Dear Colleagues,

With the on-hand global energy crisis coupled with strong commitment towards achieving UN sustainability goals, renewable energy technologies have been experiencing an unprecedented growth. Amongst the renewable energy sources, solar, biomass and wind play a leading role in today’s energy scenario, and this trend is expected to increase manifold over the coming years. Solar and wind power have already been proven to compete with fossil fuels in terms of energy economics. However, the dependence on fossil fuels is still overwhelmingly large, and, consequently, this not only leads to accelerating the use of renewable sources but also to promoting the development of innovative renewable energy technologies. Given the intermittent nature of solar and wind resources, finding ways to enhance energy storage plays a pivotal role in the commercial deployment of these resources where ‘energy storage’ is becoming one of the growing fields of research. Similarly, biomass as a renewable energy source is considered to be a successful option depending on the available infrastructure and raw-material accessibility. Thus, topics such as circular bioeconomy and integrated biorefineries that consider resource minimization and conversion of waste biomass into valuable products have become increasingly popular within the domain of bioenergy. There are also other alternative approaches, such as artificial intelligence, big data, smart grid and IoT as control and optimization tools for renewable energy system management, that have slowly but steadily become more widely applied in current applications. Thus, renewable energy is not a niche technology anymore but instead is interdisciplinary and falls within the scope of many fields of interest, including STEM, arts, and commerce. Bearing this in mind, the journal Sustainability is excited to issue this call for original research ideas and review papers on the multi-disciplinary field of the current or growing renewable energy technologies. Particularly, articles that are novel and show results on pure renewable energy technologies with foreseeable holy grail impact on the future of energy context are highly welcomed.  Topics covered in this Special Issue will include but are not limited to:   

• Current and future approaches for renewable energy sources, technologies and management;
• Assessment of growing renewable energy technologies considering three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental and social);
• Industrial application potential of growing renewable energy technologies;
• Revolutionary renewable energy approaches aligned to meet UN sustainability goals within the framework of poverty and access of electricity to all;
• Promising early-stage studies of innovative renewable energy approaches awaiting upscaling.

Dr. Shiplu Sarker
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Current and future approaches for renewable energy sources, technologies and management
• Assessment of growing renewable energy technologies considering three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental and social)
• Industrial application potential of growing renewable energy technologies
• Revolutionary renewable energy approaches aligned to meet UN sustainability goals within the framework of poverty and access of electricity to all
• Promising early-stage studies of innovative renewable energy approaches awaiting upscaling