Barcode readers excel at quickly identifying groceries and other products. Could a similar idea work at industrial recycling facilities to make sorting different plastics quicker and more cost-effective? The answer, according to a University at Buffalo research team, is yes.

Battery energy storage systems can play a key role in future renewable energy systems—but how they are operated is crucial for both profitability and battery life, according to research by Meryem Ahouad at Chalmers University of Technology.

Battery-electric trucks are expected to play the leading role in the future decarbonization of road freight transport. At the same time, a new study from Chalmers University of Technology shows that hydrogen could remain important for the heaviest trucks operating over long distances.

Fayas Malik Kanchiralla, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Environmental and Energy Sciences, together with colleagues has analyzed how the International Maritime Organization's (IMO) proposed climate framework affects shipping's transition to new marine fuels.

Just as an orchestra needs a conductor, a battery management system (BMS) controls the power storage of an electric vehicle. However, until now, monitoring has been based only on the voltages, currents and temperatures of the individual battery cells. Their aging or possible damage can only be checked externally using complex calculations.

The UK government is preparing to water down its electric vehicle sales targets. Under the existing zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) mandate, 80% of all new cars sold in Britain would need to be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030.

Artificial intelligence (AI) use is exploding. More than 50 percent of new internet content was generated by AI in 2025, according to an industry report. We even train AI on AI-generated content now, and although this can degrade performance, it continues at breakneck pace.

States and cities, tired of waiting for the federal government to deal with energy and climate challenges during the first Trump administration, started writing their own laws.

Data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, with some now consuming as much power as entire cities to generate the computing power needed to support the expanding use of artificial intelligence. But unlike factories or hospitals, data center workloads are flexible.

Solar power towers can play an important role in the energy transition. They convert sunlight into heat that can be stored or used to generate electricity. Until now, however, data to test new methods for more efficient and reliable systems have been lacking. In a world first, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) are now publishing freely accessible operational data from the Jülich Solar Tower test power plant. This provides a foundation for developing new AI methods and digital twins. The results are published in Nature Energy.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones and electric vehicles to grid-scale energy storage and earbuds, but their cathodes—the part of batteries denoted by a plus sign—are expensive to make and rely on minerals sourced from a limited number of countries, including lithium and cobalt. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is responsible for mining about 70% of the world's cobalt.

Australia's big clean energy projects get a lot of attention, from giant solar farms to the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme. So does the push for rooftop solar and home batteries.

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have developed an artificial photosynthesis system capable of producing solar fuels more stably by integrating a self-regulating chemical component directly into the electrolyzer itself. The new device doesn't rely on a battery-powered control method, removing an expensive component of such systems. The study is published in EES Solar.

Batteries are undergoing rapid advances. For example, modern zinc-air batteries have the remarkable ability to use oxygen as energy—but that oxygen isn't stored in the battery itself. Zinc-air batteries take in surrounding oxygen to undergo a reaction to discharge energy called the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). While this convenient strategy is promising, the slow speed of the ORR limits the practicality of these batteries.

When they get home, the residents of a small housing association on the outskirts of Hudiksvall, Sweden, plug in their electric vehicles to charge them or, intriguingly, power their homes.

Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a jacket that harvests drinking water directly from the air. The technology could benefit anyone who spends a lot of time in areas without easy access to drinking water, from hobbyist hikers, campers and runners to agricultural workers, emergency responders and soldiers. The advance in fabric technology comes alongside a new benchmark for atmospheric water harvesting.

Northwestern University scientists have developed a new liquid material that charges like a battery, transforms like a living organism and then resets itself in open air. Traditionally, harvesting energy, storing it and using it require separate materials or devices. The new platform merges all three functions into a single material, opening the door for adaptive, clean, renewable systems that don't require plastics or metals.

In order to stabilize global warming at less than 1.5°C in the long term, there is a need not only for a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions but also for technologies to remove and store hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. This is also the underlying basis of the scenarios set out in the latest Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Imagine a catalyst that can heal itself after being damaged. A POSTECH-led research team has developed an electrocatalyst that regenerates its own metallic surface after oxidation, much like how a wound heals naturally. This breakthrough addresses one of the most critical challenges in hydrogen energy technology: the irreversible degradation of catalysts during operation.

If you've ever stood on a Victorian beach and felt the wind from the Southern Ocean, you'll know this is not a gentle force. Whipped up across thousands of kilometers of cold ocean, these winds are relentless and powerful.