Find out more about our session on Wednesday 21 January.

US support for nuclear energy is soaring. Meanwhile, coal plants are on their way out and electricity-sucking data centers are meeting huge pushback. Welcome to the next front in the energy battle. Take yourself back to 2017. Get Out and The Shape of Water were playing in theaters, Zohran Mamdani was still known as rapper Young Cardamom, and the Trump administration, freshly in power, was eager to prop up its favored energy sources. That year, the administration introduced a series of subsidies for struggling coal-fired power plants and nuclear power plants, which were facing increasing price pressures from gas and cheap renewables.

Accurate renewable energy forecasting is essential to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and enabling grid decarbonization. However, current approaches fail to effectively integrate the rich spatial context of weather patterns with their temporal evolution. This work introduces a novel approach that treats weather maps as tokens in transformer sequences to predict renewable energy. Hourly weather maps are encoded as spatial tokens using a lightweight convolutional neural network, and then processed by a transformer to capture temporal dynamics across a 45-hour forecast horizon. Despite disadvantages in input initialization, evaluation against ENTSO-E operational forecasts shows a reduction in RMSE of about 60% and 20% for wind and solar respectively. A live dashboard showing daily forecasts is available at: https://www.sardiniaforecast.ifabfoundation.it.

If the US Has to Build Data Centers, Here's Where They Should Go A new analysis tries to calculate the coming environmental footprint of AI in the US and finds that the ideal sites for data centers aren't where they're being built. A data center for cryptocurrency mining, cloud services, and AI computing in Stutsman County, North Dakota.Video: halbergman/Getty Images Tech companies have invested so much money in building data centers in recent months, it's actively driving the US economy--and the AI race is showing no signs of slowing down. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told President Donald Trump last week that the company would spend $600 billion on US infrastructure--including data centers--by 2028, while OpenAI has committed already to spending $1.4 trillion. An extensive new analysis looks at the environmental footprint of data centers in the US to get a handle on what, exactly, the country might be facing as this buildout continues over the next few years--and where the US should be building data centers to avoid the most harmful environmental impacts. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications on Monday, uses a variety of data, including demand for AI chips and information on state electricity and water scarcity, to project the potential environmental impacts of future data centers through the end of the decade. The study models a number of different possible scenarios on how data centers could affect the US and the planet--and cautions that tech companies' net zero promises aren't likely to hold up against the energy and water needs of the massive facilities they're building.

By virtually every key metric, efforts to fight climate change are going too slowly, according to findings by a coalition of climate groups. In some cases, things are moving in the wrong direction. An eroded iceberg is seen is seen floating near Horseshoe Island, Antarctica. In the 10 years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, the backbone of international climate action, humanity has made impressive progress. Renewable energy is increasingly cheap and reliable, while electric vehicles are becoming better every year.

--We present a deep reinforcement learning-based framework for autonomous microgrid management. Using deep reinforcement learning and time-series forecasting models, we optimize microgrid energy dispatch strategies to minimize costs and maximize the utilization of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Our approach integrates the transformer architecture for forecasting of renewable generation and a proximal-policy optimization (PPO) agent to make decisions in a simulated environment. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in both energy efficiency and operational resilience when compared to traditional rule-based methods. This work contributes to advancing smart-grid technologies in pursuit of zero-carbon energy systems. We finally provide an open-source framework for simulating several microgrid environments.

Apple's AI Ambitions Leave Big Questions Over Its Climate Goals Halfway to its 2030 net-zero goal, Apple faces slow and hold-out suppliers, a tariffs scramble, and an AI race that could profoundly impact eco-friendly ambitions. Here's a simple question: Is the current top iPhone better for the environment than the top iPhone was five years ago? Let's take the iPhone Pro series. If we're looking at recycled and renewable materials, it's an easy yes. Compare the iPhone 11 Pro, released in September 2019, with the iPhone 16 Pro, released in September 2024, and there has been good progress--from a few smaller components and packaging to now at more than 25 percent of the whole phone.

Major tech firms should commit to fully powering data centers with renewable energy by 2030, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said. Big tech also must be responsible in its use of water for cooling, Guterres said Tuesday in New York City as he presented the U.N.'s new report on the energy transition, Seizing the Moment of Opportunity, together with the International Renewable Energy Agency. "AI can boost efficiency, innovation and resilience in energy systems, but it is also energy hungry," Guterres said in prepared remarks. "This is not sustainable -- unless we make it so."

The global switch to renewable energy has passed a "positive tipping point", and solar and wind power will become even cheaper and more widespread, according to two reports. Last year, 74 percent of the growth in electricity generated worldwide was from wind, solar and other green sources, according to a report compiled by multiple United Nations agencies called Seizing the Moment of Opportunity. It was published on Tuesday. It found that 92.5 percent of all new electricity capacity added to the grid worldwide in 2024 came from renewables. Meanwhile, sales of electric vehicles were up from 500,000 in 2015 to more than 17 million in 2024.

Donald Trump joined big oil and technology bosses on Tuesday at a major artificial intelligence and energy summit in Pittsburgh, outraging environmentalists and community organizations. The event came weeks after the passage of a mega-bill that experts say could stymy AI growth with its attacks on renewable energy. "We're here today because we believe that America's destiny is to dominate every industry and be the first in every technology, and that includes being the world's number one superpower in artificial intelligence," said Trump. The inaugural Pennsylvania energy and innovation summit, held at Carnegie Mellon University, is an attempt to position the state as an AI leader, showcasing the technological innovation being developed in the city and the widespread availability of fossil fuel reserves to power them. At the gathering, Trump announced 70bn in AI and energy investments for the state, Axios first reported, in a move the event's host, the Republican Pennsylvania senator, Dave McCormick, says will be a boon to local economies.