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.

It's so hard to feel bad for these thieving companies complaining about theft. Add on top increased utilities the data centers are costing us, the jobs they keep promising to take from us, and the risks of AI they continually warn about - despite marching stead fast towards the cliff. phuck'em.

It means Iran has severely limited the capacity of the Strait of Hormuz. It's a hostage situation. No one is winning, but the objective isn't to win in the sense of completely closing the Strait, the objective is to create a sufficiently long period of pain that eventually the US and its allies walk away. Christ almighty, force multiplication is hardly a new concept.

There are plenty of places in North America without coverage because there's so little to cover. The Los Vegas metropolitan area has about three million people. So yes, that would be a place with cell phone coverage. By the same token, coverage in states like Montana, particularly in mountainous areas is spotty because, well, there's not a lot of people.

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.

Are you fucking stupid? Names actually are useful, which is why we propers nouns at all.

Jesus fuck the supporters of Trump really are a pack of morally compromised halfwits.

"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.

I suspect you were just asked to be nice, and through a combination of spectrum OCD and insufficient cognitive therapy, you decided somehow you were being asked to do something wrong.

So you helped elect an ignorant sociopath. Congrats on that. Maybe you should have attended more of those cognitive therapy sessions.

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.

Jesus Fucking Christ. It's 2026, Trump has been putting his boot on the necks of major networks and studios for a year and a half now. I realize you probably fell into a coma in 2016, but ten years later, the free press, regardless of what you think of it, or fair you imagine it is, is under direct assault. Fuck off with the "MSM" bullshit and grow the fuck up.

As a corporate M365 user, their entire "CoPilot" strategy is just confusing. Everything is named "copilot" without any cohesiveness or logic as to how it's laid out. There's no training for users, and just when you think you understand it, they change behavior, remove function and add something different. You can't develop training material, standards let along policies because the inner workings change so frequently.