Accelerating Renewable Energy Transitions: The Enabling Role of Data-Driven Technologies in Environmental Innovations and Policy and Governance Processes

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, the world has witnessed a plethora of innovations and policies that are expediting energy transitions away from fossil fuels towards zero-carbon energy production. To secure a sustainable future, the energy sector indeed needs to rapidly transform from its dependency on fossil fuels to relying on renewable energy sources and smart energy solutions. Therefore, environmental innovation and sustainable energy transition are high on the agenda of many countries, the European Union (EU), and international organizations. This relates to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, which aims to take urgent actions to combat climate change and its impacts. The corresponding aim of rapid and deep decarbonization will affect major economic sectors. The energy sector is crucial for transitioning to low-carbon economies and cities and fossil fuel-free societies through integrating large shares of renewables together with smart energy solutions through additional flexibility and decarbonizing other key emitting sectors. However, one of the key challenges to address and overcome is how to accelerate the transition to low-carbon societies. This calls for radical environmental innovations, but also requires a massive deployment of existing renewable energy and smart energy technologies. Policy and governance have a key role to play in this rather purposive transition. This requires embracing and leveraging what big data technologies have to offer in terms of advanced analytics and related enhanced decision-making processes pertaining to a wide variety of uses. 

The transition to smart sustainable energy needs to be supported by advanced ICT given its pivotal role in stimulating environmental innovations by various means. A large body of work has, since the mid-2000s, demonstrated the role of advanced ICT in the transition to low-carbon societies by massively improving energy efficiency and thus reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in major economic sectors. More so, emerging data-driven technologies as a form of advanced ICT offer unsurpassed ways to accelerate smart sustainable energy transition thanks to the associated applied solutions for energy efficiency processes, integrated renewable solutions, as well as environmental monitoring systems. The real gains will come from the economic sectors of energy, transport, industry, and buildings given their significant contribution to global GHG emissions as a result of the huge losses, poor management, and intolerable inefficiencies associated with the operations of energy systems. The positive effects of ICT on mitigating climate change can increase significantly when smart energy is integrated with renewable energy (e.g., solar, wind, hydropower), especially through large-scale grid system development and implementation. The vision of smart energy aims to achieve energy systems that are highly energy-efficient, increasingly powered by renewable energy sources enabled by new technologies, and less dependent on fossil fuels. Smart grid technologies provide numerous benefits associated with energy management, energy conservation, cost reduction, as well as the integration of  renewable energy sources in power generation, transmission, and distribution systems. However, there are major barriers to the development of smart grids and significant challenges for their implementation that need to be addressed and overcome.

Policymakers need to identify and implement more effective mechanisms to get producers and consumers to use ICT-based climate solutions. Indeed, advanced ICT cannot act in isolation to mitigate climate change, nor can de-carbonization practices become widespread with free will. Policy is a determining factor for any societal transition. It has a primary role in aligning and mobilizing diverse actors in the same direction, as well as in incentivizing different types of these actors to participate actively in decisions that accelerate renewable energy transitions. These actions can occur through allocating knowledge and financial resources and making governance arrangements.

The explosive growth of data, coupled with its analytical power, has become of crucial importance to policy and governance processes thanks to evidence-based decisions, cooperative communication channels, learning and sharing mechanisms, and collective intelligence tools. These indeed are key drivers of accelerating renewable energy transitions. The outcome of big data analytics can be used as the evidence base for formulating policies and tracking their effectiveness and impact. Using a data-driven approach to investigate all available evidence from research can generate well-informed decisions based on accurate and meaningful information. The outcome can also enhance stakeholders’ collaboration capabilities, increase the capacity to handle challenges, and improve technologies’ usefulness, all aimed at accelerating renewable energy transitions. Collective intelligence emerges from the collaboration and collective efforts of many actors and appears in consensus decision making.

This Special Issue of Energies aims to offer a platform for accelerating environmental innovations and renewable energy transitions in an increasingly datafied society. This Special Issue seeks contributions—in the form of research articles, literature reviews, theoretical analysis, case studies, short communications, and discussion papers—that offer fertile insights and new knowledge in relation to innovation studies and sustainability transitions. The scope of this Special Issue—which compiles the cutting-edge work of researchers that investigates the state-of-the-art and new perspectives in the field—includes but is not limited to the following topics:

• The pace of the diffusion of data-driven smart zero-emission innovations;
• Resource mobilization for renewable energy transitions based on evidence-based policy decisions;
• Smart transition governance processes and benefits;
• User innovation, niche development, and regime destabilization in renewable energy transitions;
• Influences of technological and sectoral contexts on technological (energy) innovation systems;
• Influence of policy discourse networks on local renewable energy transitions;
• Challenges and barriers to the upscaling and diffusion of environmental innovations;
• Incumbents’ enabling role in innovative technological niches in the energy sector;
• The role of smart energy technologies in impacting the pace of renewable energy transitions;
• The impacts of evidence-based policy decisions on the pace of environmental innovations;
• The potential of evidence-based policy decisions in accelerating renewable energy transitions;
• Methodological frameworks for environmental innovations and sustainability transitions;
• Theoretical advancements in the acceleration phase of renewable energy transitions;
• Best practices and lessons learned for the rapid diffusion of environmental innovations;
• Policies balancing environmental innovation incentives;
• Opportunities for aligning transition and economic goals to legitimize transition policies;
• The contribution of innovative technological niches in renewable energy transition governance;
• Experimentation, learning, adaptation, and network effects mechanisms in innovative technological niches;
• Empirical and theoretical analysis of socio-technical shifts in transition governance in technological innovation systems;
• The role of established technological regimes in transforming socio–technical constellations in renewable energy transitions.

Dr. Simon Elias Bibri
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• technological innovation systems
• environmental innovations
• renewable energy transitions
• smart energy transitions
• diffusion of environmental innovations
• sustainability transitions
• sociotechnical regimes
• institutional barriers
• transition governance
• evidence-based policy decisions
• innovative technological niches
• strategic niche management
• transition experiments
• transition pathways
• innovation policy