Breakthrough Position and Trajectory of Sustainable Energy Technology

Bart Bossink (), Sandra Hasanefendic, Marjolein Hoogstraaten and Charusheela Ramanan
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Bart Bossink: Breakthrough Tech Innovation Group, Department of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Sandra Hasanefendic: Breakthrough Tech Innovation Group, Department of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Marjolein Hoogstraaten: Breakthrough Tech Innovation Group, Department of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Charusheela Ramanan: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 1, 1-24

Abstract: This research aims to determine the position and the breakthrough trajectory of sustainable energy technologies. Fine-grained insights into these breakthrough positions and trajectories are limited. This research seeks to fill this gap by analyzing sustainable energy technologies’ breakthrough positions and trajectories in terms of development, application, and upscaling. To this end, the breakthrough positions and trajectories of seven sustainable energy technologies, i.e., hydrogen from seawater electrolysis, hydrogen airplanes, inland floating photovoltaics, redox flow batteries, hydrogen energy for grid balancing, hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, and smart sustainable energy houses, are analyzed. This is guided by an extensively researched and literature-based model that visualizes and describes these technologies’ experimentation and demonstration stages. This research identifies where these technologies are located in their breakthrough trajectory in terms of the development phase (prototyping, production process and organization, and niche market creation and sales), experiment and demonstration stage (technical, organizational, and market), the form of collaboration (public–private, private–public, and private), physical location (university and company laboratories, production sites, and marketplaces), and scale-up type (demonstrative, and first-order and second-order transformative). For scientists, this research offers the opportunity to further refine the features of sustainable energy technologies’ developmental positions and trajectories at a detailed level. For practitioners, it provides insights that help to determine investments in various sustainable energy technologies.

Keywords: energy; innovation; renewal; technology; transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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