Clean energy transitions depend on more than technology and costs. Public debate, media coverage, and political signaling shape how new energy technologies are perceived and adopted. This blog post looks at three crucial recent examples to illustrate how public narratives...
Coffee producers depend on reliable power for processing and irrigation, yet many rural farms remain off-grid and exposed to volatile diesel prices. A master’s project at ETH Zurich’s Power Systems Laboratory explores this challenge through the world’s first large-scale agriphotovoltaics...
Densification is hailed as the key to the sustainable transformation of our cities. However, its implementation through the pursuit of “building new and better” is actually hurting the environment more. Our latest study reveals flaws in the sustainability of modern,...
Switzerland’s energy transition is accelerating, but planners and analysts have long faced fragmented or incomplete data on how rooftop photovoltaics, heat pumps, batteries, and electric vehicles may spread across the country. Our recent publication introduces a new open dataset that...
In discussions about the net-zero energy transition, many sectors are often labelled “hard-to-abate”—but what does that really mean? The term has no agreed definition, leading it to be applied loosely and potentially be used as an excuse to delay decarbonization...
Every two years, the ETH Energy Science Center hosts a summer school about energy. This year, the focus was “navigating the transition in an insecure world”. Energy Blog editors Lingxi Tang and Jonathan Peel were among the 60 attending researchers...
In a prospective life cycle assessment, we assessed and compared the environmental impacts of technological options to decarbonise the shipping sector, comparing e-ammonia, e-methanol, e-LNG, e-FT diesel and ship-based carbon capture and storage. The findings highlight that while no single...
Power outages affect individuals, cutting off access to services like lighting, air conditioning, and communication. Here, we draw on our recent paper to explain how power system failures affect individuals, how we can measure the human impacts of outages, and...
How can the Bündner Rheintal, an urban-industrial cluster, achieve cost-effective decarbonization despite having CO₂ emissions per capita that are two times higher than the Swiss average? Researchers from Empa, in collaboration with the Canton of Graubünden, regional energy providers, and...
As the Energy Blog celebrates its 100th post, we spoke with two of its founders, Yael Borofsky and Florian Egli, to look back on its origins, impact, and the evolving world of energy research. What started as a casual idea...
Dr. Iryna Doronina Senior Researcher at ETH in collaboration with PLUS, for the first time in Ukraine, mapped all energy infrastructure in Ukraine (more than 1700 units), identified energy sector damages and calculated detailed renewable energy potential by region, using...
In Switzerland, the potential of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology to integrate renewable electricity is huge, and by using batteries that already exist in electric vehicles, V2G is also more sustainable than producing new batteries for grid-scale storage. However, V2G technology is...
