What new accomplishments will be made in the energy industry in the near future?

The triumvirate of solar, wind and storage will win the energy battle, once and for all. This is achieved by steady, not revolutionary increases in efficiency and decreases in cost. The trends are well established over the last 10 years, and as we are now starting to see these 3 becoming lowest cost options the adaptation will escalate exponentially. For solar, we will see other chemistries in addition to silicone, in particular Perovskites. We will also see low-cost concentrator systems with a wider range of system sizes. For wind, the trend is simply bigger - and offshore both fixed and floating. HAWT has won, there are no way VAWT will ever be a player in wind. For storage, there is the relentless improvement in lithium chemistries for portable/moving storage, and a range of solutions for stationary (grid) batteries where weight/size is not important. The grid will be upgraded and made smart to handle intermittent distributed loads.  All other energy sources will see steady declines over the next few decades.

I think there are three major breakthroughs to be made in the energy sector. Depending on the order they happen will possibly impact the need for the other two. Small nuclear reactors that are made in a factory and delivered to a site ready for initial criticality. This can absolutely be done with current technology, the breakthrough required is one of financing a relatively expensive development project with a business model that could be trumped by one of the ideas below. High energy density electrical storage. This is the area of innovative battery technology or maybe nanotechnology enabled capacitors. There is some difficult physics standing in the way of this one but it would be the enabling technology the would make solar and wind capable of supplying base load requirements. Fusion. This one also has some very difficult physics standing in its way but I think a net positive fusion reaction will be created in a lab soon. That being said there is some very hard engineering standing in the way of commicial fusion power reactors. So, like a manned mission to Mars, commercially viable fusion power remains always 30 - 50 years away. Any one of these would be an incredible boon to humanity and go a long way towards letting us get through the inevitable effects of climate change as gently as possible. All three of these breakthroughs would greatly benefit my other area of interest, space exploration and the establishment of a human presence throughout the solar system.

I like this image because it really expresses the radical difference between the potential of solar and wind. The math heavily favors solar and nuclear because of overall availability. Note that the bubble comparisons between finite and renewable are highly deceptive because the renewables are representing total energy available in the system and the finite is measuring how much energy could be generated using know extractable reserves given today's prices and technologies. For nuclear this means only using fissile fuel (0.72% of all uranium and not counting the 4x amount of thorium ie multiply the bubble size by 1000) and only counting known sources when there hasn't been any meaningful exploration for uranium for decades (unlike fossil fuels). Now that is in the long term. In the next couple decades not much is going to change. Solar and wind will likely increase more from subsidies and suitability to certain locations but fossil fuels will continue to dominate.