The World Society of Sustainable Energy Technologies has established Special Interest Groups covering the fields in which its members work. All opened with the Society's new website in September 2026 and all are open to every member, who may join as many of them as they wish.
Between one SET conference and the next, members working upon the same questions had no standing forum in which to meet. Work in progress was presented once in the year or not at all, and collaborations formed at a conference had little to sustain them through the eleven months that followed. Each group now supplies that forum, under a chair and with a programme of its own.
The groups are Architecture & the Built Environment, Artificial Intelligence & Innovation, Energy Storage & Conversion, Renewable Energy and Water, Waste & Pollution Control.
Workshops are scheduled twice in the year. Each runs for ninety minutes, is held online and is led by the chair of the group, the dates being published upon each group's page and notified by electronic mail to everyone within it. Any member of a group may place a contribution upon the programme in advance, consisting of a title, a short description and a single illustration: a result obtained, a difficulty encountered or a collaborator sought are each appropriate to it. Every member who contributes is given five to ten minutes in which to present, followed by discussion. The format is intended for work that is not yet complete, put before colleagues in a position to say what is wrong with it, an audience considerably harder to assemble than it appears and the principal reason for which the groups exist.
Each group holds a list of its members, visible to the members of that group alone, stating institution and research interests, by which a member may identify colleagues already at work upon a question before beginning it themselves. A member appears upon that list only by their own choice, exercised from their account.
A member's groups page sets out the groups to which they belong and those open to them, with the date of the next workshop beside each. The Society asks that members join those in which they work, and that they consider offering a contribution to the first workshop of their group.