About Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality

Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality

Overview and identity

Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality, abbreviated TRCN, is a multidisciplinary, open-access international journal launched in 2025 by Tsinghua University in Beijing and published by Tsinghua University Press on the SciOpen platform. It appears on the official Tsinghua University Press journal list, and its first volume appeared in 2025. The journal describes itself in terms that set it apart from conventional research journals: it is a technology observatory and a policy connector for decision-makers in policy, investment, industry and research, providing macro-level reviews and analysis of the progress, challenges and solutions involved in transforming energy and broader systems toward carbon neutrality. Its home institution is the Institute for Carbon Neutrality at Tsinghua University, and its editorial contact address is maintained at Tsinghua. In form and ambition it resembles a review quarterly for the global energy transition, staffed from a major research university, more than a conventional disciplinary journal.

Launch at the 2025 CNEST forum

The journal was officially released at the 2025 International Forum on Carbon Neutrality and Energy System Transformation, held in Beijing from 27 to 29 June 2025. The forum was hosted by Tsinghua University and organised by the Tsinghua Institute for Carbon Neutrality, and it was the inaugural international gathering of the Carbon Neutrality and Energy System Transformation (CNEST) multilateral collaboration programme. At the same ceremony, the CNEST initiative itself was formally launched, with the aim of strengthening global collaboration, developing a new paradigm for future energy systems and accelerating progress toward carbon neutrality. The journal's launch was part of that moment: China Daily's report of the forum recorded that the ceremony saw the launch of Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality, co-edited by Professor Michael McElroy of Harvard University and Professor He Kebin, dean of the Tsinghua Institute for Carbon Neutrality. Launching a journal at a forum attended by university presidents, ministry officials and international institute directors was a statement of the audience the journal intends to reach.

Companion to the CNEST programme

TRCN is the companion journal of CNEST, the Tsinghua-led multilateral research collaboration programme on Carbon Neutrality and Energy System Transformation. The programme, led by Jiang Peixue, a vice-president of Tsinghua University, proposes a vision of an integrated, optimised energy system that achieves carbon neutrality at the lowest cost while supporting sustainable development, and aims to build an open, international innovation ecosystem mobilising universities, research institutions, enterprises and international organisations. The journal's own description is careful about the relationship: while closely connected to CNEST, Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality maintains an independent editorial mandate — to identify and synthesise cutting-edge research and emerging topics that may inform, challenge or expand the broader clean-technology and global-transition discourse. It is therefore both an organ of a specific research programme and, by design, a platform on which that programme's assumptions can be questioned by outside voices, a dual role visible in its early author list, which ranges well beyond Tsinghua and beyond China.

Editorial leadership

The journal's founding co-editors, as announced at its launch, are Michael McElroy of Harvard University and He Kebin of Tsinghua University. He Kebin, dean of the Institute for Carbon Neutrality at Tsinghua, is identified in the journal's articles as its Editor-in-Chief; he is a leading Chinese scholar of air pollution control and carbon neutrality who also appears among the authors of the journal's review of deep-learning weather forecasting. Xi Lu of Tsinghua's School of Environment and Institute for Carbon Neutrality serves as Executive Editor-in-Chief. Editorial staff are drawn from the Institute for Carbon Neutrality itself: Yijing Zhong, an editor of the journal at the institute, authored its first feature article. This leadership structure — a Harvard co-editor signalling international standing, a Tsinghua institute dean in direction, and working editors inside the host institute — matches the journal's positioning between Chinese energy-transition research and the global policy conversation, and its editorial office contact, carbontr@tsinghua.edu.cn, is published by the institute for submissions and enquiries.

A decision-oriented, macro-level review journal

The journal's aims statement defines its genre precisely. Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality is a decision-oriented, macro-level review journal. It publishes concise, macro-level analysis — reviews, perspectives, research and features — on carbon-neutral systems transformations, connecting technology, policy and real-world implementation and translating complexity into clarity and actionable guidance for decision-makers. Correspondingly, it explicitly excludes narrowly disciplinary or single-technology studies: it does not publish narrowly framed disciplinary studies, single-technology performance reports or method-development papers whose primary contribution is to a specialised research community, holding that such work is better suited to disciplinary journals. Submissions are expected to carry clear system-level implications. This editorial discipline is the journal's most distinctive feature. Where most new journals widen their scope to attract submissions, TRCN narrows its scope by level of analysis rather than by topic: any technology, sector or country is in bounds, provided the treatment is at the level of systems, transitions and decisions.

Early reviews: China's transition at system level

The review articles of Volume 1 show the model in practice, and many of them map China's transition sector by sector. Siyue Guo and colleagues reviewed energy sector decarbonisation in China through a technology-governance framework covering supporting technologies, transmission, distribution and storage systems, carbon governance mechanisms, the risks of renewables waste and critical mineral supply. Jianing Liu and colleagues reviewed the shifting technology landscape of electrical energy storage in China, from ultra-short-term to ultra-long-term solutions. Yan Yan and colleagues reviewed industrial decarbonisation technologies and pathways for China's steel, cement, petrochemical and nonferrous metals sectors, projecting their staged roles toward and beyond 2050 — energy efficiency and feedstock substitution first, clean electricity and green hydrogen at scale later. Ziwen Ruan and colleagues took a systems-oriented view of China's wind and solar development, proposing that wind and solar could occupy more than 83 percent of China's total installed power capacity by 2060. Bojun Du and colleagues set out the vision, technology framework and roadmap of China's new power system, analysing eight key technological components. A further review examined green hydrogen's current state and economic competitiveness across sectors in China. Read together, these reviews function as a rolling, peer-reviewed survey of the whole Chinese transition.

Perspectives, features and international voices

Alongside the reviews, the journal's perspectives and features deliberately import outside and cross-disciplinary voices. John Loughhead of the University of Birmingham wrote on the lack of effective international research collaboration on decarbonisation and how to build it. Pete Smith of the University of Aberdeen argued for emerging from narrow disciplines to address nexus problems spanning climate, nature, water, food and health. Massamba Thioye of the UN Climate Change Global Innovation Hub proposed a systemic innovation framework for the climate transition. Piers Forster of the University of Leeds and the UK Climate Change Committee reflected on how the UK's carbon-budget governance regime drove progress toward carbon neutrality. Other perspectives examined the risks of increased ultrafine particles associated with the transition to a carbon-neutral world, how steel industry decarbonisation could benefit the global south, and how transparent, high-resolution, stakeholder-engaged modelling can support energy-transition decisions, drawing on Princeton's Net-Zero America project. The journal's signature feature, "Mining hydrogen at sea" by Yijing Zhong and Shaoqing Bian, told the inside story of Heping Xie's team turning a failed deep-core mining technology into seawater electrolysis for hydrogen production. A case study of Indonesia's demand-side modelling (the DREAM approach) extended the journal's coverage to other rapidly growing Asian economies.

Publishing model and platform

Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality is sponsored by Tsinghua University and published by Tsinghua University Press, fully open access on SciOpen. Its articles are published under the authors' copyright with DOIs in the TRCN series under Tsinghua University Press's 10.26599 prefix — the first volume's articles run in sequence from 10.26599/TRCN.2025.9550002 onward — and are cited in the form Technology Review for Carbon Neutrality, 2025, 1, followed by the article number. The Institute for Carbon Neutrality maintains a journal page listing its recent articles and giving the submission route through the journal's SciOpen website. The institute itself, which hosts and organises the CNEST forum and programme, presents the journal as a global platform of communication and collaboration on carbon neutrality and energy system transformation, aiming to track global clean technologies across the innovation lifecycle, catalyse global innovation ecosystems and shape the global agenda and discourse on the transition — language that again underlines that the journal is meant to intervene in a policy conversation, not merely to archive research.

Readership and significance

The journal's stated audience is decision-makers in policy, investment, industry and research, together with the researchers who want their synthesis work to reach those readers. Its significance lies in its model. China, which has pledged to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, is the decisive arena of the global energy transition, and Tsinghua's Institute for Carbon Neutrality is one of its principal academic centres; a review journal edited from that institute, co-edited from Harvard, companion to an international collaboration programme and written at the level of systems rather than devices, occupies a niche no other title quite fills. Readers identifying the journal should note its TRCN abbreviation, its Tsinghua University sponsorship and Tsinghua University Press publication, its launch at the June 2025 CNEST forum in Beijing, and its distinction from similarly named titles: it is a carbon-neutrality review journal, not a general technology magazine.