It’s widely accepted that electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids are more efficient than cars that run on gas. However, researchers recently managed to increase the efficiency of plug-in hybrids by up to 30 percent. This is just one step in what is now an irreversible trend involving renewable energy, as President Barack Obama recently proclaimed.

President Obama is about to end his term as the leader of the free world in just a few days. The one to replace him is a known friend to Big Oil and a prominent denier of climate change. Wanting to reassure the public, the first African-American president declared in a piece that he wrote for Science journal that renewable energy’s progress is now unstoppable.

“The business case for clean energy is growing, and the trend toward a cleaner power sector can be sustained regardless of near-term federal policies,” the paper reads. “I believe the trend toward clean energy is irreversible.”

In order to really drive the point home that this is the case, however, the world needs to see more development and adoption of green energy. University of California, Riverside engineers might have just made a huge contribution to that end by developing a method to increase efficiency in plug-in hybrid vehicles that are exploding in popularity right now.

Publishing a paper called “Development and Evaluation of an Evolutionary Algorithm-Based Online Energy Management System for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles,” the engineers took their cue from how birds save energy and improve speed via specific flight patterns. By applying an evolutionary algorithm that takes traffic flow into account and then having the plug-in hybrids adapt accordingly, efficiency is improved substantially.

According to Xuewei Qi, the project’s lead, the algorithm is intended to solve the long-standing issue of apparent unpredictability on the road. Basing the calculations on patterns that occur in nature, the ability of the vehicles to adapt are optimized even if those of the drivers are not, Phys.org reports.