Journals | Engineering

Low-carbon development concerns the future of the world, Energy-conversion and storage technologies innovation is the foremost driving force to lead this development. Advanced batteries, solar cells, and fuel cells are the most exciting innovation areas in the energy sector, with diversified new structures, materials, and technologies progressed. Nevertheless, numerous fundamental and engineering challenges remain to be resolved for the widespread use of these battery and cell technologies, including safety, cost, manufacturing, performance, and durability. This special issue reports the new opportunity for designing batteries that are intrinsically safe at the material, device, and system levels; key technologies of, implementation strategies for, and future development of the solid-state batteries, sodium-ion batteries, new multi-electron battery system and vanadium flow batteries; feasible routes for the intensive participation of PVs in the energy-structure transformation; opportunities and challenging issues in the use of fuel cells. We believe that a completely carbon-neutral world can only be achieved by keeping the innovation going: As Edison once said, “There is a way to do it better. Find it.”