Biomass, as a renewable carbon source, offers decarbonization possibilities for a wide range of energy and material-related end uses, including power and heat, fuels, fertilizers, and biomaterials. As the global concerns about climate change and carbon neutrality goals increase, the efficient allocation of limited biomass resources across these competing sectors has become a critical issue. This study integrates life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis to compare the benefits of intersectoral biomass resource utilization, and linking the evaluation results to the stakeholders under different system boundaries. Through evaluating 31 representative biomass utilization pathways in China, this framework quantifies the environmental and economic impacts under multiple policy scenarios. The results suggest that prioritizing biomass for green fuel production not only offers higher profitability but also delivers the greatest decarbonization potential across the entire biomass utilization system. This study finds that optimization of inter-sectoral biomass resource allocation could achieve low-cost decarbonization. This study offers valuable technical insights for optimizing biomass resource allocation and provides actionable recommendations for carbon neutrality strategies.
Monitoring and predicting climate modes of variability, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), can be useful for informing decision-making in numerous sectors. The influence of climate modes on electricity demand, and wind and solar photovoltaic generation in Australia varies spatially and temporally, but studies have so far considered demand and generation separately. Here, we quantify for the first time the relationships between three major climate modes and residual load, which integrates supply and demand. For Australia’s largest power system, we find that ENSO and the Indian Ocean Dipole have limited influence on residual load, both today and under future scenarios that model an increasingly renewables-dominated gird. This implies an overall resilience to climate mode variability. The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is weakly correlated with residual load ( $\rho = 0.3$ ), but we find evidence of an asymmetric relationship, whereby a negative SAM more strongly influences residual load than its other phases. By imposing additional renewables capacity in strategic locations, we find it would require substantially more capacity to reduce variability associated with the SAM. Finally, we show that the ability to predict residual load with climate mode indices is limited, with random forest models outperforming benchmarks by a small margin ( $F$ 1 scores of 0.5 compared to the benchmark of 0.33). Our work suggests that there is limited influence of climate modes on the grid overall, and efforts to improve climate information for the energy sector should prioritise the evaluation and development of seasonal predictions of wind speed and solar radiation directly.
Clean energy innovation and adoption is critical to addressing energy poverty in West Africa. This article focuses on identifying which drivers actually govern solar technology adoption in West Africa and how energy users themselves interpret them. By utilizing a mixed method approach that combines desk review of academic and policy literature with field visits (direct observation and stakeholder interviews across Nigeria and Ghana) we explored the major drivers of clean solar energy adoption. The field engagement was conducted between November 2023 and January 2026, and the resulting observations and discussion notes were analyzed thematically and compared across (residential, commercial and industrial) sectors in Nigeria and Ghana. We found that two drivers, availability and affordability, dominated user decisions in practice, whose meaning differs (between the two countries, by the sectors studied, and from the global energy access definitions). This study reveals that: (1) local context and sector-specific meanings shape solar energy technology adoption and use across countries and sectors; (2) solar adoption strategies substitute for unreliable electricity supply in Nigeria, while in Ghana it substitutes for higher grid tariff. It concludes by highlighting the need for a clear understanding of the contextual dimensions of these drivers for effective interventions.
Power grids are increasingly vulnerable to weather events, which not only lead to power outages but also complicate analysis efforts to inform planning and mitigation strategies. While previous studies have focused on individual hazards or regions, comparative assessments across event types and geographic areas are limited. This study conducted a county-level, spatio-temporal analysis of power outages during weather events across the contiguous United States, utilizing an integrated dataset of historical outage and weather event records along with county-level environmental, infrastructural, and demographic features. We analyzed 124,291 historical weather events from November 2014 to November 2022 (categorized into 12 hazards and a co-occurring events category) to characterize outages by duration, severity, and correlations with local features. Our findings revealed that outage characteristics vary systematically by hazard, with tropical cyclones causing outages that are 5.4 times longer and 17.8 times more severe than the median for single-hazard events. Co-occurring events led to both increased outage duration and severity for almost 90% of paired hazards (compared to single-hazard events). An evaluation of local features identified multiple patterns in outage duration and severity. For example, across all hazards, highly developed areas generally experienced less severe but longer-lasting outages, while energy corridors were generally associated with more severe outages; affluence had an inverse relationship with both outage duration and severity. Hazard-specific patterns were also identified with local features, with outlying forested areas generally associated with longer and more severe outages, primarily during wind-based events. These insights provide a foundation for further assessments of power outages during weather events and can inform strategies to enhance grid resilience to weather events.
Renewable energy is central to climate strategies in Nigeria, yet the policy architecture guiding this transition continues to prioritise technical and economic metrics while giving limited attention to social and ecological safeguards. This paper conducts a structured qualitative content analysis of eight national renewable energy and energy transition policy documents to evaluate the extent to which energy justice principles are embedded in Nigeria’s transition framework. Using a theory-driven coding schema spanning procedural, recognitional, distributional, and reparative justice, each document was assessed across eighteen parameters using a five-point explicitness-enforceability scale distinguishing between provisions that are explicit and enforceable, explicit but non-enforceable, general but enforceable, general and non-enforceable, and not addressed. Findings show that justice considerations are widely referenced but unevenly operationalised across the instrument set. When scores are normalised against the maximum available within each dimension, procedural justice achieves the highest proportional integration at 53.4% of its possible maximum, followed by distributional justice at 50.5%, recognitional justice at 34.4%, and reparative justice at 26.0%. This rank order holds independently of differential parameter weighting and indicates that access-oriented and process-focused provisions are more consistently embedded than those addressing identity, historical harm, and compensatory obligation. Enforcement mechanisms, community feedback and grievance pathways, cultural safeguards, and compensation frameworks for historically affected communities are the most consistently absent or under-specified provisions across the corpus. The findings demonstrate that the barrier to stronger justice integration is not the absence of legal authority within Nigeria’s existing statutory architecture but the selective application of that authority to community-facing and reparative provisions. The paper provides a replicable analytical framework applicable to comparable fossil fuel-dependent, climate-vulnerable transition contexts beyond Nigeria.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) faces mounting reliability challenges as electrification, large flexible loads (e.g. data centers, hydrogen, crypto, and industrial demand), and high renewable penetration reshape system dynamics. Traditional reserve margin–based planning is increasingly inadequate, as periods of highest risk are shifting to net peak hours and extended low-renewable events. To address these challenges, we developed a probabilistic resource adequacy (RA) framework using PLEXOS ^® to evaluate ERCOT’s long-term RA outlook through 2050. We modeled baseline growth, high load growth from data centers and cryptocurrency, enhanced ancillary service requirements, and targeted transmission expansion, with sensitivities to technology costs, fuel prices, and policy uncertainty (e.g. Inflation Reduction Act repeal). We quantified reliability outcomes through probabilistic metrics, including loss of load expectation, loss of load probability, and expected unserved energy, to capture the marginal contribution of conventional, renewable, and storage resources. Our results show that rapid load growth, particularly from data centers, intensifies RA risks absent complementary transmission and resource expansion; however, transmission upgrades and enhanced ancillary services improve adequacy by mitigating congestion and stabilizing net load variability. We benchmarked our framework against the February 2021 Winter Storm Uri through hourly operational simulations, which validate the framework’s capability to replicate observed stress conditions and unserved energy outcomes. These findings collectively underscore that ERCOT’s future reliability hinges on coordinated planning across generation, transmission, and demand-side flexibility. This study provides a novel integration of long-term capacity expansion and probabilistic RA modeling, offering actionable insights for system operators, policymakers, and market stakeholders navigating ERCOT’s transition to a high-renewable, high-load future.
Modeling energy systems with a large share of cascaded hydropower requires an adequate representation of reservoir and plant interactions within a national power system. However, many energy system models rely on simplified or aggregated hydropower representations that neglect hydraulic interconnections, affecting operational results. This study quantifies the compound impact of hydropower cascade simplification, comprising hydraulic topology, inflow representation, and parameters aggregation, on national power system modeling. A hydropower cascade formulation is integrated into the open-source Dispa-SET unit commitment and economic dispatch model and compared with two simplified formulations with different levels of hydraulic detail, typically applied in mid and long-term energy system models. The analysis is applied to the Bolivian power system, where hydropower represents a significant share of electricity generation. The results show that simplified formulations significantly impact system operation. Hydropower generation is overestimated during the wet season and underestimated during the dry season. This leads to operational cost underestimation of 7% and up to 28.9% during the wet season depending on the formulation, and affects key operational indicators, including transmission congestion, reservoir operation, and the detection of shed load events. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly representing hydropower cascade dynamics when assessing the operation of hydro-dominated national power systems.
Electrification strategies based on renewable energy (RE) are critical for achieving multiple sustainable development goals and meeting the Paris Agreement in Africa. Low-cost RE offers multiple benefits and enables rapid scale-up through decentralised and scalable solutions, particularly solar photovoltaics (PV). However, despite recent progress, about 600 million people in Africa, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, are still estimated to lack access to electricity. This perspective synthesises literature evidence to show the critical role of RE in delivering sustainable, secure, and reliable electricity. It provides nuanced insights into energy policy, economic factors, social inclusion, technology relevance, and planning tools, while identifying context-relevant solutions tailored to the continent. It further emphasises the evolving role of energy stakeholders, with active energy citizens increasingly transitioning from consumers to prosumers, yet this aspect remains underexplored in the literature. To inform policy and practice, we recommend inclusive, interdisciplinary approaches that engage African and international partners, implement context-specific business models, and make parallel investments in centralised and decentralised systems. Strategic investment in scalable, low-cost RE technologies, particularly solar PV, and in solar-to-X pathways can accelerate socially inclusive and sustainable electrification across Africa.
The European Union’s (EUs) goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 will lead to an economy-wide transformation that will also affect labour markets, particularly in sectors that are more directly impacted by the climate transition. Because of the expected sectoral shifts in employment, it is important to gain insight into the sectoral mobility of workers. Thus, this paper contains an exploratory and descriptive analysis of the labour force in the impacted sectors between 2010 and 2020, investigating certain demographic indicators that may be relevant for labour mobility, such as age and gender. Next, we combine this data with calculations on sector-to-sector transitions. The findings indicate that the transforming sectors collectively employed around 30% of the EU labour market in 2023, with a balanced representation of age groups comparable to the average across all sectors. However, the transforming sectors are male-dominated, with women making up a much smaller share of employment compared to the economy-wide average. We find that younger workers in all countries demonstrate higher mobility compared to older workers, with variation across EU Member States. In terms of transitions between individual transforming sectors, we find that these happen most frequently between manufacturing and construction (in both directions). There is also a net inflow of workers into all of the transforming sectors, except for mining and extraction.
Access to electricity in Somalia remains low and highly unequal, particularly between rural and nomadic populations. This study examines the determinants of household electricity access and decomposes disparities by residence using nationally representative data from the Somalia Health and Demographic Survey. A binary logistic regression model is applied to identify key socio-economic, demographic, and housing-related factors associated with electricity access. At the same time, the Fairlie decomposition technique is used to quantify the contribution of these factors to the rural-nomadic gap. The results show that household wealth is the most significant determinant of electricity access, with substantially higher odds among households in upper wealth quintiles. Living conditions, including sanitation facilities and cooking arrangements, are also important predictors, indicating that electricity access is closely linked to broader household welfare. Female-headed households and those without agricultural land have lower odds of access, while livestock ownership is not statistically significant. Notably, nomadic households exhibit extremely low odds of electricity access compared to rural households, reflecting severe exclusion. The decomposition results reveal a large disparity in electricity access between rural and nomadic households, with most of the gap explained by differences in observable characteristics. Wealth accounts for the largest share of the explained component, followed by sanitation and cooking conditions, while demographic factors contribute minimally. Addressing these disparities requires targeted policies that enhance affordability and expand decentralized energy solutions to underserved communities.
Historically, hydropower projects have significantly impacted local populations, mainly due to inadequate attention to justice principles in their planning and implementation. We examine the evolving impacts of Ghana’s Akosombo Dam through the lens of ‘hydropower communities,’ local populations whose lives are intricately tied to the socio-environmental footprint of hydropower infrastructure. Applying an energy justice framework focused on distributive, procedural, recognition, and restorative justice, we evaluate the dam’s initial construction with the 2023 controlled spillage. Findings reveal that in both historical and contemporary contexts, affected communities have disproportionately borne the burdens of hydropower development while receiving limited benefits. Although efforts to address these harms have evolved, they remain largely insufficient to achieve meaningful justice. Building on these findings, the study proposes a set of forward-looking recommendations, including the establishment of benefit-sharing mechanisms, participatory governance forums, protection of cultural heritage, and creation of a resilience and reparations trust fund. The research highlights that without deliberate integration of energy justice principles, hydropower projects risk entrenching structural inequalities, particularly under the intensifying pressures of climate change. Advancing justice for hydropower communities is essential not only for rectifying historical grievances but also for ensuring more equitable and inclusive energy transition in Ghana and beyond.
Climate projections often lack the high temporal resolution required to inform robust system planning and risk assessment in power grids with high variable renewable energy (VRE) generation. In this work, we present a novel and computationally inexpensive temporal disaggregation approach to generate plausible hourly time series from coarse daily climate model projections over multiple sites, with a focus on wind power generation. For each candidate day to disaggregate, the approach picks an analogue day from a historical hourly record, based on multi-site squared Euclidean distance between each candidate day and historical days, while also accounting for inter-day continuity. Hourly wind speed values from the analogue day are then rescaled across sites to match the daily data to disaggregate and converted into hourly capacity factor time series. We validate the framework using a 71 years open-source ERA5 reanalysis record for onshore wind speed and wind power generation across the twelve NUTS1 regions of the United Kingdom, which we split between training and test data sets (15 years). Our approach requires less than one minute to disaggregate 15 years daily mean data into hourly series. It successfully captures the full probability distribution of the test hourly data. It also addresses a longstanding limitation of disaggregation methods by preserving high hourly autocorrelation—up to 0.95—at midnight when the analogue day changes. The resulting hourly wind power time series also successfully reproduce key energy-modelling-relevant characteristics, including (1) the event-duration distribution of droughts, particularly the longer, system-critical events, and (2) the test data’s wind power ramp frequency and magnitude. Therefore, our analogue-based approach provides an efficient, reliable, and statistically consistent tool for generating plausible high-resolution VRE time series needed to inform critical investment and policy decisions for future decarbonised energy systems.
This paper explores the synergies between photovoltaic (PV) adoption as a climate mitigation strategy and the growing need for adaptation through increased cooling demand across Italy. We combine estimates of semi elasticities capturing the effect of residential PV systems on household electricity withdrawals from the grid with high frequency projections of local PV potential, future adoption scenarios and climate projections. This integrated framework allows us to assess two key outcomes: first, the evolution of residential electricity demand for cooling under rising temperatures and second, the extent to which PV diffusion can offset grid electricity consumption. Our nationwide analysis estimates that with rising temperatures, cooling needs will drive significant increases in electricity demand, by 2-3 TWh annually, a 5% increase with respect to residential electricity consumption in 2023. At the same time, expanded PV adoption can partially counterbalance this effect by reducing household reliance on the grid during peak demand periods by almost 50%. The spatial distribution of future PV uptake reveals pronounced heterogeneity across municipalities. Areas in northern Italy and the islands, where installation rates are relatively high, experience sizable benefits from PV generation. In contrast, large and densely populated cities in central and southern Italy, despite being more exposed to frequent and intense heat, capture far smaller gains due to persistently low PV penetration. Overall, our results highlight the importance of jointly considering mitigation and adaptation when designing energy policies. They also underscore the role of targeted measures to promote PV adoption in heat exposed urban areas as part of Italy's ongoing energy transition.
This dataset and toolkit provide census tract-level information on primary residential heating fuel used across the United States for three time periods: 2011-2015, 2016-2020, and 2019-2023. The data are derived from the American Community Survey 5 year estimates, accessed through the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). For all census tracts in each 5 year time period, the dataset includes the counts of occupied housing units using each of nine heating fuel types: utility natural gas, bottled/tank/LP gas (propane), electricity, fuel oil/kerosene, coal/coke, wood, solar energy, other fuel, and no fuel used. The accompanying codebase provides a complete, documented workflow that loads raw NHGIS data, calculates fuel usage percentages, and identifies dominant fuel types by census tract. The workflow then merges tabular data with geographic boundaries and generates publication-ready maps for both individual years and multi-year comparisons. The processing code is publicly available and includes complete setup instructions, enabling rapid heating fuel analysis when future data are released. Raw and processed data files are deposited on Zenodo. This resource supports research on residential energy analysis and energy transitions, electrification pathways, environmental justice, and regional energy system planning by providing readily analyzable, quality-controlled heating fuel data at high spatial and temporal resolution. For the 2019-2023 period, the dominant primary residential heating fuels by census tract were natural gas (55.2%), electricity (38.2%), fuel oil (3.5%), and propane (2.7%). We found that while useful, the dominant heating fuel analysis tends to overrepresent the prevalence of natural gas (by roughly 8%-10% depending on the 5 year average period) and underrepresent the prevalence of other fuels as a result of failing to achieve plurality.
Transitions to low-carbon energy systems require labour market transformations to support resilience, new technologies, and infrastructures across communities. Despite its rapid growth, the worldwide low-carbon energy sector remains one of the least diverse industries and has persistent inequities. Even with steady job growth in the renewable energy sector, women’s overall representation has stagnated since 2019, which indicates the need for new approaches to removing barriers to their entry and retention. Most existing research on the low-carbon energy workforce relies on structured surveys, aggregate labour market data, and projections. Very little is known about the lived experiences and motivations of equity-deserving groups entering the sector. This omission matters because mainstream data often overlooks the qualitative, values-driven perspectives and circumstances that shape career pathways, particularly those of women, newcomers, youth, Indigenous Peoples, and two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (2SLGBTQIA+) workers. This study uses a co-creation research approach to analyse 119 applications to a grassroots, community-led bursary—the Trellis Fund bursary—from an intersectional group of women. Applications were analysed against a theoretical framework of alternative pathways, strategic niche management, and feminist and energy justice, to generate insights into improving equity in recruitment and retention in Canada’s low-carbon energy workforce. Our study’s contribution is to provide deeper insight into how small-scale, grassroots, and flexible funding mechanisms developed within the communities that they serve can foster novel, justice-centred contributions that mainstream funding often overlooks. These insights offer qualitative, narrative-based data as a critical counterpoint to traditional workforce projections. They show that interest and ambition are not lacking; rather, systemic barriers are constraining diversity in Canada’s low-carbon energy workforce.
Most U.S. residential rooftop solar customers finance their solar purchases through loans or by buying power from third-party owned systems. Prior research demonstrates how third-party ownership (TPO) models such as leases emerged in the early 2010s and accelerated solar adoption by low- and moderate-income households while driving market concentration in the installation industry. Since 2015, loans have emerged as a prevalent financing alternative, but the potential effects of loans on the customer base and industry remain understudied. Here, we fill that research gap by developing a methodology to identify loan-financed and third-party owned systems in a household-level solar adopter data set. The data suggest that loans accounted for increasing solar market shares from 2017 until reaching as high as 70% in 2022, but that the market has since shifted back to TPO. The data show that TPO adopters in our sample earned about 16%-18% less and loan recipients earned 3%-7% less, at the median, than customers who self-financed systems. These results reaffirm prior research showing that TPO has accelerated low- and moderate-income adoption and that loans have likewise expanded the customer base to a lesser extent. The results suggest that loan-financed systems entail around a 16%-26% price premium that is only partly explained by loan fees. Finally, the data suggest that the emergence of loans has likely reduced market concentration in the rooftop solar industry.
Young people will implement renewable technology projects, vote on energy policies, and experience the outcomes. Therefore, recognizing their perspectives is essential for socially inclusive transitions. This interdisciplinary study operationalizes recognition and procedural justice by conducting educational workshops with 286 high school students aged 15-16 in Norway, where they had a chance to elicit their preferences for a future energy system of Norway. The workshops consisted of three segments: disseminating common energy and climate knowledge, interactive activities designed to develop a shared understanding of energy transition aspects, and questionnaires to assess students' perspectives and socio-techno-economic preferences. This paper delves into the questionnaire's findings to reveal that 33% of pupils favored exclusively offshore wind as a main energy source, while 35% preferred combining it with solar energy, indicating over 68% viewed offshore wind favorably. Although 32% supported some form of land-based wind turbines, strong disagreement emerged regarding wind parks in agricultural, forested, and residential areas. Preferences varied regionally; solar installations were favored in southern and southeastern Norway, while wind farms were suggested for central and northern regions. Pupils emphasized energy independence, were reluctant to adjust energy use, and prioritized reducing carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity over minimizing electricity costs. Pupils systematically ranked economic efficiency as least important, revealing a disconnect between energy planning's core cost-minimization objective and their perspectives. Across European studies, similar patterns emerge, with ranking environmental protection and energy sovereignty over economic efficiency, suggesting a cross-national pattern, even if specific technology choices reflect local geographic and cultural contexts.
The widespread assumption that energy systems and policies are technologically and economically neutral, or apolitical, obscures the ways in which they reproduce and reinforce structural gender inequalities. Despite the growing prominence of energy justice and just energy transition frameworks, gender remains unevenly integrated into both academic research and policy debates. This study provides a comprehensive global analysis of 2505 academic publications addressing gender within the context of energy justice and just energy transitions. Using a mixed-methods approach combining bibliometric analysis, BERTopic modelling, and qualitative narrative analysis with T-Lab, the study maps the intellectual structure of the field across 15 thematic clusters, alongside emerging theoretical and methodological dimensions. The findings show that the literature is primarily concentrated around themes of justice and equity (11.2%), energy communities (9.1%), acceptance and perceptions (8.7%), and innovation (8.6%). In contrast, critical areas such as mineral resources (3.6%) and Indigenous perspectives (4.1%) remain marginal, revealing important blind spots related to gendered aspects of extractivism, territorial conflicts, and the material foundations of low-carbon transitions. Across the literature, gender is most often addressed through issues of access, participation, and vulnerability, while there are fewer analyses of structural power and political economy. Relatedly, gender is frequently treated as an instrumental or descriptive variable, rather than as a transformative analytical lens. Although feminist and intersectional approaches are increasingly present, they are still relatively under-represented, and new methods of advanced data analysis often remain descriptive and weakly connected to theoretical debates. This review argues that advancing a just energy transition requires moving beyond assumptions of neutrality and technocratic approaches toward more intersectional and feminist frameworks, applied to the institutional, cultural, and material dimensions of energy systems, in order to address persistent inequalities and transform the power relations that shape energy transitions.
High-resolution energy system models, as powerful tools to represent energy systems in detail and assist energy transition planning, rarely account for economic disparity, unlike broader-scale tools such as integrated assessment models. In this study, by analysing net-zero European energy system designs through the lens of national gross domestic product (GDP) and household average income, we find that disparity-unaware high-resolution energy system models can produce results that are technically feasible but largely incompatible with economic realities. The investment in household heating technology may be disproportional to the income level of lower-income countries. Explicitly acknowledging economic disparity in such models reduces the danger of them proposing solutions which burden economically disadvantaged actors. Therefore, here, we explicitly include national GDP and household income disparity in a model for net-zero European energy system designs. We find that disparity-compatible systems are possible with a 1.1% total system cost increase compared to the least-cost ones. Unlike in disparity-unaware system designs, where energy infrastructure investments often reach over 20% of national GDP for some countries, we develop disparity-compatible designs which limit investments to below 5% in each country. Our results show that less affluent European countries may need substantial household-level financing to support their heating transition and to diversify their net-zero energy technology choices.
