The most obvious reason for switching to renewable energy sources is to offset climate change. The switch to new energy sources also offers a unique opportunity which is not often spoken about: the democratization of our energy supply...

To make the transition to a low carbon energy system we need all the available technologies like wind, solar, biomass and hydropower as well as new technologies that are still being developed such as tidal energy and storage. It is therefore unfortunate that cleantech startups have a track record of not performing very well. This, however, may be about to change.

A 48 MW battery is scheduled to go online in Jardelund, Germany at the end of 2017. Its primary function is to provide reserve capacity for grid stabilization. Once it is operational it will be Europe’s largest battery energy storage system (BESS).

Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands have put forward an ambitious plan to build a large Wind Power Hub in the North Sea. At the heart of the plan is the development of one or more artificial islands with interconnections to countries bordering the North Sea.

Students of the Delft University of Technology are working on an ultra fuel efficient vehicle. In May of this year their hydrogen powered car will compete in the Shell Eco-marathon Europe. The aim is to drive 3500 km on the energy equivalent of 1 liter of gasoline.

The cost of battery packs for electric vehicles has fallen nearly 80% since 2010. That downward trajectory is expected to continue over the coming years. Since the battery makes up 35 to 50% of the production cost of an EV, driving electric will become much cheaper. EVs are increasingly competing on price with internal combustion engine cars. When are they ready to push ICE off the road?

It’s notoriously hard to predict when a new technology will take off to disrupt the status quo. In 1943 Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM at the time, reputedly said the global market for computers would amount to ‘maybe five’. The International Energy Agency knows all about that. Every year it publishes a forecast about the growth of renewable energy and every year it has it wrong.

Information is everywhere but the challenge is to make good use of it. The promise of the information age is to make improvements in the material world by harnassing the immaterial. Four engineers of the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have done just that. Combining real-time data and algorithms, they were able to reduce fuel consumption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) with 10 to 30%.

Renewable energy technologies are rapidly changing the way we produce energy. However, the transition to a zero-carbon energy system is still lacking technological components such as energy storage and CO2 removal. What we need is a concerted effort to develop new technologies, says Carlo Carraro, Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III.

No wonder, 'Trump' was the word on everybody's lips during the 22nd UN Climate Conference in Marrakesh, held one year after the historic Climate Agreement at the 21th Conference in Paris. Donald Trump's vow to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement sounds like a devastating blow to the Agreement's primary objective: To keep the warming of the planet well below 2°C. But in Marrakesh the mood was one of defiance rather than devastation.