To realize improved human body thermal comfort and reduce energy consumption on building heating and cooling, personal thermal management emphasizing energy management of human body and its local environment is emerging as a promising solution. Advanced textiles are being invented and developed to effectively regulate heat exchange between human body and its surroundings. Here, recent progress on advanced

Dry methane reforming, the conversion of carbon dioxide and methane (the two main gases responsible for global warming), into a useful feedstock for the production of materials is a process known since 1928. However, fast catalyst deactivation, due to the formation of carbon deposits on the surface of the catalyst, has since its discovery hampered industrial application of this key process. In a recent

Qianru Wang is a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on hydride materials for catalytic ammonia synthesis. Jianping Guo is a professor at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on exploring metal hydrides, imides, and amides in the activation

Matthew Eisaman is an assistant professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at Stony Brook University. From 2008 to 2011, Eisaman was an applied physicist at Xerox PARC. He received an AB in physics from Princeton in 2000 and a PhD in physics from Harvard in 2006, and he was an NRC postdoc at NIST from 2006 to 2008. He holds 17 patents and has coauthored 29 papers with over 3,700

The electricity system is evolving to become more flexible, sustainable, and distributed. As the grid becomes smarter, so too do the tools that can exploit vulnerabilities in its digital backbone. Recently in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Ismail et al. reported an electricity theft detection method using deep neural networks that can achieve 99.3% detection rates with less than 0.22% false positives

Redox-site engineering at the molecular level holds great promise in the exploration of advanced electrode materials for energy-storage devices. In this issue of Joule, Yijin Liu and colleagues derived a novel nickel-cobalt (NiCo) layered double hydroxide (LDH) electrode of high energy and powder density via electrochemically driven phase-transformation of a NiCo carbonate hydroxide. The dynamic synthesis

Jie Deng is a research engineer in the Department of Electrification Subsystems and Power Supply at Ford Motor Company. He has extensive experience in computer-aided engineering analysis (structural, fluid, and thermal), battery simulations, and material characterization. He got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Florida State University and has published over 30 papers. His current research mainly

Climate change has necessitated the development of technologies that are able to efficiently capture, utilize, and store CO2, creating new opportunities to utilize CO2 as a feedstock to produce fuels and chemicals that are vital to our society. In Nature, Sargent, Peters, Agapie, et al. control microenvironments around Cu electrocatalysts to achieve an impressive selectivity of 72% for CO2 conversion

A global uniform carbon price is a simple and cost-effective tool to curb greenhouse gas emissions. However, countries have widely varying carbon intensity of production and supply chains. They further differ in the total value add to the national economy of carbon-emitting sectors. Ward and co-authors have recently analyzed the country-level impact of a unilateral carbon price. It was found that the

In this issue of Joule, Steffen et al. tackle a challenging topic to quantify and project costs for operation and maintenance (O&M) of solar and wind power plants in Germany. They note that O&M costs can be 20%–25% of overall costs and find that such costs have decreased, resulting in common overestimates of O&M costs.

One pathway to higher energy density batteries is by way of intercalation cathodes that operate at high voltage, storing charge on both the oxide and transition metal ions. In the January 23, 2020 issue of Nature, Peter Bruce and colleagues illuminate the mechanism by which the honeycomb superstructure of most O-redox compounds is lost, along with the high energy density, upon first-cycle charging

Bubbles are known to influence energy and mass transfer in gas-evolving electrodes. However, we lack a detailed understanding on the intricate dependencies between bubble evolution processes and electrochemical phenomena. This review discusses our current knowledge on the effects of bubbles on electrochemical systems with the aim to identify opportunities and motivate future research in this area.

Recently, the coupling of ferroelectrics with electrochemical reactions has attracted increasing interest for harvesting waste heat. The change of polarization of a ferroelectric with temperature can be used to influence chemical reactions, especially when the material is cycled near its Curie temperature. In this perspective, we introduce the principle of pyroelectric controlled electrochemical processes

Rechargeable metal-based batteries play a pivotal part in electrochemical energy storage, but the formation of metal dendrite on the surface of anode causes serious safety concerns and limited cycle life. Recently, electrodeposition, an ancient fabrication technique, was used to annihilate the dendrite via an epitaxial nucleation in batteries.1 This innovation will accelerate the metal-based batteries

Ammonia synthesis underpins modern life but carries a high energy and carbon cost. Recent electrochemical alternatives focus on ambient, aqueous systems with little current prospect for application. Here, Kyriakou et al.1 demonstrate a high-temperature and ambient pressure solid-state approach coupling methane steam reforming with ammonia synthesis to decrease energy usage.

The high-grade heat required for heavy industry—such as for the production of cement, steel, petrochemicals, and glass—accounts for nearly 10% of global CO2 emissions. The pathways to decarbonizing this sector are unclear. Friedmann and colleagues have recently examined the state of low-carbon heating approaches for heavy industry. Existing options are costly, inadequate, or both. Increased efforts

A microbial battery couples waste degradation to a specific enzymatic production process. This is enabled by the uncoupling of the waste oxidation process from the enzymatic bioproduction via redox cathodes. The approach can be attractive for small-scale, local production of chemicals from water and/or CO2.

Despite rising greenhouse gas emissions, the rapid diffusion of solar-PV, wind turbines, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is beginning to change the climate change discourse from one that focuses on collective action problems, free-riding concerns, and zero-sum games to one that focuses on economic opportunities, innovation races, and win-win solutions.1 In a rich and interesting article, titled “Recalibrating

The exploration of highly active, durable, and cost-effective electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is indispensable for several important energy conversion technologies. Significant achievements have been made with numerous efforts devoted by the academic and industrial researchers. In this review, from a more practical point of view, the tests and experiments at the membrane electrode

Chibueze is currently an assistant professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago where his research group focuses on tackling the challenges (some of which are detailed here) related to electrolytes for energy storage and electrocatalysis. He obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), did his postdoctoral work at Stanford University