Materials for the Renewable Technologies: Challenges, Opportunities and Recent Advances

Dear Colleagues,

The emerging need to produce and store electricity is a critical challenge for the 21^st century. In addition to maintaining the balance in the electric grid and preventing any shortage, it is crucial to store energy at off-peak periods and release it when the load is high. Currently, electricity production primarily relies on the burning of fossil fuels. Because of the limited resources for fossil fuels and severe environmental damages associated with their usage, it is crucial to switch to renewable energies such as solar, geothermal, wind, biomass, etc. 

To enhance the performance, efficiency, and safety of renewable energy storage/conversion devices, it is important to develop a solid understanding of their underlying operation and failure mechanisms. Adjustment of materials properties for each application is vital, since in most cases the performance is limited by the intrinsic properties of the active materials. Despite the tremendous efforts to push the materials performance beyond their limits, there is still a huge gap between the industrial standards and the current academic research which needs to be filled. This motivated us to dedicate a Special Issue of Energies to collect the most recent advances in the field of materials development for renewable technologies. We invite all researchers to publish their original research, whether it is purely fundamental or application-oriented, in the forms of research papers, reviews, or short communications. The proposed topics are listed below.

• Supercapacitors.
• Photovoltaic Cells.
• Fuel cells (including polymer electrolyte membrane, molten salt, solid oxide fuel cells etc.).
• Lithium batteries (including Li-ion, Li-sulfur, Li-metal, Li-air, all-solid-state batteries etc.).
• Beyond lithium batteries (including different chemistries such as Na, K, Mg, Al Batteries).
• Redox flow batteries.
• Renewable technologies recycling.

We kindly invite you to submit your relevant work in the field of “Materials for the Renewable Technologies: Challenges, Opportunities and Recent Advances” for consideration for publication.

Dr. Maziar Ashuri
Dr. Zhao Ding
Guest Editors

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