Data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, with some now consuming as much power as entire cities to generate the computing power needed to support the expanding use of artificial intelligence. But unlike factories or hospitals, data center workloads are flexible.

Solar power towers can play an important role in the energy transition. They convert sunlight into heat that can be stored or used to generate electricity. Until now, however, data to test new methods for more efficient and reliable systems have been lacking. In a world first, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) are now publishing freely accessible operational data from the Jülich Solar Tower test power plant. This provides a foundation for developing new AI methods and digital twins. The results are published in Nature Energy.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from phones and electric vehicles to grid-scale energy storage and earbuds, but their cathodes—the part of batteries denoted by a plus sign—are expensive to make and rely on minerals sourced from a limited number of countries, including lithium and cobalt. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is responsible for mining about 70% of the world's cobalt.

Australia's big clean energy projects get a lot of attention, from giant solar farms to the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme. So does the push for rooftop solar and home batteries.