内容摘要：The world needs gargantuan amounts of clean energy moving forward, making this an area of colossal a

The world needs gargantuan amounts of clean energy moving forward, making this an area of colossal and growing opportunity for disruptive innovations. Here are some of the fascinating energy ideas and technologies that made us most hopeful in 2023.

Let's start out with the problem. The world currently produces somewhere approaching 30 terawatt-hours of electricity per year – a total that's rising sharply as developing countries modernize, and as developed countries pour country-sized quantities of energy into making internet coins and training artificial intelligences, among many other things.

Coal supplies the lion's share of humanity's energy, at around 35%, and gas sits in second place at maybe 23%. Next place goes to the first "clean" source, hydropower, at about 15% – but that does require a lot of dirty concrete, and it's also reliant on geography, so it's not really a growth area.

Nuclear is next, but that's contributing about 9% and dropping. It doesn't produce carbon emissions, and statistically it's the safest power source of them all, but carries an unfortunate stigma due to occasional high-profile accidents like the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Rising sharply are wind and solar power, at 7.3% and 4.5% respectively, and these two form the future backbone of most countries' current decarbonization strategies, in combination with energy storage technologies that can smooth out the annoying offsets between supply and demand. "Other renewables," including geothermal, wave and tidal energy, have barely left the starter's blocks, contributing just 0.34% of global energy.

So there's the challenge ahead: create massive amounts of new clean energy generation capacity, enough to replace the coal and gas that power most of the planet, enough to outpace mankind's growing appetite for energy, and enough to cover things like the entire transport sector and other fossil-burning industries that will also be moving to electric power as they clean their acts up.

Solar Power

We haven't really seen a particularly exciting year in new solar technologies. The record for photovoltaic cell efficiency has probably crept upward in some laboratory somewhere, but cost-competitive commercial solar is about as efficient as it's been for the last few years, and the sector seems to be chugging along fairly nicely.

Arizona has resurrected an idea first trialed in India to place solar cells over canals, cooling the water and hoping to prevent it from evaporating it away in the desert heat.