Expanding the Foundations of the Energy System

For decades, innovation in energy has focused on improving the efficiency of existing technologies. Solar panels have become more efficient, batteries cheaper, wind turbines larger, and grids increasingly digital. These advances continue to build the global energy system, but they do so without changing its underlying constraints.

A small number of emerging technologies are taking a different approach. Rather than improving today's system, they seek to widen the assumptions it is built upon. What if energy generation were no longer constrained by geography? What if hydrogen became a naturally occurring resource rather than an industrial product? What if energy storage no longer relied on electrochemistry?

These technologies remain technically ambitious and commercially unproven. Many may never reach scale. Yet if successful, they would not simply improve today's system. They could redefine the way energy is generated, sourced and stored.

In this piece, we look at three emerging frontiers with the potential to challenge the fundamental constraints of today's energy system: Beyond Earth, Beyond Scarcity, and Beyond Chemistry.

Beyond Earth: Can energy be generated without geographic constraints?

For as long as humans have generated energy, geography has determined where it can be produced. Even solar power remains constrained by weather, seasons and the day-night cycle. Space-based solar power overcomes this constraint by capturing continuous solar energy in orbit and transmitting it wirelessly to Earth using microwave or laser beams.

If successful, energy generation would no longer depend on local geography or daylight. Beyond supplying Earth, abundant power in orbit could also become a critical enabler for emerging space industries, including commercial space stations, lunar infrastructure, in-space manufacturing and compute-intensive applications.

First proposed over 50 years ago, space-based solar power remained commercially impractical due to high launch costs and immature enabling technologies. Today, that equation is beginning to change. The cost of accessing space has fallen by more than 90% over the past two decades, driven by reusable launch vehicles. At the same time, government programmes including ESA's Solaris, the UK Space Agency's Space-Based Solar Power Innovation Programme, JAXA's long-running SBSP programme, and China's national space-based solar power initiative are accelerating research towards commercial deployment. Together, these developments are transforming space-based solar power from a long-term research concept into an emerging commercial ecosystem.

As the field matures, innovation is becoming increasingly specialized. Delivering energy from space requires solving several independent technical challenges, from generating power in orbit to transmitting it wirelessly over long distances or redirecting sunlight without converting it into electricity. Rather than pursuing a single end-to-end system, companies are emerging around these distinct technology layers, forming the foundations of an increasingly diverse space-based energy ecosystem.

Beyond Scarcity: Can hydrogen move beyond industrial production?

Hydrogen is central to many visions of a decarbonized energy system. Yet unlike oil, natural gas or coal, it is treated as an industrial product, not as a naturally occurring resource. Virtually every molecule used today is manufactured, meaning decades of innovation have focused on producing hydrogen more efficiently rather than asking whether it could simply be discovered.

Over the past decade, that view has begun to gain ground. Naturally occurring hydrogen, often referred to as white hydrogen, has been identified across multiple continents, while new geological evidence suggests these accumulations may be continuously replenished and far more widespread than previously believed. In 2024, the USGS estimated a global geologic hydrogen resource of approximately 5.6 million million tonnes, suggesting that recovering only a small fraction could satisfy projected global hydrogen demand for around 200 years. Governments are beginning to assess potential resources, dedicated exploration companies have emerged, and investors are funding the sector's first commercial exploration campaigns. If these efforts prove successful, they could fundamentally reshape the economics of the hydrogen industry.

The shift from manufacturing to resource extraction could eventually extend beyond Earth. NASA's Artemis program and its international partners are investing in technologies to extract and process water ice at the lunar poles, enabling hydrogen production for fuel, life support and other in-situ resources.

The natural hydrogen industry remains at the resource discovery stage, with the ecosystem overwhelmingly focused on answering one question: does a commercially recoverable resource exist? Unlike the mature oil and gas sector, today's ecosystem is concentrated almost entirely upstream, grouped into three emerging areas: technologies that identify prospective resources, exploration companies validating commercial accumulations, and early initiatives extending the concept of resource extraction beyond Earth.

Beyond Chemistry: Can portable power move beyond electrochemistry?

Since Volta's first battery more than two centuries ago, portable electrical power has been dominated by electrochemistry. Successive generations of lead-acid, nickel-based and lithium-ion batteries have improved energy density, cycle life and cost, but they all rely on the same fundamental principle: electricity is generated through electrochemical reactions. This paradigm has enabled everything from consumer electronics to electric vehicles, yet it also imposes inherent constraints. Electrochemical systems degrade over time, require periodic recharging, and become impractical where years or decades of autonomous operation are required.

A small but growing group of technologies is challenging that assumption. Two approaches are emerging. Nuclear batteries generate electricity directly from radioactive decay, while thermophotovoltaic systems convert heat into electricity using solid-state photovoltaic cells. Rather than improving existing batteries, they introduce a fundamentally different model of portable power: systems capable of operating continuously for years, and in some cases decades, without maintenance or recharging.

While nuclear batteries have existed for decades, the field has reached an inflection point. Since 2022, advances in energy conversion have accelerated across multiple non-electrochemical power technologies. MIT and NREL have demonstrated thermophotovoltaic conversion efficiencies above 40%, while recent betavoltaic research has pushed laboratory efficiencies beyond 10%, overcoming one of the technology's longest-standing limitations. At the same time, progress in wide-bandgap semiconductor materials, particularly synthetic diamond and silicon carbide, is making radiation-tolerant devices increasingly manufacturable at industrial scale.

Europe is also building the supporting industrial ecosystem. ESA's ENDURE programme is establishing an end-to-end capability for radioisotope power systems, spanning isotope production, fuel encapsulation and system integration, while the UKAEA and the University of Bristol have demonstrated the world's first carbon-14 diamond battery.

The opportunity is not to replace today's battery market, but to enable applications that existing technologies cannot serve. As infrastructure becomes increasingly autonomous and distributed, a growing number of systems will require continuous operation in environments where maintenance is prohibitively expensive or physically impossible. Space infrastructure, remote sensing, subsea monitoring and autonomous defence systems are among the first markets where persistent power could become a competitive advantage rather than simply a technical curiosity.

The Common Thread

Three very different technologies have one thing in common: they each broaden assumptions about how energy works. None of these assumptions is likely to disappear overnight.

• Space-based solar power remains technically demanding and economically uncertain.
• Natural hydrogen is still proving the scale and recoverability of its resources.
• Persistent storage technologies must demonstrate commercial viability beyond specialist applications.

Many of these approaches may never reach widespread deployment. Whether or not these moonshots ultimately succeed, they are already giving rise to new industries and capabilities that extend well beyond the technologies themselves. In doing so, they are broadening the frontier of energy innovation.