Editorial volume 2 issue 4

Abstract

Welcome to Issue 4 of volume 2 of Progress in Energy, a journal dedicated to addressing the broad range of issues facing the world’s energy system transition. With a focus on invited content, the journal aims to cover all topics that must be addressed as we consider how to meet the world’s growing demand for energy, from policy to scientific discovery, while considering any associated environmental and social impacts. In this, our largest issue to date, we continue to reflect the breadth of challenges we have to address as the world seeks to develop a more sustainable energy system, with three topical review articles and two perspectives addressing energy poverty in the context of sustainable development goals, energy equity in the USA, the development of clean energy technologies in developing economies, the importance of flexible technologies and whole systems thinking in delivering a cost effective low carbon transition, and sodium ion batteries. Shonali Pachauri and Narasimha Rao review the issues facing the measurement of energy poverty in the context of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), arguing that currently applied indicators to track global progress towards SDG Target 7.1 underestimate energy poverty and are inadequate to inform policies to improve access, noting that the new Multi-Tier Framework for quantifying energy poverty introduced by the World Bank, while an improvement on previous simplistic measures, is too complex to be useful and too prescriptive to gain acceptance. The paper presents and discusses an alternative framework for the global tracking of energy access, testing its application to three countries, Ethiopia, India and Rwanda. This is clearly a very important area to both inform policy and measure its impact. Marilyn A Brown, Anmol Soni, Melissa V Lapsa, Katie Southworth and Matt Cox address a critical issue relating to energy equity, with a particular focus on the US where, despite many years of policy effort, low-income households still spend a higher percent of their income on electricity and gas bills than any other income group. The paper highlights that many policies and programs in the US that promote energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies are largely inaccessible to low-income households. The authors also note that eliminating barriers to improving the energy efficiency of rental properties could drastically reduce energy burden and insecurity for households of colour, who predominate in this form of housing, while reducing health and other disparities. This work forms an important contribution to ensuring that we make a just low carbon energy transition. Radhika Khosla, Ajinkya Shrish Kamat and Venkatesh Narayanamurti examine the critical issue of clean energy technology transition in developing economies, focussing on light emitting diodes in India, solar photovoltaics in China, and sugarcane ethanol fuel in Brazil. Based on these experiences, the authors argue that the development of clean-energy pathways requires a holistic systems approach, with a shift from isolated policy approaches to a portfolio of coordinated innovation policies where demand, research and development, and manufacturing are all strategically developed. Indeed, it seems to the Editor that this is a lesson that could also be applied to developed economies! Goran Strbac, Danny Pudjianto, Marko Aunedi, Predrag Djapic, Fei Teng, Xi Zhang, Hossein Ameli, Roberto Moreira and this author review the role and value of flexibility in facilitating cost-effective energy system decarbonisation. The paper clearly demonstrates the whole system value of flexible technologies in terms of both energy demand, energy storage and energy generation. Enhancing flexibility is shown to significantly improve the integration of variable renewable energy sources. The paper further concludes that work is needed to address operational standards, and regulatory and commercial frameworks, that currently act as barriers to deployment. Although most of the case studies presented in the article are based on the UK, and to some extent the EU decarbonisation pathways, the overall conclusions regarding the value of flexibility remain very relevant for the global energy transition. The final paper address one the most important materials challenges for sodium ion batteries (SIBs), namely the use of hard carbon anodes. Sodium-ion batteries are one of the most promising alternatives to