Correction to: Nature Sustainabilityhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01598-6, published online 21 July 2025. In the version of the article initially published, ref. 31 was incorrect and has now been amended to “Bouaouda, A. & Sayouti, Y. Hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms for optimal sizing of hybrid renewable energy system: a review of the state-of-the-art. Arch. Comput. Methods Eng. 29, 4049–4083 (2022)”. Additionally, several other references (refs. 7, 16, 17, 19, 21, 32, 36, 37, 42, 61) also had errors in either author name, article title or journal title. These references have now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.