encourages them to use less energy, research shows.

A team of Texas A&M researchers has developed a new technology that helps providers find the cause of outages, and anticipate and predict some failures before outages occur.

Committed to addressing the country’s severe air pollution, China is attempting a shift from coal to natural gas and is considering a variety of sources, including domestic and imported gas options as well as creating its own synthetic gas from coal.  

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, produces massive amounts of energy. Scientists here on Earth seek to replicate this process, which merges light elements in the form of hot, charged plasma composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, to create a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity in what may be called a “star in a jar.”

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have identified two main challenges for renewable biofuel production from cheap sources. Firstly, lowering the cost of developing microbial cell factories, and secondly, establishing more efficient methods for hydrolysis of biomass to sugars for fermentation. Their study was recently published in the journal Nature Energy.

Low-severity wildland fires and prescribed burns have long been presumed by scientists and resource managers to be harmless to soils, but this may not be the case, new research shows.

Scientists have developed a photoelectrode that can harvest 85 percent of visible light in a 30 nanometers-thin semiconductor layer between gold layers, converting light energy 11 times more efficiently than previous methods.