The urgent need for sustainable and eco-friendly energy conversion technologies continues to rise as the world seeks effective solutions to combat environmental challenges and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Nature, particularly plants, offers a highly efficient model for solar energy harvesting, carbon dioxide absorption and conversion, and rapid electrolyte transport through their biological structures. These natural processes have inspired scientists to develop materials and devices that replicate the structural and functional characteristics of plant tissues and cells. Innovations based on plant-inspired materials have been successfully integrated into various areas of sustainable energy technologies. For instance, in the field of solar energy, bio-inspired materials have contributed to the advancement of solar cells and photovoltaic devices, significantly improving their ability to absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity with higher efficiency. By mimicking the efficiency of natural photosynthesis and transport systems, these technologies are paving the way for more effective and environmentally friendly energy solutions. By studying the process of photosynthesis in plants, photocatalytic devices for converting captured CO2 into biofuels, such as ethanol, starch and other hydrogen carbonate fuels under solar irradiation have been innovated. Different from direct solar energy harvesting and conversion processes, plant-inspired energy generation has been remarkably integrated with kinetic and mechanical energy. Plant-inspired hydrovoltage devices convert water diffusion energy into electricity by learning from the water diffusion gradient effect of plants. By taking inspiration from the nanofluidic transport properties and selective cell structures, bioinspired materials have been developed for advanced energy storage devices for real-world scenarios, such as batteries and supercapacitors. For instance, increased ion conductivity and water retention were observed in solid-state electrolytes incorporated with natural bamboo cellulose nanofibers, which enhanced the electrochemical performance of the flexible Zn-air battery (Du et al., 2024). A plant-like battery (FlowER: an evaporation flow redox) with prolonged battery life was eco-designed to power the wireless sensor networks for aiding precision in agriculture ( Navarro-Segarra,2022). Similar plant- inspired designs have also been applied to other active metal-based batteries, including zinc-ion batteries (Zhang, et al., 2024, Dong et al., 2023). To show- case how bioinspiration paves the way to further enhancing the performance of sustainable energy technologies, we categorize plant-inspired materials in terms of the types of emerging technologies.