Environmental pressures are leading to an acceleration of development of new low carbon technologies such as wind turbines, solar panels, hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles. In order to ensure these technologies achieve the environmental impacts of which they are capable it is necessary to ensure that they perform reliably and efficiently throughout a long life time. New strategies needed to achieve effective maintenance and ensure environmental potential of technologies is achieved through extending lifespan to maximum extent. In this paper we will consider two examples of low carbon technologies which are finding widespread acceptance and contrast the different approaches to maintenance and reliability management which they require in terms of analysis of need, adaptation of existing techniques and development of new tools and techniques.