An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Siemens and Philadelphia-based ConnectDER have partnered to debut a groundbreaking simple home EV charger connector. Previously, homeowners who wanted to install EV chargers might have had to spend thousands of dollars to modify their home's electrical panel. This new proprietary plug-in adapter will eliminate that cost and allow installation and connection in minutes. ConnectDER makes meter collars that are installed between the home's meter and the meter socket to create a single plug-and-play access point for distributed energy resources (DER) installation. In other words, the collars easily add new electrical service capacity for things like solar and energy storage. Now ConnectDER will exclusively manufacture and supply a proprietary plug-in EV charger adapter to Siemens.

The new adapter will enable electric car owners to charge their EVs by connecting chargers directly through the meter socket, which is on every home. It provides more useable capacity by monitoring total load and controlling the EV circuit to ensure the total capacity rating is within the limit. Bypassing the electrical panel reduces the EV charger installation cost by around 60 to 80% because electrical panel upgrades aren't needed. [...] Nearly half of US home electrical panels previously would have needed upgrades to allow the installation of a typical Level 2 charger, usually a 7-11kW device requiring 40-60 Amps on a 240V line. A Siemens spokesperson said that the company is still finalizing pricing, but "it will be a fraction of the cost of a service panel upgrade or other modifications often needed to make for a charger. Additionally, in some cases, the cost may be fully borne by utility programs."

The adapters themselves are expected to be available by first quarter 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Energy Department on Monday announced it intends to loan a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution $2.5 billion to help finance construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facilities. The conditional commitment for the loan to Ultium Cells LLC for facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan is expected to close in the coming months and comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program, which has not funded a new loan since 2010. The plan, first reported by Reuters, would mark the Energy Department's first loan exclusively for a battery cell manufacturing project under the vehicle program.

The program previously provided low-cost government loans to Tesla, Ford and Nissan, which included some cell manufacturing. "We have to have vehicle manufacturing capacity but also battery manufacturing capacity," Jigar Shah, who directs the Energy Department loan program office, told Reuters in an interview. "This project provides one of the newest additions to battery manufacturing scale in this country." [...] Shah said the department has received more than $18 billion in loan requests from the auto program and expects at least another $5 billion in requests that are being actively prepared. "I do think there will more loans issued," Shah said, declining to offer a precise timeline. The program currently has $17.7 billion in lending authority available. Shah said "for motivated borrowers, they can close these loans rather quickly." Reuters notes that GM and LG are investing more than $7 billion via the venture. Production at its Ohio battery plant is expected to begin in August. Production is set to begin at its Tennessee plant in late 2023 and in Michigan in 2024.

The New York Times' product-recommendation service "Wirecutter" has sparked widening criticism about how laptops are reviewed. The technology/Apple blog Daring Fireball first complained that they "institutionally fetishize price over quality". That makes it all the more baffling that their recommended "Best Laptop" — not best Windows laptop, but best laptop, full stop — is a Dell XPS 13 that costs $1,340 but is slower and gets worse battery life (and has a lower-resolution display) than their "best Mac laptop", the $1,000 M1 MacBook Air.
Technically Dell's product won in a category titled "For most people: The best ultrabook" (and Wikipedia points out that ultrabook is, after all, "a marketing term, originated and trademarked by Intel.") But this leads blogger Jack Wellborn to an even larger question: why exactly do reviewers refuse to do a comparison between Wintel laptops and Apple's MacBooks? Is it that reviewers don't think they could fairly compare x86 and ARM laptops? It seems easy enough to me. Are they afraid that constantly showing MacBooks outperforming Wintel laptops will give the impression that they are in the bag for Apple? I don't see why. Facts are facts, and a lot of people need or want to buy a Windows laptop regardless. I can't help but wonder if, in the minds of many reviewers, MacBooks were PCs so long as they used Intel, and therefore they stopped being PCs once Apple switched to using their own silicon.
Saturday Daring Fireball responded with their own assessment. "Reviewers at ostensibly neutral publications are afraid that reiterating the plain truth about x86 vs. Apple silicon — that Apple silicon wins handily in both performance and efficiency — is not going to be popular with a large segment of their audience. Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they've gone into denial..."

Both bloggers cite as an example this review of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2, which does begin by criticizing the device's old processor, its un-backlit keyboard, its small selection of ports, and its low-resolution touchscreen. But it ultimately concludes "Microsoft gets most of the important things right here, and there's no laptop in this price range that doesn't come with some kind of trade-off...." A crime of omission — or is the key phrase "in this price range"? (Which gets back to Daring Fireball's original complaint about "fetishizing price over quality.") Are Apple's new Silicon-powered laptops sometimes being left out of comparisons because they're more expensive?

In an update, Wellborn acknowledges that this alleged refusal-to-compare apparently actually precedes Apple's launch of its M1 chip. But he argues that now it's more important than ever to begin making those comparisons: It's a choice between a hot and noisy and/or slow PC laptop running Windows and a cool, silent, and fast MacBook. Most buyers don't know that choice now exists, and it's the reviewer's job to educate them. Excluding MacBooks from consideration does those buyers a considerable disservice.

"It appears that we need the First Law of Robotics NOW!" quips Slashdot reader Bruce66423.

Mint reports: During a tournament in Moscow, a chess-playing robot fractured a 7-year-old boy's finger when the youngster attempted a quick move without giving the device enough time to finish its task. On July 19, at the Moscow Chess Open competition, the incident took place. The youngster is fine, but one of his fingers has been broken, according to Sergey Smagin, vice president of the Russian Chess Federation, who spoke to state-run news organisation RIA Novosti.

The boy, Christopher, is one of the top 30 young chess players in Moscow, and he is just nine years old. In a nation where chess has essentially become a national obsession and source of pride, that makes him very good.
"The boy is all right," the VP of the Russian Chess Federation assured Russia's state-run news organization. "They put a plaster cast on the finger to heal faster."

"The robot broke the child's finger," Sergey Lazarev, Moscow Chess Federation President, told Tass news agency. "This is of course bad." The BBC reports: A video shared on social media shows the robot taking one of the boy's pieces. The boy then makes his own move, and the robot grabs his finger. Four adults rush to help the boy, who is eventually freed and ushered away.

Mr Lazarev said the machine had played many previous matches without incident.

The boy was able to finish the final days of the tournament in a cast, Tass reports.
From the Guardian: Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza the robot appeared to pounce after it took one of the boy's pieces. Rather than waiting for the machine to complete its move, the boy opted for a quick riposte, he said. "There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait," Smagin said. "This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall," he added.

Lazarev had a different account, saying the child had "made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried and the robot grabbed him". Either way, he said, the robot's suppliers were "going to have to think again"....

According to one 2015 study, one person is killed each year by an industrial robot in the US alone. Indeed, according to the US occupational safety administration, most occupational accidents since 2000 involving robots have been fatalities.
Reportedly the boy's parents have now contacted the public prosecutor's office.

"A Russian grandmaster, Sergey Karjakin, said the incident was no doubt due to 'some kind of software error or something.'"

"High water temperatures threaten to reduce France's already unusually low nuclear output," Reuters reported last week, "piling more pressure on operator EDF at a time when half its reactors are offline due to maintenance and corrosion issues."

Because river water is used to cool the plants, "reactor production is limited during times of high heat to prevent the hot water re-entering rivers from damaging wildlife."

"Given the relative rarity of intense heat waves and outages due to storms, the climate-related hiccups have a small impact on energy production overall — affecting less than 1 percent of annual output for EDF on average..." reports Wired. (Though EDF "recently told reporters that it expects more cuts in the coming months as water levels continue to fall.") But Reuters points out this all comes at a bad time: EDF has already been forced to cut planned output several times this year because of a host of problems at its reactors — and expects an 18.5 billion euros ($18.6 billion) hit to its 2022 core earnings because of production losses.
Now EDF's debt "is projected to reach 60 billion euros by the end of the year," reported Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, adding that the "highly indebted" utility saw announcements of a take-over bid by France's national government to shareholders (at a cost of 9.7 billion euros ($9.9 billion): EDF's finances have been weighed down by declining output from France's ageing nuclear power stations, which it manages, and the state-imposed policy to sell energy at below cost to consumers in an effort to help them pay their energy bills.... The public tender offer is the simplest way to take back full control of EDF, analysts said, without the need for full legal nationalisation — of which there has been none in France since 1981....

Currently over half of France's 56 nuclear reactors are idle, either for maintenance or corrosion problems linked to ageing.... Nuclear energy currently covers some 70 percent of France's electricity needs.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the story.

A long-awaited bill in the U.S. Congress proposes $79 billion (over 10 years) to boost U.S. semiconductor production, reports the Associated Press, "mostly as a result of new grants and tax breaks that would subsidize the cost that computer chip manufacturers incur when building or expanding chip plants in the United States."

But opposing the bill are 31 Republican senators — and democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders: Supporters say that countries all over the world are spending billons of dollars to lure chipmakers. The U.S. must do the same or risk losing a secure supply of the semiconductors that power the nation's automobiles, computers, appliances and some of the military's most advanced weapons systems. Sanders (Independent — Vermont), and a wide range of conservative lawmakers, think tanks and media outlets have a different take. To them, it's "corporate welfare...."

"Not too many people that I can recall — I have been all over this country — say: 'Bernie, you go back there and you get the job done, and you give enormously profitable corporations, which pay outrageous compensation packages to their CEOs, billions and billions of dollars in corporate welfare,'" Sanders said.

Senator Mitt Romney (Republican — Utah), is among the likely Republican supporters. Asked about the Sanders' argument against the bill, Romney said that when other countries subsidize the manufacturing of high technology chips, the U.S. must join the club. "If you don't play like they play, then you are not going to be manufacturing high technology chips, and they are essential for our national defense as well as our economy," Romney said....

"My fear is that more and more companies will locate their manufacturing facilities in other countries and that we will be increasingly vulnerable," said Senator Susan Collin (Republican — Maine).
The bill's supporters remain confident it will pass the U.S. Senate, but then "the window for passing the bill through the House is narrow if progressives join with Sanders and if most Republicans line up in opposition based on fiscal concerns.

"The White House says the bill needs to pass by the end of the month because companies are making decisions now about where to build."

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

"Record-breaking heat across Texas has pushed its fragile power grid to the brink," reports NBC News. "But extreme temperatures are doing something else in the famously pro-business state: stirring opposition to energy-guzzling crypto miners who've flocked there seeking low-cost energy and a deregulatory stance."

Ten industrial-scale crypto miners will consume an estimated 18 gigawatts in years to come — though the state's current capacity is around 80 gigawatts (though it's expected to grow).

The case against them? The energy crypto miners use puts "an almost unprecedented burden" on the Texas grid, according to Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of Grid Edge, a unit of Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm. Mining "pushes the system closer to dangerous system peaks at all times," he told NBC News. "It is completely inessential and consuming physical resources, time and money that should be going to decarbonize and strengthen the grid...."

Unlike other electricity systems, the Texas grid does not connect to other states' grids; that means it cannot receive power from other areas in emergencies. Because of their high demand for electricity, crypto miners raise costs for other consumers of power, Hertz-Shargel said. And, on the Texas grid, miners can get paid for powering down during peak demand periods, like the one that recently hit the state. Miners and other industrial customers with these types of arrangements receive revenues for not using electricity; the costs of those revenues are passed on to other electricity customers.... During peak periods, miners can also resell to the grid the electricity they would otherwise have used. Because their contracts can let them buy power at low cost, energy resales when demand is high can generate significant financial benefits in the form of credits against future use....

Electricity customers across the state will cover those credits, said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "Ratepayers in Texas are going to be paying it off a little bit every month for decades," Dessler said. "It angers me so much."
But Lee Bratcher, founder of the Texas Blockchain Council, makes the case for industrial-scale bitcoin mines: Bratcher and the crypto miners he represents say they provide three benefits to Texas. Because they can turn off their electricity use during high-demand periods, they can help stabilize the grid and rein in runaway power prices. "Power pricing is set off at peaks and the miners are specifically trying to turn off during peaks," he said. In addition, crypto miners' 24/7 demand for electricity can provide an incentive for wind and solar developers to bring more green power to the grid while new jobs and tax revenues "lead to orders of magnitude of human flourishing in communities where the mines set up," Bratcher said.
Still, 800 locals have signed a petition against plans to built America's largest bitcoin-mining facility — a facility which will consume 1.4 million gallons of water a day and 1 gigawatt of electricity (enough to power 200,000 homes). Jackie Sawicky, a small-business owner, is organizing the opposition to the Riot facility. "There are over 7,000 people in poverty and 8,000 seniors living on fixed incomes here," she told NBC News. "We cannot afford increased water costs and electricity."

According to a 2020 economic impact report commissioned by the Rockdale Municipal Development District, an entity run by area businesspeople, the facility will deliver an estimated $28.5 million in economic benefits to the community over 10 years. The operation employs "nearly 200 full-time benefited employees..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A video started circulating on Twitter Thursday of a Boston Dynamics-style robot dog firing a submachine gun into targets amid a snowy backdrop. This type of robot dog (it doesn't seem like the robot in the video is a Boston Dynamics Spot, just looks a lot like it) is famous for dancing, but now appears to have fulfilled every warning given by journalists and analysts. It's got a gun and it's ready to kill. A lot of questions remain. First, the robot dog doesn't seem to be able to handle the recoil of the gun well. As it fires its rounds, the barrel trails up and the dog has to take a minute to get its balance back. We also don't know if the dog is firing on its own or if, and this is more likely, someone is off-camera pulling the trigger remotely.

The robot's feet, various ports, and its front are completely different from Boston Dynamics' Spot. There's dozens of knockoffs of the Boston Dynamics dog selling on the international market. The one in the video appears to be a UnitreeYusu "technology dog" selling on AliExpress for about $3,000. The feet, port placement, and joint coverings are all the same. The robot also has strips of Velcro on either of its flanks. The left flank bears a Russian flag and the other appears with a wolf's head. In another video on the channel, a man wears a similar patch on his arm. It appears to be a wolf's head insignia commonly associated with Russian Special Operations Forces or Spetsnaz. That doesn't mean that Spetsnaz is using armed robot dogs, as pretty much anyone can buy a similar patch online in various places.

The gun is also Russian. It appears to be a PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun based on the AK-74 design. As the dog wanders around and fires, it sometimes moves in front of an armored personnel carrier with a unique triangular door. That's a BDRM-2, a Russian armored car that's been spotted recently in Ukraine. Finally, there's the account the video originally appeared on. Before making its way to Twitter, the video of the dog was posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22, 2022. Atamov is listed on his LinkedIn profile as the founder of "HOVERSURF" and his Facebook page lists him as living in Moscow. He posted a picture of the robot dog on March 21. According to Facebook's translation of his post, he called the dog "Skynet."

According to CNBC, TikTok owner ByteDance is looking into designing its own chips because it says it hasn't been able to find suppliers that can meet its requirements. From the report: The chips will be customized to deal with workloads related to ByteDance's multiple business areas including video platforms, information and entertainment apps, the spokesperson added. ByteDance won't be manufacturing chips for sale to other companies. The social media giant has multiple job openings on its website for roles related to semiconductor design. The Beijing-headquartered firm's push into semiconductor design plays into two major themes -- an increasing focus from companies to create chips for specific purposes, as well as the Chinese government's push to become stronger in this fundamental technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The robot dog is waving its legs in the air like an exasperated beetle. After 10 minutes of struggling, it manages to roll over to its front. Half an hour in, the robot is taking its first clumsy steps, like a newborn calf. But after one hour, the robot is strutting around the lab with confidence. What makes this four-legged robot special is that it learned to do all this by itself, without being shown what to do in a computer simulation.

Danijar Hafner and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, used an AI technique called reinforcement learning, which trains algorithms by rewarding them for desired actions, to train the robot to walk from scratch in the real world. The team used the same algorithm to successfully train three other robots, such as one that was able to pick up balls and move them from one tray to another. Traditionally, robots are trained in a computer simulator before they attempt to do anything in the real world. For example, a pair of robot legs called Cassie taught itself to walk using reinforcement learning, but only after it had done so in a simulation. "The problem is your simulator will never be as accurate as the real world. There'll always be aspects of the world you're missing," says Hafner, who worked with colleagues Alejandro Escontrela and Philipp Wu on the project and is now an intern at DeepMind. Adapting lessons from the simulator to the real world also requires extra engineering, he says.

The team's algorithm, called Dreamer, uses past experiences to build up a model of the surrounding world. Dreamer also allows the robot to conduct trial-and-error calculations in a computer program as opposed to the real world, by predicting potential future out comes of its potential actions. This allows it to learn faster than it could purely by doing. Once the robot had learned to walk, it kept learning to adapt to unexpected situations, such as resisting being toppled by a stick.[...] Jonathan Hurst, a professor of robotics at Oregon State University, says the findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, make it clear that "reinforcement learning will be a cornerstone tool in the future of robot control."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Bad news about smartphone shipments has become the norm, rather than the exception, in recent years. The trend pre-dates the pandemic, but has only accelerated during the pandemic, thanks to various economic and supply chain impacts. Even so, a high single-digit drop warrants examination and some difficult questions around the industry's health. New figures out this morning from Canalys show a 9% year-over-year drop for global smartphone shipments in Q2. The culprits are, well, pretty much everything you've been hearing about for the last couple of years. Consumers have broadly slowed down their upgrade cycles, as phones have gotten better and more robust. The phones themselves have grown more expensive in the process, adding an air of consumer caution amid economic uncertainty, including unemployment and inflation.

The world has changed since China banned cryptomining, the Guardian reports. And now "more than a third of the global computing power dedicated to mining bitcoin comes from the US, Senator Elizabeth Warren and five other Democrats reported in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency..."

But the Guardian also notes there's two problems with this: - The largest US cryptomining companies have the capacity to use as much electricity as nearly every home in Houston, Texas; energy use that is contributing to rising utility bills, according to an investigation by Democratic lawmakers...

- "The results of our investigation ... are disturbing ... revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant — and rapidly growing — amount of carbon emissions," the letter states.

"It is imperative that your agencies work together to address the lack of information about cryptomining's energy use and environmental impacts." The congressional Democrats have asked the EPA and the Department of Energy to require cryptominers to disclose emissions and energy use, noting that regulators know little about the full environmental impact of the industry....

The power demands of the industry are also coming at a cost to consumers, the letter states, citing a study that found cryptomining operations in upstate New York led to a rise in electric bills by roughly $165m for small businesses and $79m for individuals.
The main operator of Texas's grid admitted this week to the Verge that by 2026 crypto mining is set to increase demand on the state's power grid by a whopping 27 gigawatts — or nearly a third of the grid's current maximum capacity.

And an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology with a background in electricity system policy warns the site that "The more crypto mining that comes into the state, the higher the residents should expect the electricity prices to become."

A senior systems administrator at the Free Software Foundation points out that they're running free software in two data centers and over a hundred virtual machine — each and every one with "a freedom-respecting BIOS."

But the "how" is surprisingly intricate: [E]arlier this week, we replaced "Columbia", the last of any FSF-run machines running a nonfree BIOS....

At FSF, our current standard is ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboards with AMD CPUs 6200 series CPUs released in 2012. For the BIOS, we install Libreboot, the easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs, or a version of Coreboot that is carefully built to avoid including any nonfree blobs. They are fast enough for our needs, and we expect this to be the case for many more years to come. They are also very affordable systems. We are also working toward supporting Raptor Computer Systems' newer and more powerful Talos II, as well as Blackbird motherboards that use IBM POWER9 CPUs. The POWER9 CPU architecture is called "PowerPC 64-bit little endian," abbreviated "ppc64el...." The Raptor motherboards come with entirely free firmware — and even have free hardware designs!

However, this type of migration has its challenges. For example, the first thing we needed to address before using these motherboards is that the main operating system we use, Trisquel GNU/Linux, didn't previously run on pp64el. So, earlier this year, we set up a Raptor POWER9 computer running Debian (without using any nonfree parts of Debian repositories) and loaned it to the maintainers of Trisquel for as long as needed. And now, we are proud to say that the upcoming Trisquel 11 release will support POWER9...!

Before I decommissioned Columbia, I ran a dmidecode, which told me that the BIOS program fit within a single megabyte of space. Often, very simplistic firmware becomes more complicated in later models, and that also usually means it has a growing significance for a user's software freedom. Some newer nonfree BIOSes have grown into operating systems in their own right, sometimes with large programs such as a full Web browser.

There is no fully-free BIOS available for x86 Intel and AMD CPUs released after about 2013. The key blocking factor is that those CPUs require certain firmware in the BIOS, like Intel Management Engine. Those CPUs will also refuse to run firmware that hasn't been cryptographically signed by private keys controlled by AMD and Intel, and AMD and Intel will only sign their own nonfree firmware. At the FSF, we refuse to run that nonfree firmware, and we applaud the many people who also avoid it. For those people who do run those Intel or AMD systems, running Coreboot or Osboot is still a step up the Freedom Ladder for the software freedom of your BIOS.

The road to freedom is a long road. We hope our dedication to achieve milestones like these can inspire the free software movement.

A new kind of laser uses tiny moving particles to produce beams of light. The laser is more programmable than standard lasers and the approach could be used to create visual displays that are sharp from all angles. New Scientist reports: Conventional lasers repeatedly bounce light between two mirrors until it becomes bright and focused. Riccardo Sapienza at Imperial College London and his colleagues have built a laser that uses particles that can arrange themselves to carry out a similar process. The new type of laser first requires the use of green light from a traditional laser. The researchers shine this light into a small glass box filled with a liquid solution containing particles of titanium oxide and silicon oxide. This warms up the silicon oxide particles and causes the titanium oxide particles to clump around them.

The green light then bounces between particles in the clump -- similarly to how light bounces between mirrors in conventional lasers -- until the clump itself starts to emit a laser beam, now in the color red. By nudging the particles into different positions with the green light, the team can program the properties of the light emitted by the laser, such as where in the device it originates from and how pure its color is. By comparison, conventional lasers can't be adjusted after manufacturing. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Physics.

PG&E announced that more than 1,500 Tesla Powerwall owners have already decided to joined the new virtual power plant it launched in partnership with Tesla in California. Electrek reports: A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants. Last year, Tesla launched a test VPP in California, where Powerwall owners would join in voluntarily without compensation to let the VPP pull power from their battery packs when the grid needed it. Last month, Tesla and PG&E, a large electric utility company in Northern California, announced the launch of a new commercial VPP where homeowners with Powerwalls would get compensated for helping the grid with the energy in their battery packs.

PG&E has now released an update on the virtual power plant and said that more than 1,500 Tesla Powerwall owners have already joined the program: "On June 22, Tesla invited approximately 25,000 PG&E customers with Powerwalls to join the VPP and help form the world's largest distributed battery. In the first two weeks of the new program, more than 3,000 customers have expressed interest in enrolling, with more than 1,500 customers officially in the program." With an average of two Powerwalls per customer, the VPP most likely already has a 13 MW load capacity. PG&E says that if all eligible Powerwall owners join, the VPP would have the available megawatts equivalent to "the energy generated by a small power plant." Tesla Powerwall owners can join through the Tesla app and receive $2 per kWh that they send back to the grid during emergency events. "Enabling Powerwall customers to support the grid and their community is a necessary and important part of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy," said Drew Baglino, senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla. "We seek to partner with utilities and regulators everywhere to unlock the full potential of storage to bring more renewable, resilient, and less costly electricity to everyone."

An all-electric future depends heavily on copper, and looming supply shortfalls could hamper nations' goals of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, according to a new report from S&P Global. Unless significant new supply becomes available, climate goals will be "short-circuited and remain out of reach," the report says. CNBC reports: Electric vehicles, solar and wind power, and batteries for energy storage all run on copper. An EV requires 2.5 times as much copper as an internal combustion engine vehicle, according to S&P Global. Meanwhile, solar and offshore wind need two times and five times, respectively, more copper per megawatt of installed capacity than power generated using natural gas or coal. Copper is also key to the infrastructure that transports renewable energy, thanks in part to its electrical conductivity and low reactivity. Its uses include cables, transistors and inverters.

The report forecasts copper demand nearly doubling to 50 million metric tons by 2035. By 2050, demand will reach more than 53 million metric tons. To put this figure in perspective, S&P Global noted that that's "more than all the copper consumed in the world between 1900 and 2021." Renewable energy deployment will account for much of the demand spike. S&P Global forecasts copper needed for EVs, wind, solar and batteries tripling by the middle of the next decade. This will happen alongside demand growth from other areas, pushing copper's demand to never-before-seen levels.

S&P Global offers two future scenarios in an effort to forecast how short the market will be. Under the "Rocky Road Scenario" -- in which production continues largely as is -- annual supply shortfall will reach almost 10 million metric tons in 2035. In the more optimistic "High Ambition Scenario" -- in which mines increase utilization and ramp up recycling -- the market will still be in a deficit for most of the 2030s. "Under either scenario, there would not be enough supply to meet the demand of Net-Zero-Emissions by 2050," the report concludes. The report notes that it takes, on average, 16 years for a new copper mine to get off the ground. "For the time being, increasing utilization at existing mines and ramping up recycling can fulfill some of the higher demand," it says.

According to The Verge's review of the new MacBook Air with the M2 chip, the $1,199 base model equipped with 256GB of storage has a single NAND chip, which will lead to slower SSD speeds in benchmark testing. MacRumors reports: The dilemma arises from the fact that Apple switched to using a single 256GB flash storage chip instead of two 128GB chips in the base models of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Configurations equipped with 512GB of storage or more are equipped with multiple NAND chips, allowing for faster speeds in parallel. In a statement issued to The Verge, Apple said that while benchmarks of the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage "may show a difference" compared to previous-generation models, real-world performance is "even faster":

"Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster." It's unclear if Apple's statement refers explicitly to real-world SSD performance or overall system performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nikkei Asia: Panasonic will invest $4 billion in a second U.S. electric vehicle battery factory in Kansas, its subsidiary Panasonic Energy announced on Thursday, confirming an earlier Nikkei report. The factory is expected to hire as many as 4,000 employees and supply a new high-capacity battery for Tesla. The decision follows Tesla's April opening of a second American EV factory in Texas to meet brisk demand.

Panasonic aims to triple or quadruple EV battery production capacity by fiscal 2028 from the current level of roughly 50 gigawatt-hours per year. It plans to install two production lines at a battery component factory in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, in fiscal 2023 and begin manufacturing its new high-capacity model, the 4680. That investment is expected to total roughly 80 billion yen ($580 million). Panasonic had said it would determine whether to build new manufacturing facilities after seeing how production at the Wakayama plant fared in terms of profitability.

Increasing production demands from Tesla, a leading source of the Japanese electronics group's earnings, were likely a factor in the decision for a new U.S. plant, along with Panasonic's progress on the new technology. Prototypes started to ship in May. Emanuel noted that Panasonic's investment plan of up to $4 billion will create as many as 4,000 American jobs. Panasonic's first U.S. plant in Nevada, the Gigafactory 1, is jointly operated with Tesla. The Japanese company invested roughly 200 billion yen in that facility, which only began turning a profit in the year ended March 2021 as high defect rates kept mass production from getting off the ground.

According to a new study from Cornell researchers, smart thermostats are initiating peak demand throughout the network at a bad time of day. From a report: "Many homes have their smart thermostats turn down temperatures at night in the winter," said Max Zhang, a professor in Cornell's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Kathy Dwyer Marble and Curt Marble Faculty Director at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. "The temperature can be programmed to ramp up before you wake up -- and you'll have a warm house. That's the smart thing to do. But if everyone keeps their default setting, let's say 6 a.m., the electric grid suffers synchronized demand spikes and that's not smart for the system. That's the challenge." "As we electrify the heating sector to decarbonize the grid," he said, "this so-called load synchronization will become a problem in the near future."

In 2021, about 40% of U.S. homes had smart thermostats, as utilities encourage adoption, according to the paper. Lee and Zhang examined wintertime smart thermostat data for over 2,200 homes in New York state, noted for its cold winter climate and a mix of urban, suburban and rural communities. Homeowners purchasing a smart thermostat can opt to share their data anonymously with electric utilities for research purposes. Lee and Zhang investigated "setpoint behavior" and learned that most homeowners use the smart thermostat's factory-default settings. Evidence showed that residents remain confused about how to operate their thermostats and are often unable to program it, the authors said. In fact, their data indicates homeowners achieved energy savings of only 5% to 8%, far less than the devices' potential of 25% to 30%, Lee said.

If hundreds of homes have their smart thermostat set to turn on at 6 a.m., the electric grids see a peak at 6:05 a.m., which is about an hour before daylight during New York state winters. While the setpoint schedules are designed to achieve the energy-saving benefit, the peak demands are concentrated primarily when renewable energy is unavailable -- aggravating the peak demand by nearly 50%, according to the paper. "The smart thermostat data shows both an increase in frequency of high daily peak heating demand," Lee said, "as well as an increase in the magnitude of the overall peak demand."