Tata is a household name in India. Starting well over a century ago, the Tatas began their foray into industry, and the brand represents more than a diversifed conglomerate. The Tatas are well-respected, having endeared themselves in every walk of Indian life. Their businesses are all-pervasive, from building automobiles and generating electric power to making steel and building supercomputers. Their charitable trusts and endowments are as extensive as their businesses. They have founded and funded outstanding educational institutions and human welfare organizations, and they have supported research on alleviating human suffering. The incumbent of the Tata Group is Ratan Naval Tata, a Cornell University graduate in architecture. In the 20 years since he took over the mantle, he has set the Tata industries on a steep growth trajectory, increasing the revenue of the Tata industries 12-fold, making automobiles—the famed Nano—available at very affordable prices in India, and introducing effcient steelmaking. The business empire he heads, the Tata Group, has over 90 companies with footholds in 80 countries. In the midst of his busy globe-trotting schedule, we managed to steal an hour of his time at the Tatas' “Bombay House” headquarters for him to tell us how he sees the global energy challenges and the opportunities they create.

Exciting and far-reaching experiments in sustainable energy have been conducted for the last 100 years in many parts of the world. Many of the initiatives work in their respective regions because of the availability of raw products or intense political will, as seen in Germany's solar effort and France's nuclear policy. Others result from the need to be self-reliant, such as the Brazilian effort to produce ethanol with their plentiful sugarcane crop and the Danish efforts to harvest offshore wind. Many of these experiments have been carried out at a large scale with the goal of producing more than 10–30% of the regions' energy needs.

If you had to guess which country produces the most electrical power from photovoltaics (PV), you would probably draw candidates from sunny places such as the Middle East, the Mediterranean, or the United States. Germany, with its gray northern European skies, seems an unlikely contender.

The 1973–1974 First Energy Crisis was a cloud with a silver lining for Brazil. A severe negative balance of payments, as oil prices more than quadrupled, stimulated the birth of a bioethanol initiative based on fermented sugarcane, which vaulted the country into today's position as a world leader in the quest for renewable energy that promises to be green, affordable, and secure.

When MRS Bulletin published its expanded special issue in April 2008, “Harnessing Materials for Energy,” it was not a project done lightly. The impetus for this effort was the desire to describe the veritable options that materials provide in energy technologies. These options can then be evaluated in the context of other imperatives such as economic viability and environmental concerns, which all interact to determine societal choices for energy.

Advanced techniques can characterize the physical and chemical properties of oil and the porous rock containing it, but the proof is in the drilling. Spills are an inevitable risk, but natural microorganisms that feed off the hydrocarbons can help to clean them up.