Editorial for the Special Issue “Feature Paper Collection in the Section ‘Energy Science and Technology’”

1. Introduction

Energy science and technology sit at the heart of today’s decarbonization challenge [1,2,3,4]. As global demand grows, society needs order-of-magnitude gains in efficiency, rapid integration of renewables, and deployable control and forecasting tools that safeguard reliability and health [5,6,7]. This Special Issue collects feature papers spanning materials, systems modeling, controls, and field-ready solutions—covering solar and wind, thermal storage and cooling, hydrogen production and use, power electronics, transport, buildings, and power-quality/public health interfaces.

2. Overview of Contributions

Nomandela, Mnguni, and Raji validate grid-connected operation of a large-scale wind power plant via real-time simulation aligned with renewable energy grid codes, showing improved busbar voltages and offering a transferable methodology for future compliance studies. Zhou, Zeng, Zheng, Wang, and Zhou introduce a de-stationarized Crossformer for remaining useful life prediction in PEM fuel cells—combining adaptive normalization, non-stationary attention, crafted features, and a similarity-focused loss—to outperform Transformer/Crossformer baselines on real-vehicle data. Teixeira, Cerveira, Pires, and Baptista integrate LSTM with genetic algorithms for short- to medium-term weather forecasting, and Emexidis and Gkonis benchmark IoT-driven models for wind-energy prediction, highlighting Random Forest’s robustness. Gabaldón, Ruiz-Abellón, Martínez, and Guillamón propose aggregated supercapacitor–battery models for hybrid locomotives to enable pre-feasibility sizing and improved energy recovery on non-electrified lines. Santana-Méndez, García-Afonso, and González-Díaz model Tenerife’s pathway to 100% renewable supply for power and road transport, quantifying the scale of renewables, storage, dispatchables, and electrolysis required. Pukalskas and co-authors assess dual-fuel gasoline–hydrogen operation across WLTC, finding efficiency gains and lower incomplete-combustion products alongside reduced CO₂. Mendiara, Filsouf, Adánez-Rubio, Izquierdo, and Abad evaluate Ti-doped manganese oxide oxygen carriers for chemical looping, demonstrating durable oxygen release/regeneration and stable fluidization with an estimated multi-thousand-hour lifetime. Fernando and Naser develop a Eulerian–Eulerian CFD approach to predict iron-particle agglomeration in DRI conditions, aligning with CFD-DEM and experiments. Kočí, Maděra, and Černý present an on-site sensor self-adjustment technique for maintenance-free heat-flow monitoring in building envelopes. Marmol, Zamiri, Purraji, Murillo, Tuñón Díaz, Vazquez, and de Castro mitigate non-minimum-phase behavior in DC–DC boost converters via a dual-control scheme—short-horizon FCS-MPC for fast dynamics with a PI controller that tunes the current reference for steady-state accuracy (validated in simulation and HIL). Gonzalez-Rodriguez, Roldan-Fernandez, Serrano-Gonzalez, and Muñoz-Díez accelerate offshore wind-farm layout optimization by reframing wake interactions as power-deficit aggregation with a conservative-field analogy, achieving substantial runtime reductions in irregular concession areas. Khalil provides a comparative viability analysis across current and emerging hydrogen production pathways using quantitative and qualitative criteria, identifying electrolysis and biomass-waste valorization as the most promising near-term routes to DOE cost targets. Criollo and co-authors show how reduced-order electrolyzer models preserve techno-economic fidelity while cutting compute cost. Skibko and co-authors report a biogas-plant case where undersized feed-in cables caused large voltage excursions; practical fixes restored dual-generator operation and improved stability. Litzbarski and colleagues measure low-frequency EMF near power infrastructure, contrasting ICNIRP guidelines with stricter national limits and advocating localized exposure assessments. Li et al. proposed a source–storage–load collaborative scheduling strategy for aluminum electrolysis, using refined load models (including temperature–output–power coupling and crane–production dynamics) and a multi-objective formulation to cut costs and emissions while maximizing renewable use. An improved heuristic algorithm solves the model. Simulations show, versus single-objective optimization, up to 1677.35 t CO₂ reduction and +12.11% renewable use at 67.8% RE penetration, and up to 8260.97 t CO₂ reduction and +18.86% renewable use at 76.2%, without harming production stability. Bucur et al. used 2D time-resolved simulations (ANSYS Fluent, Dynamic Mesh 6DOF) to test passive flow control and blade material choices for H-Darrieus VAWTs. Blades with inclined cavities on the extrados accelerate faster and achieve higher tip-speed ratios and power coefficients than baseline NACA0012, especially at higher wind speeds. Lightweight 3D-printed polycarbonate outperforms resin, indicating that combining cavity-modified profiles with low-mass materials can markedly improve VAWT start-up and overall efficiency, guiding future experiments and prototypes.

3. Outlook

Future research should pair scalable optimization with explicit optimality bounds and uncertainty quantification; advance validated digital twins via data reconciliation and hybrid modeling for plant-level monitoring and dispatch; couple thermal storage with low-exergy cooling in buildings and industry; and link comparative TEA/LCA for hydrogen with operational control strategies and infrastructure planning, particularly in isolated or weakly interconnected systems. Finally, engineering-policy co-design will remain essential to harmonize grid codes, exposure standards, and public acceptance.