The Next Power Plant Is on the Roof and in the Basement | Does A.I. Need Humans for Business Creativity? | Nuclear testing could start a new arms race | Police in Spain and Italy seize 5,000 litres of adulterated olive oil in raids

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� � � � � � The Next Power Plant Is on the Roof and in the Basement - The New Yorker    On any given Monday in Vermont, Josh Castonguay, the vice-president of innovation at that state’s Green Mountain Power utility, told me, he studies the forecast for the days ahead, asking questions like “What’s it looking like from a temperature standpoint, a potential-of-load standpoint? Is there an extremely hot, humid stretch of a few days coming? A really cold February night?” If there is trouble ahead, Castonguay prepares, among other things, Vermont’s single largest power plant, which isn’t exactly a power plant at all—or, at least, not as we normally think of one. It’s an online network, organized by the utility, of forty-five hundred electric storage batteries (currently, most of them are Tesla Powerwalls), spread out across more than three thousand Vermont homes. The network also includes a broad array of residential rooftop solar panels, which produce the energy stored in those batteries, and smart water heaters and E.V. chargers. The people who have these assets aren’t off the grid; they’re Green Mountain Power customers who, for a discount on their bills, agree to plug their batteries (most of which are leased to own) and appliances into the utility’s network and let the company control the devices so that they use less power at critical moments. (If customers need to override the company’s commands, they can.) This means that Castonguay (or, really, his algorithms) can program storage batteries to be charged a hundred per cent before a storm hits. Or, if it’s going to be a hot day, he can preheat water heaters in many homes in the morning, so that in the afternoon, as the temperature rises, more power will be available to run air-conditioners. He can also precool some big buildings in the morning. “Then, if you think about it, the building itself is the battery,” he said, in the sense that it stores chilled air for later in the day. “We have about fifty megawatts” of this distributed power, Castonguay told me. “At the scale of Vermont, that’s a lot.” Utilities have always been able to dispatch supply, bringing power plants, which are often in idle mode, online as demand requires. Now they’re increasingly able to call up small, individual home power plants and dispatch demand as well, turning down thermostats or delaying car charging. Green Mountain Power is at the forefront of this push; last month, it announced plans to install storage batteries for many of its customers—two hundred and seventy thousand homes and businesses, in total—in the next decade, pending regulatory approval. (Castonguay says it is testing a new home battery system, from FranklinWH—a company named for Ben Franklin, who actually coined the term “battery”—and that this apparatus seems to work as well as the Powerwall.) But other companies are starting to follow. Green Mountain Power’s former C.E.O., Mary Powell, left three years ago and soon took over Sunrun, which supplies rooftop solar panels and storage batteries for hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, and serves as a third-party power aggregator for several utilities. “We’re sitting on more than 1.1 gigawatt-hours of installed storage capacities just with our customers now,” she told me recently, much of it in California, where the company is based. From August through October, as a series of heat waves pushed consumption up in that state, Pacific Gas and Electric was buying up to thirty megawatts of power through Sunrun every evening to keep peak demand down in its grid system. Sunrun’s customers who provided the energy got a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars. “We went from contract to operation in six months,” Powell said. “You simply could not get a resource of that size built and operationalized any other way in that time frame.” And, she added, “it’s not just that we can make a more reliable, resilient grid” by drawing on the scattered resources; “We can also make a much more affordable grid,” because being able to use residential power means not having to build big, new power plants to meet peak demand. Taking in that money saved, she added, “We can shave ten billion dollars a year off the price of the country’s power system.” That figure comes from a report that the Department of Energy released in September on virtual power plants (V.P.P.s), the name the industry has settled on for these systems, though not without dissent: “There’s really nothing virtual about them,” Powell said. The report’s lead author, the D.O.E.’s portfolio manager Jennifer Downing, predicted that V.P.P.s could be handling twenty per cent of peak power demand across the country by 2030, at a cost forty to sixty per cent below that of the plants that would otherwise have to provide that power. As the number of E.V.s—which are basically large batteries attached to wheels, and so can be plugged into the system to provide power or extra storage—grows, that percentage could rise. Jigar Shah, the polymathic enthusiast running the department’s efforts to deploy the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal money provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (I.R.A.), told me, “Today, our grid is used at about forty per cent of capacity. If we could fluctuate demand as we now do supply, we could get a lot more out of it.” In the process, he added, customers could save twenty per cent on their power bills. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Does A.I. Need Humans for Business Creativity? - Inc.com    What Jamie Siminoff Did After He Sold His Company to Amazon Is Perhaps Even More Fascinating Than His Billion-Dolla... A.I. is a powerful tool, and it's incredibly effective at sifting through mountains of data to uncover insights, target audiences, and even generate content. It can predict trends, optimize ad placements, and personalize messaging with remarkable accuracy. Yet, when it comes to culture, it stinks. Culture is a complex tapestry of customs, traditions, values, and beliefs that define who we are and how we perceive the world. It's a dynamic force that evolves and adapts, and it's deeply intertwined with the human experience. Understanding culture isn't just about crunching numbers and analyzing statistics; it requires empathy, intuition, and a nuanced understanding of human behavior.  Continued here � � � � � � Nuclear testing could start a new arms race - The Economist    SEISMOLOGICAL detectors around the world could soon twitch not to the tremors of earthquakes, but of an underground nuclear explosion, at Novaya Zemlya in Russia’s Arctic region, or Lop Nur, in the Xinjiang region of China. Then, soon enough, a blast at the Nevada National Security Site in America. None of the big three powers has detonated a nuclear device since 1996, the year the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was negotiated. Yet satellite imagery suggests intense activity at their test sites. A detonation at any of them could start an arms race more dangerous than that of the cold war. Nuclear arms-control has been eroding since America withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (which limited anti-missile defences) in 2002. But nuclear dangers have become more acute with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its threats to use nuclear weapons. America and Russia have stopped exchanging information under the New start Treaty, which limits each side’s long-range “strategic” nuclear weapons. Russia is deploying tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, and in late 2023 it set out to reverse its ratification of the CTBT. According to the Pentagon, China’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will grow from 500 warheads to more than 1,000 by 2030. Continued here � � � � � � Police in Spain and Italy seize 5,000 litres of adulterated olive oil in raids - the Guardian    International gang allegedly sought to pass off lower-quality oils as virgin and extra virgin Police in Spain and Italy have arrested 11 people and seized more than 5,000 litres of adulterated olive oil after breaking up an international gang that allegedly sought to profit by passing off cheap oils as their more expensive equivalents. The investigation, carried out by the Guardia Civil in conjunction with Italy’s carabinieri and Europol, led to raids in both countries and the searching of olive-processing cooperatives in the Spanish provinces of Ciudad Real, Jaén and Córdoba. Continued here

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