Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN, written by Olesya Dmitracova: Nyobolt, based in Cambridge, has developed a new 35kWh lithium-ion battery that was charged from 10% to 80% in just over four and a half minutes in its first live demonstration last week. [...] Nyobolt's technology builds on a decade of research led by University of Cambridge battery scientist Clare Grey and Cambridge-educated Shivareddy, the company said. Key to its batteries' ability to be charged super-fast without a big impact on their longevity is a design that means they generate less heat. It also makes them safer as overheating can cause a lithium-ion battery to catch fire and explode. In addition, the materials used to make the batteries' anodes allow for a faster transfer of electrons. Nyobolt is currently in talks to sell its batteries to eight electric car manufacturers. At 35 kWh, the battery is much smaller than the 85 kWh in a more typical American electric vehicle (EV). Yet the technology may be used in larger battery packs in the future.

Independent testing of Nyobolt's batteries by what it called a leading global manufacturer found that they can achieve over 4,000 fast-charge cycles, equivalent to 600,000 miles (965,600 kilometers), while retaining more than 80% of capacity, Nyobolt said in its Friday statement. William Kephart, an e-mobility specialist at consultancy P3 Group and a former engineer, said EV batteries of the kind Nyobolt has developed could "theoretically" be charged as fast as the firm is promising, but the challenge was manufacturing such batteries on an industrial scale. A crucial chemical element in Nyobolt's batteries is niobium but, as Kephart pointed out, last year only an estimated 83,000 tons (94,500 tons) was mined worldwide. Compare that with graphite, commonly used as anode material in lithium-ion batteries: an estimated 1.6 million tons (1.8 million tons) was produced in 2023. In addition, there are currently "a lot of unknowns" with the niobium battery technology, he told CNN. "The industry will work it out (but) it's not seen by the industry as a scalable technology just yet," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Google's greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48 percent in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centers that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to "net zero" by 2030 in doubt. The Silicon Valley company's pollution amounted to 14.3 million tons of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48 percent increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13 percent rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday. Google said the jump highlighted "the challenge of reducing emissions" at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that "the future environmental impact of AI" was "complex and difficult to predict."

Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the "extremely ambitious" nature of the goal. "We do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal," said Brandt. She added that Google was "working very hard" on reducing its emissions, including by signing deals for clean energy. There was also a "tremendous opportunity for climate solutions that are enabled by AI," said Brandt. [...] In Tuesday's report, Google said its 2023 energy-related emissions -- which come primarily from data center electricity consumption -- rose 37 percent year on year, and overall represented a quarter of its total greenhouse gas emissions. Google's supply chain emissions -- its largest chunk, representing 75 percent of its total emissions -- also rose 8 percent. Google said they would "continue to rise in the near term" as a result in part of the build-out of the infrastructure needed to run AI systems.

Google has pledged to achieve net zero across its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to run on carbon-free energy during every hour of every day within each grid it operates by the same date. However, the company warned in Tuesday's report that the "termination" of some clean energy projects during 2023 had pushed down the amount of renewables it had access to. Meanwhile, the company's data centre electricity consumption had "outpaced" Google's ability to bring more clean power projects online in the US and Asia-Pacific regions. Google's data centre electricity consumption increased 17 percent in 2023, and amounted to approximately 7-10 percent of global data center electricity consumption, the company estimated.Its data centers also consumed 17 percent more water in 2023 than during the previous year, Google said.

To stop their smartphone battery from swelling, long-time Slashdot reader shanen bought a Samsung Galaxy with a "restrictive charging option." But what setting should they use? The way this battery protection option worked was to stop charging the phone at 85%. That left me enough charge for my normal daily travels, which rarely took the phone below 50%, and the battery remained unswollen after a year, which included a month of quite heavy tethering, too. Unfortunately... After a recent upgrade, now my Galaxy has three options for the battery where it had two. The 85% option is still there, but it has been lowered to 80%. I've been using that for now and it still seems good enough. However my main concern is with the best option to maximize the overall lifespan of the smartphone...

The other old option says something about using AI to control the battery charging, but I don't trust it and think it is just the old approach that causes phones to die quickly... The new third option is the one that is interesting me. This seems to be a kind of flutter charge where the phone will charge to 100% and then stop until it has dropped to 95% before charging again, even if it remains plugged in. This sounds attractive and would give me more battery insurance when I'm traveling, but maybe it reduces the overall lifetime of the phone?
They tried getting answers from Samsung, but "I think I have been flagged as a low-profit customer." And of course, this raises several other questions? (Are other smartphones better? Have iPhones solved the battery-swelling issue?) And most importantly: is there a way to charge batteries without reducing their lifespan?

Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

What's the best way to charge your smartphone battery?

Bloomberg and The Washington Post "claim AI power usage is dire," writes Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm. But Ars Technica "begs to disagree with those speculations."

From Ars Technica's article: The high-profile pieces lean heavily on recent projections from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to cast AI's "insatiable" demand for energy as an almost apocalyptic threat to our power infrastructure. The Post piece even cites anonymous "some [people]" in reporting that "some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet [the power demands] from any source." Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light... While the headline focus of both Bloomberg and The Washington Post's recent pieces is on artificial intelligence, the actual numbers and projections cited in both pieces overwhelmingly focus on the energy used by Internet "data centers" as a whole...

Bloomberg asks one source directly "why data centers were suddenly sucking up so much power" and gets back a blunt answer: "It's AI... It's 10 to 15 times the amount of electricity." Unfortunately for Bloomberg, that quote is followed almost immediately by a chart that heavily undercuts the AI alarmism. That chart shows worldwide data center energy usage growing at a remarkably steady pace from about 100 TWh in 2012 to around 350 TWh in 2024. The vast majority of that energy usage growth came before 2022, when the launch of tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT largely set off the industry's current mania for generative AI. If you squint at Bloomberg's graph, you can almost see the growth in energy usage slowing down a bit since that momentous year for generative AI.
Ars Technica first cites Dutch researcher Alex de Vries's estimate that in a few years the AI sector could use between 85 and 134 TWh of power. But another study estimated in 2018 that PC gaming already accounted for 75 TWh of electricity use per year, while "the IEA estimates crypto mining ate up 110 TWh of electricity in 2022." More to the point, de Vries' AI energy estimates are only a small fraction of the 620 to 1,050 TWh that data centers as a whole are projected to use by 2026, according to the IEA's recent report. The vast majority of all that data center power will still be going to more mundane Internet infrastructure that we all take for granted (and which is not nearly as sexy of a headline bogeyman as "AI").
The future is also hard to predict, the article concludes. "If customers don't respond to the hype by actually spending significant money on generative AI at some point, the tech-marketing machine will largely move on, as it did very recently with the metaverse and NFTs..."

What if across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, six high-voltage power cables stretched — each over 2,000 miles long.

CNN reports that a group of entrepreneurs "wants to build what would be the world's largest subsea energy interconnector between continents, linking Europe and North America...to connect places like the United Kingdom's west with eastern Canada, and potentially New York with western France...

"The Europe-US cables could send 6 gigawatts of energy in both directions at the speed of light, said Laurent Segalen, founder of the London-based Megawatt-X renewable energy firm, who is also part of the trio proposing the transatlantic interconnector. That's equivalent to what six large-scale nuclear power plants can generate, transmitted in near-real time." The interconnector would send renewable energy both east and west, taking advantage of the sun's diurnal journey across the sky. "When the sun is at its zenith, we probably have more power in Europe than we can really use," said Simon Ludlam, founder and CEO of Etchea Energy, and one of the trio of Europeans leading the project. "We've got wind and we've also got too much solar. That's a good time to send it to a demand center, like the East Coast of the United States. Five, six hours later, it's the zenith in the East Coast, and obviously, we in Europe have come back for dinner, and we get the reverse flow," he added.

The transatlantic interconnector is still a proposal, but networks of green energy cables are starting to sprawl across the world's sea beds. They are fast becoming part of a global climate solution, transmitting large amounts of renewable energy to countries struggling to make the green transition alone. But they are also forging new relations that are reshaping the geopolitical map and shifting some of the world's energy wars down to the depths of the ocean...

Already, energy cables run between several countries in Europe, most of them allied neighbors. Not all of them carry renewable power exclusively — that's sometimes determined by what makes up each country's energy grid — âbut new ones are typically being built for a green energy future. The UK, where land space for power plants is limited, is already connected with Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark under the sea. It has signed up to a solar and wind link with Morocco to take advantage of the North African country's many hours of sunlight and strong trade winds that run across the equator. Similar proposals are popping up around the globe. A project called Sun Cable seeks to send solar power from sunny Australia, where land is abundant, to the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore, which also has plenty of sun but very little room for solar farms. India and Saudi Arabia plan to link their respective power grids via the Arabian Sea, part of a broader economic corridor plan to connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

It transforms water into the fuel — one of the first fuel plants in the world to do so.

The Washington Post visits a facility in Corpus Christi, Texas using renewable energy to produce "green" hydrogen. The plant feeds water through machines that pull out its hydrogen atoms... [T]he hydrogen is chemically transformed into diesel for delivery trucks. This process could represent the biggest change in how fuel for planes, ships, trains and trucks is made since the first internal combustion engine fired up in the 19th century... Turning hydrogen into liquid fuel could help slash planet-warming pollution from heavy vehicles, cutting a key source of emissions that contribute to climate change. But to fulfill that promise, companies will have to build massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panels to power the energy-hungry process. Regulators will have to make sure hydrogen production doesn't siphon green energy that could go towards cleaning up other sources of global warming gases, such as homes or factories.

Although cars and light trucks are shifting to electric motors, other forms of transport will likely rely on some kind of liquid fuel for the foreseeable future. Batteries are too heavy for planes and too bulky for ships. Extended charging times could be an obstacle for long-haul trucks, and some rail lines may be too expensive to electrify. Together, these vehicles represent roughly half of emissions from transportation, the fourth-biggest source of greenhouse gases. To wean machines off oil, companies like Infinium, the owner of this plant, are starting to churn out hydrogen-based fuels that — in the best case — produce close to net zero emissions. They could also pave the way for a new technology, hydrogen fuel cells, to power planes, ships and trucks in the second half of this century. For now, these fuels are expensive and almost no one makes them, so the U.S. government, businesses and philanthropists including Bill Gates are investing billions of dollars to build up a hydrogen industry that could cut eventually some of the most stubborn, hard-to-remove carbon pollution.

Most scenarios for how the world could avoid the worst effects of climate change envision hydrogen cleaning up emissions in transportation, as well as in fertilizer production and steel and chemical refining. But if they're not made with dedicated renewable energy, hydrogen-based fuels could generate even more pollution than regular diesel, creating a wasteful boondoggle that sets the world back in the fight against climate change. Their potential comes down to the way plants like this produce them... Only about 40 percent of the power on the [Texas] electric grid is from renewables, with the rest coming from natural gas and coal, according to state data. That grid energy is what flows through the power line into the Infinium plant.
"One day, heavy transportation may shift to fuel cells that run on pure hydrogen and emit only water vapor from their tailpipes," the article points out. But to accommodate today's carbon-burning vehicles, Infinium produces "chemical copies of existing fuels made with crude oil" by combining captured carbon with green hydrogen.

"A truck running on diesel made from hydrogen using only renewable electricity would create 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions over the course of its lifetime than a truck burning diesel made from petroleum, according to a 2022 analysis from the European nonprofit Transport & Environment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the most striking things about the explosion of renewable power that's happening in the U.S. is that much of it is going on in states governed by politicians who don't believe in the problem wind and solar are meant to address. Acceptance of the evidence for climate change tends to be lowest among Republicans, yet many of the states where renewable power has boomed -- wind in Wyoming and Iowa, solar in Texas -- are governed by Republicans. That's partly because, up until about 2020, there was a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of expanding wind and solar power, with support above 75 percent among both parties. Since then, however, support among Republicans has dropped dramatically, approaching 50 percent, according to polling data released this week. [...] One striking thing about the new polling data, gathered by the Pew Research Center, is how dramatically it skews with age. When given a choice between expanding fossil fuel production or expanding renewable power, Republicans under the age of 30 favored renewables by a 2-to-1 margin. Republicans over 30, in contrast, favored fossil fuels by margins that increased with age, topping out at a three-to-one margin in favor of fossil fuels among those in the 65-and-over age group. The decline in support occurred in those over 50 starting in 2020; support held steady among younger groups until 2024, when the 30-49 age group started moving in favor of fossil fuels.

Democrats, by contrast, break in favor of renewables by 75 points, with little difference across age groups and no indication of significant change over time. They're also twice as likely to think a solar farm will help the local economy than Republicans are. Similar differences were apparent when Pew asked about policies meant to encourage the sale of electric vehicles, with 83 percent of Republicans opposed to having half of cars sold be electric in 2032. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Democrats favored this policy. There's also a rural/urban divide apparent (consistent with Republicans getting more support from rural voters). Forty percent of urban residents felt that a solar farm would improve the local economy; only 25 percent of rural residents agreed. Rural residents were also more likely to say solar farms made the landscape unattractive and take up too much space. (Suburban participants were consistently in between rural and urban participants.) What's behind these changes? The single biggest factor appears to be negative partisanship combined with the election of Joe Biden. Among Republicans, support for every single form of power started to change in 2020 -- fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear. Among Democrats, that's largely untrue. Their high level of support for renewable power and aversion to fossil fuels remained largely unchanged. The lone exception is nuclear power, where support rose among both Democrats and Republicans (the Biden administration has adopted a number of pro-nuclear policies).

According to a report from The Information, Apple is developing a new "electrically induced adhesive debonding" technology that would make iPhone batteries easier to replace. 9to5Mac reports: Currently, replacing an iPhone battery requires using tweezers to remove the existing battery, which is held in place by adhesive strips. Then, you must use a "specialized machine and tray" to press the new battery into place. The new process uses metal instead of foil to cover the battery, as The Information explains: "The new technology --- known as electrically induced adhesive debonding -- involves encasing the battery in metal, rather than foil as it is currently. That would allow people to dislodge the battery from the chassis by administering a small jolt of electricity to the battery, the people said. Consumers still have to pry open the iPhone themselves, which is not an easy process because of the adhesives and screws that keep the iPhone's screen sealed in place."

Even with this change, however, Apple will still recommend that iPhone users visit a professional to replace their battery. If Apple's development of this new bonding technology goes according to plan, it could debut it with at least one iPhone 16 model this year. According to the report, it would then expand to all versions of the iPhone 17 next year.

After launching in the United States earlier this year, Apple's Vision Pro is now available to buy in China, Japan, and Singapore. "The Apple Vision Pro will also roll out to Germany, France, Australia, the UK, and Canada on July 12th, with preorders for those regions available starting today at 5AM PT," notes The Verge. Apple is documenting the international launch via a recent blog post.

According to CNBC, the device starts at $4,128 (29,999 yuan) in China, compared to $3,500 in the U.S. Meanwhile, Apple is already hard at work on a more budget-friendly model. In Bloomberg's "Power On" newsletter, Apple news-breaker Mark Gurman reports today that the tech giant is "working on a cheaper headset, a second Vision Pro model and augmented-reality glasses to better compete with Meta."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Fervo Energy has announced the signing of two power purchase agreements (PPAs) totaling 320 MW with Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the nation's largest electric utilities. The two PPAs, signed for 15 years, will provide clean, and affordable power for the equivalent of 350,000 homes across Southern California. The geothermal energy from Fervo will help California transition to a cleaner and more reliable power source. According to Fervo Energy, SCE will purchase the power from its 400 MW Cape Station project currently under construction in southwest Utah.

The first 70 MW phase of Fervo Energy's project is expected to be operational by 2026 and the second phase will be operational by 2028, according to a release by the company. Geothermal energy, being a carbon-free and weather-agnostic source, will also prove to be a reliable source for meeting California's power consumption demands. Unlike wind and solar power plants, geothermal energy can be sourced around the clock and on demand to cater to increased energy needs.

Earlier in July 2023, Fervo Energy had claimed to achieve "commercial scale" geothermal energy production from its Project Red demonstration site in northern Nevada. [...] For the demo, Fervo had used a horizontal well pair that extended to 3,250 feet (990 m) and reached a temperature of 375 degrees Fahrenheit (191 degrees Celsius). During the test period, Fervo achieved a flow rate of 63 liters per second, sufficient to generate 3.5 MW of electricity. One megawatt of energy can power approximately 750 homes at a time. Data collected during this pilot was used to improve the design for Fervo's next well pair and double the energy output generated.

Intel has introduced an advanced optical input/output chiplet, marking what it claims to be a significant leap in data center technology. The optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet, unveiled at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference 2024, is designed for integration with CPUs and GPUs and boasts 64 PCIe 5.0 channels transmitting 4 Tbps over 100 meters using fiber optics. Tom's Hardware adds: The chiplet uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) wavelengths and consumes only five pico-Joules per bit, significantly more energy-efficient than pluggable optical transceiver modules, which consume about 15 pico-Joules per bit, according to Intel. This device is crucial for next-generation data centers and AI/HPC applications. It will enable high-performance connections for CPU and GPU clusters, coherent memory expansion, and resource disaggregation. These features will be handy for operating supercomputers for large-scale AI models and machine learning tasks that require tremendous data bandwidth.

Kurt Schlosser reports via GeekWire: Living Computers Museum + Labs, the Seattle institution created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as a hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays, will not reopen, more than four years after closing just ahead of the pandemic. Allen's estate, which has been managing and winding down his vast array of holdings since his death in 2018, confirmed to GeekWire that the 12-year-old museum is closed for good. The estate also announced Tuesday that some key pieces from Allen's personal collection of computer artifacts, displayed over the years at Living Computers, will be auctioned by Christie's as part of a broader sale of various Allen items later this year.

As directed by Allen's wishes, proceeds from the sale of any items will go to charitable causes. Allen's sister Jody Allen is the executor of his estate and for several years has been selling pieces of it, ranging from Seattle's Cinerama movie theater, the Everett, Wash.-based Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum, Vulcan Productions, Stratolaunch, the superyacht Octopus, and more. The estate previously teamed up with Christie's for a November 2022 auction of 155 masterpieces from Allen's extensive art collection. It was the world's most successful single-owner fine art auction ever, raising a record $1.62 billion.

The new auction, titled "Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection," is billed as "a celebration of first-generation technologies and the pioneering minds behind them." The event will feature more than 150 items in three separate auctions, including "Firsts: The History of Computing," an online sale closing Sept. 12. This auction pays homage to Allen's role shaping the modern computing landscape. A highlight of the sale is a computer that Allen helped restore and on which he worked, a DEC PDP-10: KI-10. Built in 1971, it's the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ever used prior to founding Microsoft. It's estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000. Christie's said details about other computers and related items from Allen's collection will be shared this summer.

The other two auctions of Allen property include "Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity," a live auction on Sept. 10 that will feature items intended to tell the story of scientific and technological achievements spanning centuries. The top item is a 1939 signed letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt credited as the impetus behind the establishment of the Manhattan Project. It's estimated to fetch $4 million to $6 million. The third auction is "Over the Horizon: Art of the Future," an online auction closing Sept. 12, showcasing art devoted to interplanetary travel. A sale highlight is Chelsey Bonestell's "Saturn as Seen from Titan," circa 1952, and estimated to fetch $30,000 to $50,000.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the OMG Ubuntu blog: Those of you who own a Framework Laptop 13 — consider me jealous, btw — or are considering buying one in the near future, you may be interested to know that a RISC-V motherboard option is in the works. DeepComputing, the company behind the recently-announced Ubuntu RISC-V laptop, is working with Framework Computer Inc, the company behind the popular, modular, and Linux-friendly Framework laptops, on a RISC-V mainboard.

This is a new announcement; the component itself is in early development, and there's no tentative price tag or pre-order date pencilled in... [T]he Framework RISC-V mainboard will use soldered memory and non-upgradeable eMMC storage (though it can boot from microSD cards). It will 'drop into' any Framework Laptop 13 chassis (or Cooler Master Mainboard Case), per Framework's modular ethos... Framework mentions DeepComputing is "working closely with the teams at Canonical and Red Hat to ensure Linux support is solid through Ubuntu and Fedora", which is great news, and cements Canonical's seriousness to supporting Ubuntu on RISC-V.
"We want to be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkerers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating on RISC-V," says Framework's announcement. "The peripheral set and performance aren't yet competitive with our Intel and AMD-powered Framework Laptop Mainboards." They're calling the Mainboard "a huge milestone both for expanding the breadth of the Framework ecosystem and for making RISC-V more accessible than ever... DeepComputing is demoing an early prototype of this Mainboard in a Framework Laptop 13 at the RISC-V Summit Europe next week, and we'll be sharing more as this program progresses."

And their announcement included two additional updates:

• "Just like we did for Framework Laptop 16 last week, today we're sharing open source CAD for the Framework Laptop 13 shell, enabling development of skins, cases, and accessories."

• "We now have Framework Laptop 13 Factory Seconds systems available with British English and German keyboards, making entering the ecosystem more affordable than ever."

"We're eager to continue growing a new Consumer Electronics industry that is grounded in open access, repairability, and customization at every level."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares CNBC's report on the U.S. car market: Back in February, used electric vehicle prices dipped below used gasoline-powered vehicle prices for the first time ever, and the pricing cliff keeps getting steeper as car buyers reject any "premium" tag formerly associated with EVs.

The decline has been dramatic over the past year. In June 2023, average used EV prices were over 25% higher than used gas car prices, but by May, used EVs were on average 8% lower than the average price for a used gasoline-powered car in U.S. In dollar terms, the gap widened from $265 in February to $2,657 in May, according to an analysis of 2.2 million one to five year-old used cars conducted by iSeeCars. Over the past year, gasoline-powered used vehicle prices have declined between 3-7%, while electric vehicle prices have decreased 30-39%.

"It's clear used car shoppers will no longer pay a premium for electric vehicles," iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer stated in an iSeeCars report published last week. Electric power is now a detractor in the consumer's mind, with EVs "less desirable" and therefore less valuable than traditional cars, he said.
The article notes there's been a price war among EV manufacturers — and that newer EV models might be more attractive due to "longer ranges and improved battery life with temperature control for charging."

But CNBC also notes a silver lining. "As more EVs enter the used market at lower prices, the EV market does become available to a wider market of potential first-time EV owners."

The artificial intelligence revolution will demand more electricity, warns the Washington Post. "Much more..."

They warn that the "voracious" electricity consumption of AI is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use in America — "including delaying the retirement of some coal-fired plants." As the tech giants compete in a global AI arms race, a frenzy of data center construction is sweeping the country. Some computing campuses require as much energy as a modest-sized city, turning tech firms that promised to lead the way into a clean energy future into some of the world's most insatiable guzzlers of power. Their projected energy needs are so huge, some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet them from any source... A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company...

[Tech companies] argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption. They say AI is already being harnessed to make the power grid smarter, speed up innovation of new nuclear technologies and track emissions.... "If we work together, we can unlock AI's game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need," Microsoft said in a statement.

The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show... heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.
The article quotes a project director at the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the effect of AI and accuses the tech industry of using "fuzzy math" in its climate claims. "Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom," they tell the Washington Post. "This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment."

The article also summarzies a recent Goldman Sachs analysis, which predicted data centers would use 8% of America's total electricity by 2030, with 60% of that usage coming "from a vast expansion in the burning of natural gas. The new emissions created would be comparable to that of putting 15.7 million additional gas-powered cars on the road." "We all want to be cleaner," Brian Bird, president of NorthWestern Energy, a utility serving Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, told a recent gathering of data center executives in Washington, D.C. "But you guys aren't going to wait 10 years ... My only choice today, other than keeping coal plants open longer than all of us want, is natural gas. And so you're going see a lot of natural gas build out in this country."
Big Tech responded by "going all in on experimental clean-energy projects that have long odds of success anytime soon," the article concludes. "In addition to fusion, they are hoping to generate power through such futuristic schemes as small nuclear reactors hooked to individual computing centers and machinery that taps geothermal energy by boring 10,000 feet into the Earth's crust..." Some experts point to these developments in arguing the electricity needs of the tech companies will speed up the energy transition away from fossil fuels rather than undermine it. "Companies like this that make aggressive climate commitments have historically accelerated deployment of clean electricity," said Melissa Lott, a professor at the Climate School at Columbia University.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: A device federal public servants call "the little robot" began appearing in Gatineau office buildings in March. It travels through the workplace to collect data using about 20 sensors and a 360-degree camera, according to Yahya Saad, co-founder of GlobalDWS, which created the robot. "Using AI on the robot, the camera takes the picture, analyzes and counts the number of people and then discards the image," he said. Part of a platform known as VirBrix, the robot also gathers information on air quality, light levels, noise, humidity, temperature and even measures CO2, methane and radon gas. The aim is to create a better work environment for humans -- one that isn't too hot, humid or dim. Saad said that means more comfortable and productive employees. The technology can also help reduce heating, cooling and hydro costs, he said. "All these measures are done to save on energy and reduce the carbon footprint," Saad explained. After the pilot program in March, VirBrix is set to return in July and October, and the government hasn't ruled out extending its use. It's paying $39,663 to lease the robot for two years.

Bruce Roy, national president of the Government Services Union, called the robot's presence in federal workplaces "intrusive" and "insulting." "People feel observed all the time," he said in French. "It's a spy. The robot is a spy for management." Roy, whose union represents more than 12,000 federal workers across several departments, said the robot is unnecessary because the employer already has ways of monitoring employee attendance and performance. "We believe that one of the robot's tasks is to monitor who is there and who is not," he said. "Folks say, why is there a robot here? Doesn't my employer trust that I'm here and doing my work properly?" [...] Jean-Yves Duclos, the minister of public services and procurement, said the government is instead using the technology as it looks to cut its office space footprint in half over the coming years. "These robots, as we call them, these sensors observe the utilization of office space and will be able to give us information over the next few years to better provide the kind of workplace employees need to do their job," Duclos said in French. "These are totally anonymous methods that allow us to evaluate which spaces are the most used and which spaces are not used, so we can better arrange them." "In those cases we keep the images, but the whole body, not just the face, the whole body of the person is blurred," said Saad. "These are exceptional cases where we need to keep images and then the images would be handed over to the client."

The data is then stored on a server on Canadian soil, according to GlobalDWS.

sonlas writes: Germany's energy transition plan includes extensive interconnection projects to distribute its intermittent renewable energy production. However, these projects face significant challenges. The latest example is Sweden. One such project, Hansa PowerBridge, announced in 2017, intended to link Germany and Sweden via a 300 km HVDC line through the Baltic Sea. This 700 MW project, estimated at 600 million euro, aimed to stabilize Germany's volatile electricity prices. However, on June 14, 2024, Sweden rejected the project, citing incompatibility between the countries' electricity systems. The connection would link northern Germany to southern Sweden, an area with insufficient infrastructure. Concerns also arose about the volatile German market disrupting Sweden's and increasing local prices. Energy Minister Ebba Busch justified this decision by saying the German market is currently not efficient enough and a connection would risk leading to higher prices and a more unstable electricity market in southern Sweden.

This highlights the difficulty Germany faces with its Energiewende, or energy transition model. This model leads to erratic electricity price behaviors and significant challenges in balancing production capacities. While a possible solution for Germany lies in interconnection with neighboring countries, the examples of Norway (which cancelled the NorGer project too) and Sweden show that from the perspective of these neighbors, it looks more like an "export of German problems" rather than a solution.

French electricity prices turned negative due to a drop in demand and a surge in renewable energy output, prompting the grid operator to request that Electricite de France (EDF) take several nuclear reactors offline. Fortune reports: While more clean power is needed across Europe to reach climate goals, soaring renewables output and a lack of battery storage mean reactors sometimes have to be turned off during periods of low demand. It's becoming increasingly common around weekends in France -- which gets about two-thirds of its electricity from its atomic fleet -- and also occurs in the Nordic region and Spain.

EDF halted its Golfech 2, Cruas 2 and Tricastin 1 nuclear plants, and plans to halt three others during the weekend. Some renewables producers will also have to curb generation to avoid paying a fee amid negative prices. French day-ahead power fell to -5.76 euros a megawatt-hour, the lowest in four years, in an auction on Epex Spot. Germany's equivalent contract dropped to 7.64 euros.

Nvidia has leapfrogged Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable company in the world, following months of explosive share price growth driven by demand for its chips and an investor frenzy over artificial intelligence. From a report: The company's shares climbed 3.2 per cent to $135.18 on Tuesday, bringing its market capitalisation to $3.332tn and surpassing the two tech giants that have long jostled for pole position on US stock markets.

Nvidia has been the chief beneficiary of a boom in demand for chips that can train and run powerful generative AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In less than two years, it has been transformed from a $300bn company, grappling with a chip glut exacerbated by a cryptocurrency bust, into one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, with other Silicon Valley giants lining up to secure its latest products.

Rocio Fabbro reports via Quartz: TDK, the largest maker of smartphone batteries in the world, said Monday that it has successfully developed a material that could be used in a new battery with "significantly higher energy density" than its existing cells. Energy density refers to how much energy a battery can store relative to its size or weight. The material will be used in TDK's CeraCharge solid-state battery, which it says has an energy density of 1,000 watt-hours per liter -- approximately 100 times more than its conventional solid-state battery. These batteries use an oxide-based solid electrolyte, in contrast with the liquid electrolyte used in lithium-ion batteries that are widely found in electronic devices, making them "extremely safe." Solid-state batteries are smaller, charge faster, last longer, and have a lower risk of damage from temperature changes. "Smaller size and higher capacitance contribute to smaller device size and longer operating time," the Tokyo-based company said.

The battery is designed to replace coin cell primary batteries, such as those found in wearable devices like wireless headphones, smartwatches, and hearing aids. The new batteries would be rechargeable, in compliance with new European Union battery regulations that are aimed at reducing the environmental impact of batteries. TDK said it's working toward mass production of solid-state batteries, and beefing up the batteries' capacity using multi-layer lamination technology and expanding their operating temperature range.