Better action to combat climate change and its devastating impacts is urgently needed to save lives and livelihoods and realize the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Left unchecked, climate change will reverse much of the development of recent years as well as exacerbate food and water scarcity. This implies increasing efforts to transform energy, industrial, transport, food, agricultural and forestry systems.
Technology plays a fundamental role in climate change mitigation and, although current technology is an important support, technological development is necessary to reduce global emissions, make efficient use of renewable energy, and deal with extreme weather events.
In recent years there have been innovative ideas to achieve this, such as carbon capture technology (with the drawback of the difficulty in storing the captured carbon and possible CO2 leakage); seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfate-based aerosols; space sun shields to reflect the sun’s rays before they reach the atmosphere; and even painting the ceilings white to potentially reduce the urban heat island effect and help reflect more light and heat back into the space.
In the first half of 2020, solar and wind power covered 10% of global electricity demand, setting an all-time record, even though it is still far from what would be desirable, especially considering that coal still generates a third of the world’s energy. Clean energy still faces technical barriers that limit its expansion, but there are already some innovations that could increase the sustainability of renewable energy in the future.
The best solutions involve upgrading existing energy technologies and infrastructure to meet energy demands; capitalize on smart devices and appliances, smart electricity meters, energy recovery from municipal waste, floating solar plants and farms (which also save water by reducing evaporation), vertical axis wind turbines, metal solar and wind energy storage cast, reversible hydroelectric dams, and agrovoltaic solutions.
But there are other options that technology provides. Many researchers are already working on systems to store solar heat and return it at night in the form of electricity, taking advantage of the physical principle of radioactive cooling, considered the energy of the future; For its part, a new system designed in the United States uses sunlight to transform CO2 and water into oxygen and formic acid, which can be converted into hydrogen fuel, clean energy.
For its part, a German startup seeks to generate energy by combining in a single system that generated by the waves of the sea, the sun and the wind, a concept that is already being tested off the coast of Greece, through a modular floating platform that can be expanded as needed. Other American entrepreneurs seek to generate energy by manipulating the biological processes of bacteria such as Geobacter sulfurreducensto manufacture electrically conductive protein nanowires, taking advantage of the fact that when the moisture in the air reaches the bacteria, a small constant electric current is produced.