Renewable Energy Research In Science

Again and again I see people making comments in my social media feed that solar and wind are a bad idea because of their environmental impacts. "Compared to what?" is a question we often ask at the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP). Of course every single electricity production technology has environmental and social impacts. But pointing out that solar panels require energy to be produced, occupy land if not on rooftops and need to be recycled is often used as an argument against the energy transition without doing an objective comparison with fossil fuel-based electricity generation technologies. Luckily a recent meta-review led by Benjamin Sovacool assessing 83 studies of the external costs of electricity production technologies provides important insights. It allows us to use the latest available evidence for a systematic assessment of the environmental and social impacts of electricity production. For those who are not economists: External costs are a metric for monetising the environmental and social impacts of electricity production in a systematic way. This includes for example acidifying substances, airborne particles, land use/deforestation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel electricity generation results in multiple times more externalities than renewable energy. Energy efficiency and demand response provide positive externalities because they avoid negative externalities through reducing overall demand and peak demand. Full study can be found here: https://lnkd.in/ePV39bNj

⚡️ LCOE vs. System-LCOE: Why understanding the full picture matters! As part of Norway’s efforts to promote smart, sustainable energy solutions abroad, we often highlight how competitive solar, wind, and offshore technologies have become. The progress is real, costs have dropped, and renewables are at the heart of the global energy transition. But when planning large-scale investments or national energy strategies, headline figures alone aren’t enough. For real impact, we must understand the difference between LCOE and System-LCOE and why this distinction matters for delivering reliable, low-emission power 24/7. 📉 LCOE. A valuable, but limited metric LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) is a well-established measure of production cost per MWh over a plant’s lifetime. It’s an essential benchmark and the reason why solar, wind, and offshore wind are now increasingly preferred in many markets. However, LCOE only tells us what it costs to produce electricity, not what it takes to deliver it when and where it’s needed. That’s where System-LCOE becomes critical. 🧩 What System-LCOE adds to the conversation System-LCOE reflects the broader cost of integrating energy into a functioning power system. This includes: - Backup capacity (e.g., hydropower, gas peakers) - Storage (batteries, hydrogen, thermal, etc.) - Grid upgrades and interconnection - Curtailment losses and balancing services This doesn’t make renewables "too expensive", but reminds us that energy systems need more than generation alone. The Norwegian perspective: our flexibility is a strength Norway is in a unique position. A flexible hydropower system provides natural balancing for intermittent energy sources, such as wind. That makes it easier and cheaper to integrate renewables at scale, a goal many other countries are actively pursuing, for instance, through battery deployment or hydrogen-based storage. This means Norwegian companies, technologies, and experience in system integration and flexibility are more relevant than ever. ⚠️ Why this nuance matters Comparing LCOE from solar in Spain with baseload gas in Southeast Asia doesn’t tell the whole story. System integration matters, and System-LCOE can often be 1.5–3 times higher than LCOE, depending on geography, grid structure, and generation mix. Norwegian companies must be prepared to address this complexity when advising or exporting and show how smart design and flexible technology can manage these costs. ✅ Bottom line To support our partners in making sound energy decisions, we must: - Go beyond LCOE when discussing costs - Highlight Norway’s strength in system-level thinking - Recognise that renewables are essential, and so is integration 📣 Next time you see that solar or wind is “the cheapest,” ask: Is that just the generation cost or the full cost of reliable energy delivery, including the cost of infrastructure? Is that the full answer, or is it still blowin’ in the wind 👍

A 2,000 km wall of dust swept across West Africa on March 30, 2026, a major dust storm formed in southern Algeria and moved rapidly southward through Mali and Mauritania, all the way to the Atlantic coast, and eventually triggering a severe Calima alert in the Canary Islands. These events are not rare. But they are becoming more consequential and one of their most underappreciated impacts is on the energy systems we are counting on to power the future. Dust storms and renewable energy don't mix well. ☀️ Solar panels coated in Saharan dust can lose 25 to 40% of their generation capacity during and after a major event. In regions like the Sahel, where solar is increasingly the primary source of electricity, an unplanned drop of that magnitude hits homes, hospitals, water pumping systems, and cold chains, all at once. 💨 Wind turbines are equally exposed. Dense dust affects aerodynamic efficiency, accelerates wear on blades and mechanical components, and in extreme cases forces shutdowns to prevent damage. 🌫️ Grid operators lose visibility. Without real-time atmospheric data, dust-induced generation drops are unpredictable — exactly the kind of uncertainty that makes grid management in renewable-heavy systems so difficult. The image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite shows the dust front crossing the Algeria-Mali border in striking detail. It is a remarkable image. Copernicus ECMWF data supports atmospheric monitoring, early warning systems, and the assessment of dust impacts on infrastructure and regional air quality. For energy planners and grid operators across North and West Africa, that kind of advance visibility is the difference between a managed disruption and a crisis. The clean energy transition in the Sahel and across Africa is one of the most important infrastructure stories of this decade. Countries like Mali are expanding solar capacity rapidly. But building resilient renewable systems in dust-prone regions requires integrating meteorological and satellite data into energy planning from the start. World Meteorological Organization's work on early warning systems and atmospheric monitoring, combined with tools like Copernicus, gives us the science to anticipate these events.

A State-of-the-Art Review on Geothermal Energy Extraction, Utilization, and Improvement Strategies: Conventional, Hybridized, and Enhanced Geothermal Systems This paper presents a review the potential of geothermal energy,  technologies implemented in power plants and direct heat applications; performance enhancement of the existing conventional systems, the implementation of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and Hybridized Geothermal Systems. Main takeaways: ✔ the larger geothermal capacity factor necessitates faster geothermal development. Accelerating EGS development would be a significant accomplishment ✔ recently, there has been considerable interest in hybrid systems that combine geothermal and other energy sources to increase the output efficiency of a geothermal system. Geothermal energy shows great potential when utilized in combination with some other form of renewable resource. ✔ geothermal energy systems have proven to be highly effective in establishing a more balanced power supply #geothermal #energy #renewable #heat #electricity #hybridization #EGS #Enhanced #Geothermal #Systems

"Why is conventional geothermal not the answer? It’s restricted by geology. Conventional geothermal tends to work only in a few locations around the world with a high thermal gradient, tapping into shallow, high-heat resources. Wells are drilled into highly permeable reservoirs, drawing the hot fluids to surface where they generate the power and heat in the geothermal plant. Just 0.6% of the 45,000 oil and gas reservoirs in our database have these qualities. What are new technologies trying to do that’s different? Take geothermal global and realise the aspiration of geothermal anywhere. The holy grail is wells that can work in locations with an average thermal gradient. Two technologies are targeting low permeability rocks. Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) use fracking to stimulate the flow of hot fluids through the rocks; advanced geothermal systems (AGS) are testing closed-loop designs where water or other fluids are circulated through the hot rock without leaving the wellbore. Separately, a range of new drilling technologies are hoping to cut well costs, which account for up to 90% of geothermal project capital expenditure. Non-drilling projects include more effective heat exchangers to maximise output from lower temperature resources and co-location of geothermal with hydrogen production, direct air capture, underground thermal energy storage and critical mineral extraction to maximise the value of the geothermal resource. Most of the pilot projects are in Europe and the US where there are subsidies available. The level of spend on the pilot projects is currently tiny, amounting to just a few hundred million dollars. But if geothermal goes global, we estimate that cumulative investment through 2050 could be US$1 trillion. Which projects could signal the breakthrough? Both EGS and AGS technologies are being tested at commercial scale and could be moving towards widespread, location-agnostic deployment. Eavor’s AGS project at Geretsreid in Germany is one to watch. Its Eavorloop multilateral closed-loop well design is targeting 60 MWth of heat capacity and 8.2 MW of power by 2026 from a reservoir at 4.5 kilometres depth with a normal geothermal gradient. Success could see five similar installations following in short order. Another is Fervo Energy’s Project Red in Nevada which came onstream in 2023 and has already demonstrated EGS technologies at commercial scale. Its much larger Project Cape in Utah began drilling 29 wells in 2023 and aims to produce 400 MW from EGS by 2028. Both harness the much higher-than-average geothermal gradients in these locations. Are costs a challenge? Yes. Geothermal’s current levelised cost of electricity is well out of the money at about US$200/MWh. Should the pilot projects prove the concept, the hope is that scaling up lowers the LCOE by two-thirds to US$75/MWh by 2050." https://lnkd.in/gaK65ehR

The transition to renewable energy sources like solar and wind is crucial for a sustainable future. However, their intermittent nature poses challenges for grid integration and stability. Our latest review focuses on Integrated Energy Management Systems (IEMS) that can make a game-changing difference. An IEMS is an advanced system that combines predictive and real-time controls to balance energy supply and demand intelligently. By integrating solar forecasting, demand-side management, and supply-side management, an IEMS can optimize renewable energy utilization while maintaining grid reliability. Here are some key benefits of implementing an IEMS: 1. Accurate Solar Forecasting: By precisely predicting solar energy generation, an IEMS can proactively manage supply and initiate appropriate responses, reducing uncertainties. 2. Demand-Side Management: An IEMS can initiate demand responses, such as adjusting energy consumption patterns or incentivizing customers to shift loads, ensuring a better balance between supply and demand. 3. Supply-Side Management: When solar generation is insufficient, an IEMS can seamlessly integrate alternative energy sources, energy storage systems, or dispatch algorithms to maintain a stable supply. 4. Cost Savings: By optimizing energy use and reducing waste, an IEMS can lead to significant cost savings for utilities, businesses, and consumers alike. As the world transitions towards a more sustainable energy future, adopting cutting-edge technologies like IEMS will be crucial. #renewables #research #management #netzero #energy

🗺️ Could weather maps be treated as word tokens for renewable energy forecasting? Since both energy production and language are sequences, the idea is to encode weather maps as embeddings, just as NLP does with word tokens, and then use a transformer to forecast the entire sequence. This makes it possible to combine spatial and temporal information within a single architecture: - Weather maps are encoded with a lightweight CNN. - Token sequences are processed with a transformer encoder. - The model learns to forecast wind or solar power. The same architecture can handle both wind and solar inputs without any modification. Traditional computer vision approaches often struggle with solar data due to night hours that carry no information. This formulation handles them naturally. Key results compared to ENTSO-E operational forecasts: 🌬️ Wind: ~63% reduction in forecast error ☀️ Solar: ~21% reduction in forecast error The model is lightweight (274k parameters, ~1 MB), fast to train (1–2 hours on a single A100), and scalable to any region or weather input without architectural changes. This work is part of the Weather4Energy project. ICSC - Centro Nazionale di Ricerca in HPC, Big Data e Quantum Computing | CINECA | IFAB - International Foundation Big Data and Artificial Intelligence for Human Development | Illumia

Beyond the Hype: A Clear-Eyed Look at Geothermal’s Role in the Energy Transition I spent months digging into geothermal, publishing many articles and ending with a just released full report, Beyond the Hype: Geothermal in Context, published by TFIE Strategy in late September 2025. Link to report PDF: https://lnkd.in/gDwz8G_n The work was shaped by open debate with engineers, scientists, investors, and policymakers who challenged assumptions and added missing context. The report separates proven approaches from hype. Conventional geothermal works in the right geographies but will always be limited. Enhanced and ultra-deep drilling carry stacked risks that mirror nuclear-scale megaprojects, where Flyvbjerg’s iron law of cost overruns is the norm. Closed-loop designs like Eavor deserve credit for ingenuity but remain constrained by efficiency, thermal depletion and first-of-a-kind drilling risks. Where geothermal already delivers value is in heating and cooling. China’s district heating buildout shows how shallow and medium-depth systems can scale, while seasonal thermal storage in Denmark and Alberta demonstrates real-world reliability. Industrial heat pumps with aquifers are cutting fossil demand today, and even data center cooling has niche but proven applications. The report urges policymakers to back shallow geothermal, district heating, and industrial heat while avoiding speculative drilling traps. Utilities should study Sinopec’s pivot to heat networks instead of clinging to stranded gas pipelines. Investors need to recognize where capital will be stranded and where it will deliver steady returns. The report is freely available for these audiences with the hope that it will aid them to make better decisions. Geothermal’s strength is not in competing with wind and solar on electricity, but in providing flexible, distributed, and dependable heat. In the right contexts, it simply works.

For most of the last century, generators stabilised the grid as a by-product of producing energy. Today, we are building assets that stabilise the grid without producing energy at all. That shift identifies the binding constraint. Electricity system transition is no longer constrained by renewable resource availability. It is constrained by deliverability and operability. In inverter-dominated systems under rapid load growth, the binding constraints are: - transmission and major substation capacity - system strength, fault levels, frequency and voltage control - connection and commissioning throughput - secure operation under worst-day conditions - execution pace across networks and system services Generation capacity remains necessary. On its own, it no longer delivers firm supply or supports large new loads. Historically, synchronous generators supplied energy and stability together. Inertia, fault current, voltage support, and controllability were implicit. As synchronous plant retires, these services must be provided explicitly. Stability shifts from physics-led to control-led. System behaviour becomes more sensitive to modelling accuracy, protection coordination, control settings, and real-time visibility. Curtailment is not excess energy. It is a deliverability or security constraint. When transmission and substations lag generation, congestion and curtailment rise. Independent analysis shows that delay increases prices and emissions by extending reliance on higher-cost thermal generation. Distribution networks are no longer passive. They now host distributed generation, storage, EV charging, and large loads at the edge of transmission. Voltage control, protection coordination, hosting capacity, and connection throughput now constrain both decarbonisation and industrial growth. Firming is a hard requirement. Batteries provide fast frequency response and contingency arrest. They do not provide multi-day energy and do not replace networks or system strength in weak grids. Demand response reduces peaks. It cannot be relied upon for system-wide security under stress. Execution speed is critical. Slow delivery increases congestion duration, curtailment exposure, reserve requirements, and reliance on ageing plant. These effects flow directly into costs, emissions, and reliability. This is why electricity bills can rise even when average wholesale prices fall. Costs are driven by peak demand, contingencies, and security, not average energy. Large digital and industrial loads are transmission-scale, continuous, and failure-intolerant. They increase contingency size and correlation risk. At that scale, loads do not connect to the grid, they shape it. Supporting growth requires time-to-power, transmission and substation capacity in load corridors, explicit system strength and fault levels, operable firming under worst-day conditions, scalable connection and commissioning, and early procurement of long lead time HV equipment. #energy

🌞 The Hidden Side of Solar Power – Solar Waste - A Growing Challenge Solar energy is rightly celebrated as one of the cleanest and most promising sources of power for our future. But there’s an emerging challenge that often goes unnoticed — solar waste. As the first generation of large-scale PV installations reaches the end of their 20–25 year lifespan, end-of-life (EoL) panels and inverter waste are becoming a significant environmental concern. ⚠️ Key Issues - • PV modules can contain lead, cadmium, silver, and other toxic materials that leach into soil and groundwater if dumped improperly. • Limited recycling infrastructure and high treatment costs make safe disposal difficult. • Many countries, including Sri Lanka, still lack dedicated regulations or EPR frameworks for solar waste management. • Informal recycling practices in parts of Asia expose workers to health and safety risks. 🌍 Real-World Incidents - • California, USA (2022) - Thousands of solar panels were landfilled instead of recycled due to high costs — raising serious questions about “green waste.” • China (Hebei Province) - Manufacturing waste from PV production was improperly dumped, causing toxic soil contamination. 🌱 The Way Forward To ensure solar remains truly sustainable, we must focus on - ✅ Establishing solar waste recycling plants and logistics systems. ✅ Introducing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) frameworks. ✅ Promoting “Design for Recycling” in future PV technology. ✅ Building awareness and training for safe dismantling and handling. Sri Lanka’s Soorya Bala Sangramaya program is a great step toward renewable energy independence — but it’s time to plan ahead for end-of-life PV management as well. 💬 Let’s talk about it - How can we build a solar waste recycling framework suitable for South Asia before the first wave of decommissioning hits? #SolarEnergy #Sustainability #RenewableEnergy #EnvironmentalManagement #QAQC #SriLanka #EPR #CircularEconomy #GreenFuture #EnergyTransition