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.

As the world looks to incorporate more renewables into energy grids, centuries-old systems that can balance supply and demand are being reappraised and innovated upon.

This week, Casey Crownhart, senior reporter for energy at MIT Technology Review and Pilita Clark, FT's columnist, consider how China's rapid renewables buildout could help it leapfrog on AI progress. In the age of AI, the biggest barrier to progress isn't money but energy . That should be particularly worrying here in the US, where massive data centers are waiting to come online, and it doesn't look as if the country will build the steady power supply or infrastructure needed to serve them all. For about a decade before 2020, data centers were able to offset increased demand with efficiency improvements . Now, though, electricity demand is ticking up in the US, with billions of queries to popular AI models each day--and efficiency gains aren't keeping pace. With too little new power capacity coming online, the strain is starting to show: Electricity bills are ballooning for people who live in places where data centers place a growing load on the grid.

Big Language Models (LLMs) are changing the way businesses use software, the way people live their lives and the way industries work. Companies like Google, High-Flyer, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta are making better LLMs. So, it's crucial to look at how each model is different in terms of performance, moral behaviour and usability, as these differences are based on the different ideas that built them. This study compares five top LLMs: Google's Gemini, High-Flyer's DeepSeek, Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT models and Meta's LLaMA. It performs this by analysing three important factors: Performance and Accuracy, Ethics and Bias Mitigation and Usability and Integration. It was found that Claude has good moral reasoning, Gemini is better at multimodal capabilities and has strong ethical frameworks. DeepSeek is great at reasoning based on facts, LLaMA is good for open applications and ChatGPT delivers balanced performance with a focus on usage. It was concluded that these models are different in terms of how well they work, how easy they are to use and how they treat people ethically, making it a point that each model should be utilised by the user in a way that makes the most of its strengths.

China Is Leading the World in the Clean Energy Transition. The country spends like no one else on renewables and has reshaped the global market. Xi Jinping gives a video address at the United Nations Climate Summit. Speaking by video at the UN Climate Summit in New York last week, China's president Xi Jinping laid out his country's climate ambitions. While the stated goals may not have been aggressive as some environmentalists would like, Xi at least reaffirmed China's green commitment.

'Done properly, AI releases human capacity,' Simon Stiell said. 'Done properly, AI releases human capacity,' Simon Stiell said. AI'carries risks' but will help tackle global heating, says UN's climate chief Mon 22 Sep 2025 15.54 EDTLast modified on Mon 22 Sep 2025 16.04 EDT Harnessing artificial intelligence will help the world to tackle the climate crisis, but governments must step in to regulate the technology, the UN's climate chief has said. AI is being used to make energy systems more efficient, and to develop tools to reduce carbon from industrial processes. The UN is also using AI as an aid to climate diplomacy.

The 20th century was a famously fertile time for visions of the future, but the 21st century has failed to inspire them in the same way. Science fiction writer William Gibson, author of the prescient cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, has called this "future fatigue", pointing out that we barely ever make reference to the 22nd century. One reason for this apparent stasis is that most of the ideas of the future that captured people's imaginations in the 20th century have mutated since then. For example, plastic was billed as the material of the future. It has become an abundant material resource that is durable and versatile, just as its manufacturers promised.

Traditional power grid infrastructure presents significant barriers to renewable energy integration and perpetuates energy access inequities, with low-income communities experiencing disproportionately longer power outages. This study develops a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework to optimize renewable energy allocation while explicitly addressing social equity concerns in electricity distribution. The model incorporates budget constraints, energy demand variability, and social vulnerability indicators across eight major U.S. cities to evaluate policy alternatives for equitable clean energy transitions. Numerical experiments compare the MDP-based approach against baseline policies including random allocation, greedy renewable expansion, and expert heuristics. Results demonstrate that equity-focused optimization can achieve 32.9% renewable energy penetration while reducing underserved low-income populations by 55% compared to conventional approaches. The expert policy achieved the highest reward, while the Monte Carlo Tree Search baseline provided competitive performance with significantly lower budget utilization, demonstrating that fair distribution of clean energy resources is achievable without sacrificing overall system performance and providing ways for integrating social equity considerations with climate goals and inclusive access to clean power infrastructure.

There's arguably no face, voice or collection of exuberant, patterned shirts more recognisable than those belonging to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. The bespectacled boffin has been answering curly listener questions about science, with characteristic excitement and passion, for more than 40 years. Despite a seemingly tireless work ethic, Kruszelnicki, now 77 years old, can't be everywhere all at once. Those questions now come in waves, across social media platforms at all hours of the day. "Sometimes I get 300 requests a day on Twitter to answer an involved question about climate change," Kruszelnicki says.

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.