Green energy to benefit both people and planet

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Green energy to benefit both people and planet

Benj Sykes, Country Manager at Ørsted UK discusses the company is leading the way from the UK in green energy infrastructure. At Ørsted, we have a vision of creating a world that runs entirely on green energy.We transformed from being one of Europe’s most fossil fuel-intensive utilities to being ranked one of the world’s most […]

Benj Sykes, Country Manager at Ørsted UK discusses the company is leading the way from the UK in green energy infrastructure.

At Ørsted, we have a vision of creating a world that runs entirely on green energy.
We transformed from being one of Europe’s most fossil fuel-intensive utilities to being ranked one of the world’s most sustainable energy companies and a global leader in the transition to green energy.

Now, the world is facing two urgent and deeply interconnected crises: climate change and biodiversity loss.

As the world’s leading offshore wind developer, at Ørsted we believe that renewable energy is at the intersection of these challenges.

In order to tackle both the climate and biodiversity crises, we need to build green energy infrastructure at a pace and scale never seen before – but we need to build it responsibly and sustainably, in a way that benefits both people and planet.

Leading the way from the UK

The UK has long established itself as a world leader in offshore wind. Other markets around the world look to the UK as an example of how things should be done – not just in terms of scale and cost, but how to build offshore wind in the right way.

We have always had a strong focus on building projects sensitively and sustainably. We’ve had to innovate and work closely with other partners, NGOs, scientists, academics, and industries to find solutions to some very complex challenges.

With the government’s ambition to accelerate the deployment of offshore wind to deliver clean power by 2030, the UK is, once more, going to have to take the lead on creating a regulatory framework that can deliver this whilst also improving the biodiversity in our seas and coastline.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill now under consideration in Parliament offers a key opportunity to take a strategic approach to compensating for the impact of offshore wind projects.

Currently, each project is asked to provide measures to compensate for any impact that the project might have on the marine environment. It would be better for offshore wind projects to pool their resources into a larger fund that the government could use to spend on the actions that would best support the recovery of the wider ecosystem.

This is why we greatly welcome the announcement by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) that they will adopt this approach and that they are seeking views on how the Marine Recovery Fund will function.

If the UK gets planning reform right, it will be able to deploy more offshore wind and simultaneously enhance the marine environment.

Wilder Humber

The Wilder Humber is an example of the kind of strategic project that can enhance our marine environment.

The Humber Estuary is one of the most important natural features in the UK – especially for the birds and other wildlife that depend on it. But decades of pollution and commercial development has resulted in the severe decline of precious habitats and species, such as sand dunes, salt marsh, seagrass, and native oysters.

Ørsted teamed up with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust to deliver Wilder Humber which will restore seagrass and saltmarsh and introduce half a million native oysters to improve the health and resilience of the estuary’s ecosystem.

It’s one of many pilot projects we’re working on around the globe to help inform what methods we can scale in a wide range of ecosystems to achieve our 2030 ambition to deliver a net-positive biodiversity impact from all new renewable energy projects and support long-term benefits to nature.

Delivering lasting community impacts

We are also committed to ensuring that people and communities share the long-term benefits of green energy transformation through skills training and job opportunities.
We invest in the future of the local communities where we construct and operate our projects through our community benefit funds, partnerships, support of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) education among primary, secondary, college and university students, as well as apprenticeships and jobs training.

So far, through our four UK community benefit funds, we have awarded over £11.5 million to more than 800 local social and environmental projects along the East and West coasts where we operate.

Our funds administered by independent grant-making charity GrantScape, have helped all manner of projects – from retrofitting community halls into more energy-efficient spaces, to helping to bring back grasshoppers in Norfolk as a way to tackle biodiversity loss.

We don’t have all the answers, but by working collaboratively with government, industry, NGOs and local communities, we believe we can deliver a green energy transition that benefits both people and planet.

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Zonal pricing ‘the start of a long road’ to mid-2030s, warns Cornwall Insight

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Port of Cromarty Firth awards £1.5m pre-construction deal

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Networking errors pose threat to data center reliability

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Cisco unveils prototype quantum networking chip

Clock synchronization allows for coordinated time-dependent communications between end points that might be cloud databases or in large global databases that could be sitting across the country or across the world, he said. “We saw recently when we were visiting Lawrence Berkeley Labs where they have all of these data sources such as radio telescopes, optical telescopes, satellites, the James Webb platform. All of these end points are taking snapshots of a piece of space, and they need to synchronize those snapshots to the picosecond level, because you want to detect things like meteorites, something that is moving faster than the rotational speed of planet Earth. So the only way you can detect that quickly is if you synchronize these snapshots at the picosecond level,” Pandey said. For security use cases, the chip can ensure that if an eavesdropper tries to intercept the quantum signals carrying the key, they will likely disturb the state of the qubits, and this disturbance can be detected by the legitimate communicating parties and the link will be dropped, protecting the sender’s data. This feature is typically implemented in a Quantum Key Distribution system. Location information can serve as a critical credential for systems to authenticate control access, Pandey said. The prototype quantum entanglement chip is just part of the research Cisco is doing to accelerate practical quantum computing and the development of future quantum data centers. The quantum data center that Cisco envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols. The idea is to build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base, according to Cisco. The challenges for quantum data center network fabric

Zyxel launches 100GbE switch for enterprise networks

Port specifications include: 48 SFP28 ports supporting dual-rate 10GbE/25GbE connectivity 8 QSFP28 ports supporting 100GbE connections Console port for direct management access Layer 3 routing capabilities include static routing with support for access control lists (ACLs) and VLAN segmentation. The switch implements IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging, port isolation, and port mirroring for traffic analysis. For link aggregation, the switch supports IEEE 802.3ad for increased throughput and redundancy between switches or servers. Target applications and use cases The CX4800-56F targets multiple deployment scenarios where high-capacity backbone connectivity and flexible port configurations are required. “This will be for service providers initially or large deployments where they need a high capacity backbone to deliver a primarily 10G access layer to the end point,” explains Nguyen. “Now with Wi-Fi 7, more 10G/25G capable POE switches are being powered up and need interconnectivity without the bottleneck. We see this for data centers, campus, MDU (Multi-Dwelling Unit) buildings or community deployments.” Management is handled through Zyxel’s NebulaFlex Pro technology, which supports both standalone configuration and cloud management via the Nebula Control Center (NCC). The switch includes a one-year professional pack license providing IGMP technology and network analytics features. The SFP28 ports maintain backward compatibility between 10G and 25G standards, enabling phased migration paths for organizations transitioning between these speeds.

Engineers rush to master new skills for AI-driven data centers

According to the Uptime Institute survey, 57% of data centers are increasing salary spending. Data center job roles that saw the highest increases were in operations management – 49% of data center operators said they saw highest increases in this category – followed by junior and mid-level operations staff at 45%, and senior management and strategy at 35%. Other job categories that saw salary growth were electrical, at 32% and mechanical, at 23%. Organizations are also paying premiums on top of salaries for particular skills and certifications. Foote Partners tracks pay premiums for more than 1,300 certified and non-certified skills for IT jobs in general. The company doesn’t segment the data based on whether the jobs themselves are data center jobs, but it does track 60 skills and certifications related to data center management, including skills such as storage area networking, LAN, and AIOps, and 24 data center-related certificates from Cisco, Juniper, VMware and other organizations. “Five of the eight data center-related skills recording market value gains in cash pay premiums in the last twelve months are all AI-related skills,” says David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “In fact, they are all among the highest-paying skills for all 723 non-certified skills we report.” These skills bring in 16% to 22% of base salary, he says. AIOps, for example, saw an 11% increase in market value over the past year, now bringing in a premium of 20% over base salary, according to Foote data. MLOps now brings in a 22% premium. “Again, these AI skills have many uses of which the data center is only one,” Foote adds. The percentage increase in the specific subset of these skills in data centers jobs may vary. The Uptime Institute survey suggests that the higher pay is motivating workers to stay in the

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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