The payback rate is pathetic; almsot negligble. But the rebate is 30% of the cost of the battery as a tax credit; 20kW runs around $15-$18k, so a 30% rebate is around $5,000+ tax credit (not deduction, tax credit), so it's worth it.

From the numbers I posted, you can see the grid operators are about 80-85% grid storage, so as some else posted, it's mostly for demand shifting. My colleague who lives in California and I were discussing it; essentially he charges his EV at night during Super off-peak (which his rate is around 10-15% of peak). He then charges up his batteries on his home solar; by about noon it's full even if he's running A/C and all the household appliances for the day. California will then draw off his system in the afternoon, between 15-25 kW per day; some days it's less than 5 and it's been as high as 28. He's got 20kW in storage, but has sun going to around 6 to 8 PM depending on the time of day, so his battery is right around 50% or less. The battery will run everything in the house, and often have enough left over to charge the EV again down to around 20% of the battery storage by the time the sun comes up the next day.

You just need to do it most days, but not all, during a given month, so you can have a few off days if you need the power for something. But in essence between the high incentive for super off peak's very low rates and the battery rebate to export to the grid, his behavior has shifted most of his demand to the off-peak times and the residential batteries are essentially an "overflow" or "as-needed" for the grid to supplement the grid-level storage. I imagine many Californians with home solar do the same thing as it makes economic sense and the batteries are easily controlled.

The California State government deserves many of it's very legitimate critiques, but in this case it did something right.

You're right the article is light on details. They did install 17,000 MW worth of batteries; ~13,500 was grid-scale storage and the rest was residential supported through rebates. The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours. So about 15-20% was residential people incentivized to use their home batteries as storage and the rest was grid storage.

The article doesn't point out that California also added 27,000 MW of generation capacity also but good news it was almost entirely renewables, wind and solar mostly; natural gas power generation has been flat in it's power generation capacity. They still need the NG to help deal with the hourly volatility of the grid, but they didn't need to add any and overall usage is down around 50%.

And to your point, the other thing they did in the interim periods is halfway through this (2022) they asked people to voluntarily use less power via these Flex Alerts, sending the population alerts to limit usage. 2023 it was a colder year on average so they didn't have to go that path.

So overall it is a pretty good success story.

One thing that never happened was any country saying they wouldn't adopt electricity.

Some municipalities were slower than others to roll it out, for example many had plumbed gas lines already and the early days of electricity were seen as a luxury when they already invested in lighting, so rather they adopted it eventually but not right away. However it was also at the time proven with a clearly useful application (light) replacing an existing application (gas-powered lanterns) where people already had an expectation of the value and the cost. It's beholden on the AI labs to show that value to those they intend to sell to (and replace apparently), they haven't done so.

"At the same time, they are also offering programs to use frontier AI models for defensive purposes, including OpenAI's Daybreak program, Anthropic's Mythos, and Microsoft's new cyber platform Perception."

I mean the answer is in the last sentence of the summary. They tried a consumer model for revenue, it didn't work. They tried a B2B tokenized model, that didn't work either.

Now they went to one of the oldest business models in the book: the Mafia protection racket. They make AIs, the AIs go rogue and hack your systems. But if you subscribe now, we have AI defenses to stop Rogue AIs from happening!

This is just the 2026 version of throwing a brick through your window, then selling you repairs to fix the window.

His comment: "If they really gave a shit about security, there would be minimum standards for cybersecurity and the auditability of all critical infrastructure. This is a price fixing scheme to further smash the electrical equipment that is in such artificially high demand for all of those data centers that aren't actually being built"

IEEE 1547.3 provides standards for cybersecurity on distributed energy resources.

NIST IR 7628 is a US standard that is considered a minimum framework for securing Smart-Grid systems.

NERC CIP Standards> are Federally enforceable cybersecurity standards overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Hey look, 5 minutes on Google undermines the entire premise of the post from paul-engr, and shows numerous standards that are federally enforceable, auditable standards for cybersecurity. So I'm just going to disagree with you there, and stick with my original premise.

Generally not a Trump supporter, but this executive order is a lot less than the hyperbolic headline and summary would suggest.

The executive order gives the Energy Secretary the power to designate certain organizations as potential risks, with a primary focus on Chinese suppliers. This doesn't outright ban "all foreign suppliers" of electrical grid equipment, the biggest suppliers of which are ABB and SIemens, both European and they are not banned. Organizations like ABB and Siemens will have to document their subcontractor exposure to Chinese suppliers, and certain suppliers in that supply chain may be banned forcing them to find an alternative to that component, but that's a very different scenario than "All foreign electrical grid equipment is banned!" as this headline and summary portray.

And the order is in response, as the summary accurately says, to Iranian sourced subcomponents in the water infrastructure that led to a cyber-attack. Ultimately this is about making sure our grid is not exposed to cyber secuirty risks. I'm all for Trump outrage, but let's direct it to the stuff he actually deserves; this issue is the kind of thing that if it came up during the Obama administration I think it would be implemented exactly the same way and with no news about it.

First, I haven't seen any articles yet claiming that these "AI detection tools" don't have a high false positive rate anyways, so those tools alone are controversial.

Second, if AI's job, like any tool, is to make our lives easier, then editing something seems like a good use of the technology. When i write stuff, I often will get all my thoughts down as best as I can, but then use AI to evaluate if the message can come across in a more impactful way with fewer words, which helps to make it clearer for my intended recipient. In that the AI isn't generating the information at all, it's doing what it's actually good at, ie looking at text and recommending changes based on what people who are better writers might do. Particularly someone like this professor whom, just by judging based on her name, English is likely her second language so she may not be the best at communicating in writing. If that's what we're talking about here, this seems like a non-controversy.

Every person I've ever met that I respected went through some sort of major crisis or failure in life. I'm sure that's also true of every person reading this comment.

Too often we focus on those who had wild success and see the success as the goal. Success is the symptom; it's a byproduct of numerous scars and failures, it's learning how to take a loss, pick yourself back up and do better the next time.

I can't imagine what Teddy Roosevelt would be thinking today's generation of kids; his famous "man in the arena" speech would instead be about appreciating "the man in the arena without the bumper rails and safety cushions and child protections".

I don't follow prediction markets that closely, but it seems to me that win or lose, this ruling shows they're screwed either way.

If they lose, showing that these are unregulated forms of gambling, then the states can come after them.

If they win and the injunction is dismissed, it's because these prediction markets are operating like credit default swaps, which are heavily regulated. This would force every prediction market to operate through clearing houses, eliminate direct holding of users' funds, force them to to become registered dealers, and most importantly limit their market to those who have high discretionary assets, because at least regulated swaps require you to have $10M in discretionary assets to even buy swaps.

Again I may be missing something here, but I read this as the injunction being put on hold because they could essentially be swaps; if that holds, then it could be argued they must then act like swaps which are highly regulated and would kill their retail business. I'd be curious to know if I'm missing something about these though that would suggest a different analysis.

You know what's funny? Weirdly enough I think they are paying more in tax revenue than they should because of this. For the AI companies to grow, they need to keep raising money. And I'm not just talking about Anthropic and Open AI, but Meta, Facebook, NVidia and the like.

Open AI and Anthropic pay no Federal Corporate income tax because they are not profitable. However, they do pay sales tax, which is a tax on revenue, so the states are getting some. Also they are paying property tax for data centers they own, although most are being built by others, but every data center pays property tax.

Meta is likely paying more in corporate tax. Zuckerberg is overspending on AI to try and catch up, adn he's behind. If the true spend was clear, Meta's stock would suffer. So they're pulling an accounting trick. When you buy equipment, you're allowed to depreciate the cost of that equipment as an expense, even though it's a non-cash expense. This is to recognize that machinery and buildings and such have a fixed life before they fail. What Meta did is change their depreciation schedule on GPUs from 3 years to 7 years. This way, their profits weren't hurt too bad. This is actually bad because teh GPUs last 3 years, so MEta will have to replace assets that ostensibly halfway through their useful life and take an asset write off when they do which won't look good, but it propped up their profitability for their earnings call. As such, becuase it increased their profits, they had to pay more corporate tax.

NVidia is likely paying more in tax than they should. WHat they do is they "invest" in groups like OpenAI. Let's say they invest $5B. However they don't give OpenAI $5B in cash. They instead give OpenAI GPUs that in total are priced at $5B. No cash changed hands, but a sale is made, and they need to pay taxes in cash on what was a non-cash revenue stream. Also likely at inflated prices because the demand is up by them doing this. So NVidia feeding everyone's addition raises the prices of their product, raising their revenue, requiring them to pay more in taxes but a bunch of it is not in cash. Of course that equity they receive goes up in value, theoretically, since it's private valuations and they have no real meaning. Nevertheless their revenue and profits are inflated, making them pay more in cash for sales tax and income tax than they otherwise would. Microsoft did the same thing; they "invested" in OpenAI, and did give them some cash, but much of it was in cloud-computing credits, not cash, but it's still revenue.

The cyclical growth of the valuations of these companies are heavily inflated, but you can't tax that because it's unrealized gains; it's meaningless value unless it turns into cash, and wealth taxes historically have done no good but damage economies.

Anyways, I think the tax part of this is entirely screwed up.

Except this time the US government doesn't have the finances to support them.

TARP was a net positive for the US. The banks that got bailed out paid back their loans with interest, and the stocks the US government took in those banks paid dividends. Eventually the US government took equity in hundreds of banks around the country through direct stock purchases and warrants (think options) of around $245B, and sold them for $275B for a $30B profit. There were several social programs to help individuals that ended up being a net loss that weighed down the overall TARP program, but the government did get paid back and in general made some money on it.

But that was when the US government was spending around 10% of net revenue on debt services and had a debt-to-GDP of around 35%. Today it's around 100% and it spends more on debt servicing than the entire US Defense budget. So a TARP-style protection program could be much more difficult.

But aside from all of this, the government won't want tech to fail. I doubt they really need Anthropic or OpenAI, but they will need Microsoft, Oracle, NVidia, and others for both DoD purposes and export purposes. So most likely there will be some kind of bailout when this all shakes out.

I would disagree with you on RAM. RAM all around is going up in price. RAM suppliers make good margins on the high-end RAM used in these data center GPU setups but the demand wasn't very high for them. Now with this buildout, the demand was very high and they made money hand over fist. But the RAM guys didn't build new production lines, they just shifted supply to the more profitable in-demand product. As a result, all RAM went up in price, because the RAM providers started making less of the lower-end, more common RAM.

So if demand dries up for AI data center buildouts, then there won't be as much demand for that high-end RAM. The suppliers will then shift production back to the more common RAM, which should bring hte price back down again. I don't see it crashing as the OP said, but I would use the term "normalize".

You're missing a big one:

5) Nvidia doesn't have the money to guarantee these loans. Nvidia has in current assets around 125B; about 50% to guarantee these loans.

We have a major issue here. These guys had all this circular finance with equity, where Nvidia would invest in OpenAI who then turn around and bought chips from them, adding to NVidia's revenue. Very little cash was exchanged, the equity was exchanged, but then the equity went up (in a private valuation) because OpenAI was spending more on Capex. Now people are calling BS on this circular finance non-sense, so they're turning to debt.

But the debt is a problem. Bloomberg came out (non-paywall source from Futurism) with a report saying they're using Enron-style accounting, essentially shell companies to hold the debt while they own 20% of the shell, so the debt stays off their books. Debt financing like this however is extremely reckless; it is the source of the Enron crash, the Lucent technologies crash (Lucent also got into trouble with risky customer financing and crashed big time), the 2008 financial crisis, etc.

These guys are headed for a fall and will bring the economy into recession with it, right when the US government is too over-leveraged too.

Sony is a big company with many divisions that do their own things and operate with their customers in their own ways. That being said, there does seem to be some consistency here. Many years ago when i lived in San Diego, a guy I knew worked for Sony Online Entertainment and he worked on Star Wars Galaxies. I recall how at a party he gleefully told stories about how players would complain about certain things, and the mods would actively punish and ban them for complaining about imbalance and lack of features. He wasn't directly involved with the infamous Teleport them into Space situation, but he knew people who were and laughed about it, and as a player when I said that seems kind of bad service to your customer his response was that "why should we care, we're Sony, we're the best and those players f*ing deserved it". The guy was a a total POS, and my admittedly long ago and minimal experience suggests they, at least at that time, hired that type.