New technology would turn batteries and solar panels into data centre assistants

Researchers at Aalborg University have developed a new technology that would let data centres outsource computing tasks to batteries, solar farms and electric vehicle charging stations. The idea is to turn this kind of energy infrastructure into assistants for the data centres, which would offload some of their processing work onto it.

The work responds to a squeezed situation in Denmark. The congested public electricity grid means data centres face waiting times of several years to receive the power that keeps their servers running, while the AI boom is driving demand for computing power sharply upward.

According to an associate professor quoted in the piece, solar installations are one type of infrastructure the technology should work particularly well with.

An industry association has shown curiosity but is holding back on endorsement. It says it wants to see scale, reliability and economics before judging the approach, so it is not yet clear whether the technology can work in practice at the level data centres require.

The story sits within a wider Danish debate over data centres, with related coverage pointing to a billion-kroner data centre approved in Varde, protests against what demonstrators call an "energy vampire", questions about new neighbours on Lolland, and a government choice between AI factories and the green transition.

Only the opening of the report was available, so details of how the technology works and how it was tested are not covered here.