An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. After investigating to determine the impact of the loss, the university concluded that the work of four of the affected groups could no longer be restored. All affected users have been individually notified of the incident via email, but no details were published on the type of work that was lost.

At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022. The plan is to also keep incremental backups -- which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened -- in addition to full backup mirrors. While the details of the type of data that was lost weren't revealed to the public, supercomputer research costs several hundreds of USD per hour, so this incident must have caused distress to the affected groups. The Kyoto University is considered one of Japan's most important research institutions and enjoys the second-largest scientific research investments from national grants. Its research excellence and importance is particularly distinctive in the area of chemistry, where it ranks fourth in the world, while it also contributes to biology, pharmacology, immunology, material science, and physics.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people, the department announced on Dec. 27. From a report: The MPD said the floppy disks contained personal data on 38 people who had applied for public housing in Tokyo's Meguro Ward. The ward office had provided the personal information to the MPD to check if the applicants were affiliated with organized crime groups. Police said no leaks or misuse of the information have been confirmed at this point. According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs. The police division and Meguro Ward signed an agreement in 2012 to check whether public housing applicants were affiliated with crime syndicates. Police received the floppy disks from the ward in December 2019 and February 2021 to conduct background checks, and kept them in the division's locked storage. The loss of the disks emerged after a Meguro Ward employee made a new inquiry to the police division on Dec. 7 and police went back to the disks to return them. Police say the disks may have been discarded accidentally.

China will work to become a leading global player in robotics by 2025 under a five-year plan announced Tuesday as it ramps up efforts to build a high-tech manufacturing sector resilient to American sanctions. From a report: Coming amid what is expected to be a drawn-out rivalry with the U.S., the plan seeks to help Chinese technology companies compete on the world stage. It was compiled by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other agencies. The plan targets revenue growth of more than 20% per year for the Chinese robotics industry. Despite reaching the 100 billion yuan ($15.7 billion) mark in 2020, the industry still lags in foundational technologies and manufacturing advanced robots. The government wants to improve the industry's ability to innovate. China will support restructuring efforts and mergers, particularly among large corporations, to create more competitive players. It will also provide financial assistance and strengthen cooperation between industry, academia and government to develop more advanced materials and core components. The plan promotes the diversification of supply chains, which has emerged as a top priority for economic security amid the Sino-American rivalry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Behind every TikTok, Zoom call, and cat meme is a data center that stores, processes, or reroutes that data around the world. The more we do online, the bigger these data centers and their energy footprint get. At full capacity, servers within a modern "hyperscale" (aka "massive") data center can use as much power as 80,000 households. Although the data center industry is global, places with the right combination of stable climate and friendly regulations attract outsized attention from data center developers. Ireland is one of these places. The island nation hosts 70 data centers and is now the fastest-growing data center market in Europe. Unfortunately, supplying the equivalent of several extra cities worth of electricity to servers that aid your doomscrolling is starting to take a toll on Ireland's power grid.

Data centers already use around 900 megawatts of electricity in Ireland. According to Paul Deane, an energy researcher working with the MaREI Environmental Research Institute in Ireland, this adds up to at least 11% of Ireland's total electricity supply at present, a situation he described "as a serious energy systems problem." As Deane outlined, meeting this demand is making Ireland's current energy crisis worse and its target of halving greenhouse emissions by 2030 harder to reach. And things are only getting more challenging. A recent report from Eirgrid, Ireland's state-owned grid operator, shows that data centers will consume almost 30% (PDF) of Ireland's annual electricity supply by 2029.

Although, as Deane pointed out, data centers are essential to modern life, a small country with little grid power to spare hosting so many of them puts the sustainability of Ireland's entire power supply at risk. Deane summed up Ireland's issue with data centers as being a mismatch in size. "Data centers are large power users, and our power system is small, so plugging more of them into a small grid will start to have an outsized impact," he said. In stark comparison, Germany, the EU's biggest data center market overall, will use less than 5% of its grid capacity to power data centers in the same period. As well as stoking fears that the industry's growth will create blackouts and power shortages for Irish consumers this winter, data centers may also derail Ireland's drive to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that on December 28th, it successfully produced the first lithium-ion battery cell to be designed, developed, and built completely in Europe by a homegrown company. Teslarati reports: "Last night, the commissioning of the Northvolt Ett gigafactory in northern Sweden led to the assembly of the first battery cell," Northvolt wrote. The company's factory, located in Vasteras, Sweden, is the first factory in Europe to have a cell that has been "fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company," the company added. The production of the cell is a massive milestone for Northvolt, which has been working to get its gigafactory up and running since 2017. The company said the cell is of a prismatic cell format, which consist of large sheets of anodes, cathodes, and separators sandwiched, rolled up, and pressed to fit into a metallic or hard-plastic housing in cubic form, according to AllAboutCircuits.

Northvolt Labs in Vasteras has been in production since early 2020, the company said. Northvolt plans to expand the production capacity of the facility toward 60 GWh per year, which will fulfill over $30 billion worth of contracts the battery maker has already locked up with various automotive manufacturers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Polestar, Fluence, and Scania. Northvolt Ett will commercially deliver various cell types in 2022. While the company is based in Europe and has various partnerships with European automotive and energy storage companies, it has no plans to only service entities that are only located on the same continent.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Todd Haselton: Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year. The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring. It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run. Those fears were quickly quelled.

The first M1 Apple chip was launched in 2020 in a MacBook Air laptop. It was more powerful than Intel's chip while offering longer battery life and enabling a fanless design, which helped keep Apple's new MacBook Air even quieter. It proved to be an early success. In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. That quarter, it launched the all-new iMac, which offered a redesigned super-thin metal body that looks like a screen propped up on a stand. It's slimmer than the Intel models that came before it, while offering other benefits, like a much better webcam, great speakers and a much sharper display than the models it replaced. And Apple made the launch more exciting by offering an array of colors for the iMac, which it hadn't done since it shipped the 1999 iMac. There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.

Apple's fiscal Q1 earnings in January will give an indication of how well all its new computers are selling. But it's clear the move from Intel has allowed Apple to move full speed ahead with its own chip development, much like it does for iPhones and iPads, the latter of which has yet to be matched by any other tablet on the market. It's no longer beholden to delays that plagued Intel, which started to lag behind AMD with its new 7nm chips. And Apple has full control over its "stack," which means it can design new computer hardware and software together, instead of letting the power of another company's chips dictate what its computers can and can't do.

Hyundai announced that it is shutting down its internal combustion engine development team as the automaker focuses on electric cars. Electrek reports: For 40 years the Korean automaker has been developing internal combustion engines to use in its vehicle lineup, but no more. The Korea Economic Daily reports that Hyundai's new R&D chief Park Chung-kook confirmed in an email to employees that they are shutting down new engine development: "Now, it is inevitable to convert into electrification. Our own engine development is a great achievement, but we must change the system to create future innovation based on the great asset from the past."

Hyundai reportedly had 12,000 people working on engines, but they are now being transferred to EV powertrain development: "Researchers at the engine design unit have moved to the electrification design center, leaving only some to modify existing engines. The powertrain system development center is transforming into an electrification test center, while the powertrain performance development center is becoming an electrification performance development center." Park added on the change: "The immediate task is to develop innovative vehicles that can dominate the future market. This reorganization will be an important starting point for change ahead in the new year."

schwit1 shares a report from Electrek: There are 13 new battery cell gigafactories coming online in the US by 2025, according to the Department of Energy. These factories are ushering in a new era of battery production in the US. [...] Now the Department of Energy has issued a report listing all the battery factory projects in the US: "In addition to electric vehicle battery plants that are already in operation in the United States, 13 additional plants have been announced and are expected to be operational within the next 5 years. Of the 13 plants that are planned, eight are joint ventures between automakers and battery manufacturers. Many of these new plants will be located in the Southeast or Midwest." The list, published by the Department of Energy last week (available in full via Electrek), includes factories from Ford, SK Innovation, General Motors and LG Energy Solution, as well as one from Toyota and Volkswagen. "It looks like they missed a few too," adds Electrek.

"For example, Tesla is currently deploying battery cell production capacity at its Gigafactory Texas in Austin. It could become one of the biggest battery cell factories in the world, with a planned capacity of over 100 GWh."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has a tendency to show up, innovate, and then abandon its products/services rather quickly. There's an entire site, Killed by Google, that's dedicated to documenting all of Google's dead projects. Even Stadia, Google's once-promising cloud gaming service, could be heading to the graveyard, after years of failing to measure up to Microsoft's xCloud and Nvidia's GeForce Now. But software is one thing. Hardware is another, and Google has let its premiere Chromebook, the Pixelbook, rot without a hardware refresh since 2019's Pixelbook Go.

Not counting the original Cr-48 reference design Chromebook, Google has released a total of four Chrome OS-powered laptops. There was the original 2013 Chromebook Pixel and 2015 Pixel 2 (not to be confused with the phones that are named Pixel). Then the 2-in-1 Pixelbook in 2017, and in 2019, the Pixelbook Go. The pattern for a refresh seemed to be every two years. This year's Pixel 6 event came and went with no word of a new Pixelbook. And according to a recent comment made at Qualcomm's conference by Chrys Tsolaki, Google's retail partner manager for Chromebooks, there won't be a Pixelbook in 2022, either.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Imagine being able to see the components of a potentially dangerous situation in live 3D and in fine detail without even having to survey the area,' says Brian Goddin, from the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center public affairs, in a video produced by the military. [...] Putting lidar on drones and on ground robots gives the military a way to map the interior of a building with a machine. With that lidar data transmitted to the computers in a command center, or even just the tablet of an operator sitting outside the building, a human can see what the robot sees, and direct the robot accordingly. (In the civilian world, lidar sensors are commonly used on self-driving cars as one tool for the vehicles to perceive the world around them.) Goddin's presentation, released online December 9, 2021, shows lidar mounted on Spot, the Boston Dynamics dog-shaped robot. Ghost Robotics Q-UGV machines, also dog-shaped and sensor-rich, have been used to patrol the perimeter of Tyndall AFB, making Spot the second breed (or brand) of robot dog to serve the needs of the base.

While all of this mapping at Tyndall is happening in the wake of Hurricane Michael, creating a virtual 3D model of the buildings as they stand can guide future repair. Such a virtual model is a useful tool for regular maintenance and repair, and it provides a record of a prior state should disaster strike again. Such techniques could also allow better investigations of failure after the fact. By comparing lidar scans of downed or wrecked craft to those before launch, and to surviving aircraft that made it back from a fight, the Air Force could understand how to better make more durable craft. Scanning a wrecked plane with lidar also lets rescue workers and recovery teams know if and how they should act to save pilots and passengers, suggested Javier Rodriguez, a technician stationed at Tyndall.

One Virginia family received the keys to their new 3D-printed home in time for Christmas. The home is Habitat for Humanity's first 3D-printed home in the nation, according to a Habitat news release. CNN reports: Janet V. Green, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg, told CNN it partnered with Alquist, a 3D printing company, earlier this year to begin the process. Alquist's crew printed the house. Janet V. Green, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg, told CNN it partnered with Alquist, a 3D printing company, earlier this year to begin the process. Alquist's crew printed the house. The technology allowed the home to be built in just 12 hours, which saves about four weeks of construction time for a typical home. The concrete used in the house's 3D construction has many long-term benefits, such as the ability to retain temperature and withstand natural disasters, like tornadoes and hurricanes.

April Stringfield purchased the home through the Habitat Homebuyer Program. She will move in with her 13-year-old son just in time for the holidays. "My son and I are so thankful," Stringfield said in a live feed streamed on Habitat's Facebook page. "I always wanted to be a homeowner. It's like a dream come true." Stringfield's home also includes a personal 3D printer that will allow her to reprint anything she may need, "everything from electrical outlet to trim to cabinet knobs," Green told CNN.

The nonprofit Habitat for Humanity uses volunteer labor to build homes with affordable mortgages for families in need (who also invest hundreds of hours of their own labor) — or to renovate or repair/improve existing homes.

But this week saw them delivering something new: a 3D-printed home, built with giant 3D printers from a company called Alquist).

CNN reports: The 1,200-square-foot home has three bedrooms, two full baths and was built from concrete. The technology allowed the home to be built in just 12 hours, which saves about four weeks of construction time for a typical home....

The concrete used in the house's 3D construction has many long-term benefits, such as the ability to retain temperature [reducing heating and cooling costs] and withstand natural disasters, like tornadoes and hurricanes. [It also reduced building costs by an estimated 15% per square foot.] Stringfield's home also includes a personal 3D printer that will allow her to reprint anything she may need, "everything from electrical outlet to trim to cabinet knobs," Janet V. Green, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg, told CNN.

While this is the first 3D home for Habitat for Humanity in the U.S., it certainly won't be the last. Green told CNN it hopes to continue partnering and developing the technology used with the printing. "We would love to build more with this technology, especially because it's got that long-term savings for the homeowners," Green said.
The house will also have "smart building" applications that track data on the indoor environment through a proprietary Virginia Tech system that uses a Raspberry Pi, according to a statement from Habitat for Humanity.

And the house will be outfitted with solar panels, "for even more cost savings after the family moves in."

"Your laptop is way more powerful than you might realize," writes long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot.

"People often rhapsodize about how much more computer power we have now compared with what was available in the 1960s during the Apollo era. Those comparisons usually grossly underestimate the difference."

Rodney Brooks, emeritus professor of robotics at MIT (and former director of their AI Lab and CSAIL) explains in IEEE Spectrum: By 1961, a few universities around the world had bought IBM 7090 mainframes. The 7090 was the first line of all-transistor computers, and it cost US $20 million in today's money, or about 6,000 times as much as a top-of-the-line laptop today. Its early buyers typically deployed the computers as a shared resource for an entire campus. Very few users were fortunate enough to get as much as an hour of computer time per week.

The 7090 had a clock cycle of 2.18 microseconds, so the operating frequency was just under 500 kilohertz. But in those days, instructions were not pipelined, so most took more than one cycle to execute. Some integer arithmetic took up to 14 cycles, and a floating-point operation could hog up to 15. So the 7090 is generally estimated to have executed about 100,000 instructions per second. Most modern computer cores can operate at a sustained rate of 3 billion instructions per second, with much faster peak speeds. That is 30,000 times as fast, so a modern chip with four or eight cores is easily 100,000 times as fast.

Unlike the lucky person in 1961 who got an hour of computer time, you can run your laptop all the time, racking up more than 1,900 years of 7090 computer time every week....

But, really, this comparison is unfair to today's computers. Your laptop probably has 16 gigabytes of main memory. The 7090 maxed out at 144 kilobytes. To run the same program would require an awful lot of shuffling of data into and out of the 7090 — and it would have to be done using magnetic tapes . The best tape drives in those days had maximum data-transfer rates of 60 KB per second. Although 12 tape units could be attached to a single 7090 computer, that rate needed to be shared among them. But such sharing would require that a group of human operators swap tapes on the drives; to read (or write) 16 GB of data this way would take three days. So data transfer, too, was slower by a factor of about 100,000 compared with today's rate.

So now the 7090 looks to have run at about a quadrillionth (10 ** -15) the speed of your 2021 laptop. A week of computing time on a modern laptop would take longer than the age of the universe on the 7090.

With some time on their hands, long-time Slashdot reader shanen began exploring the question: How many files does my Windows 10 computer have?

But then they realized "It would also be interesting to compare the weirdness on other OSes..." Here are the two data points in front of me:

(1) Using the right click on properties for all of the top-level folders on the drive (including the so-called hidden folders), it quickly determined that there are a few hundred thousand files in those folders (and a few hundred thousand subfolders). That's already ridiculous, but the expected par these days. The largest project I have on the machine only has about 3,000 files, and that one goes back many years... (My largest database only has about 5,000 records, but it's just a few files.)

(2) However, I also decided to take a look with Microsoft's malicious software removal tool and got a completely different answer. For twisted grins, I had invoked the full scan. It's still running a day later and has already passed 10 million files. Really? The progress bar indicates about 80% finished? WTF?

Obviously there is some kind of disagreement about the nature of "file" here. I could only think of one crazy explanation, but my router answered "No, the computer is not checking all of the files on the Internet." So I've already asked the specific question in three-letter form, but the broader question is about the explosive, perhaps even cancerous, "population growth" of files these days.
Maybe we can all solve this mystery together. So use the comments to share your own answers and insights.

How many files are on your computer?

Heating plasma fuel to over 100 million degrees Celsius to create inexpensive and unlimited zero-emissions electricity "has been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool's gold..." writes the Boston Globe, "or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change." [N]ow, after breakthroughs this year at MIT and elsewhere, scientists — and a growing number of deep-pocketed investors — insist that fusion is for real and could start sending power to electricity grids in about a decade.

To prove that, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff in Cambridge, is using a whopping $1.8 billion it raised in recent months from investors such as Bill Gates, Google, and a host of private equity firms to build a prototype of a specially designed fusion reactor on a former Superfund site in Devens. A host of excavators, backhoes, and other heavy machinery are clearing land there and laying concrete foundations on 47 acres of newly acquired land. "It may sound like science fiction, but the science of fusion is real, and the recent scientific advancements are game-changing," said Dennis Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and cofounder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. "These advancements aren't incremental; they are quantum leap improvements. . . . We're in a new era of actually delivering real energy systems...."

There are now at least 35 companies trying to prove that fusion can be a practical power source, most of them established in the past decade, according to the three-year-old Fusion Industry Association. The promise of fusion was buoyed with significant developments this year. In May, scientists in China used their own specially designed tokamak to sustain a fusion reaction of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds, the longest on record. In September, Whyte's team at MIT and his colleagues at Commonwealth Fusion Systems demonstrated that, while using relatively low-cost materials that don't require a large amount of space, they could create the most powerful magnetic field of its kind on Earth, a critical component of the prototype reactor they're building in Devens.

"We have come a long way," said Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who compared their advance to similar breakthroughs that made flight possible. "We're a pretty conservative science bunch, but we're pretty confident." With some $2 billion raised in recent years — more than any of the other fusion startups — his company is racing to prove that their prototype, called SPARC, will produce more energy than it consumes in 2025. If they succeed, the company plans to start building their first power plant several years afterward. Ultimately, he said, their goal is to help build 10,000 200-megawatt fusion power plants around the world, enough to replace nearly all fossil fuels. "This is a solution that can scale to the size of the problem that decarbonization requires," he said.
Phil Warburg, a senior fellow at Boston University's Institute for Sustainable Energy, disagrees. "Fusion has been an elusive fantasy for a half-century or more," he tells the Boston Globe. "Along with the technical hurdles, the environmental downsides have not been seriously examined, and the economics are anything but proven... The current wave of excitement about fusion comes at a time when we've barely begun to tap the transformative potential of solar, wind, storage, and energy efficiency — all known to be technically viable, economically competitive, and scalable today. The environmental advocacy community needs to focus on vastly expanding those clean-energy applications, leaving fusion to the scientists until they've got something much more credible to show for their efforts."

But Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts rejected the argument that fusion research detracts from investments in renewables as a "false choice.... We're at a very different moment now, and it's good to have a lot of different horses in the race."

The also article notes that officials at America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission told them federal officials are already holding meetings to discuss how they'd regulate fusion reactors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from HotHardware: During a recent earnings call to discuss its quarterly earnings, Micron explained that the reason DDR5 demand is "significantly exceeding supply" is because suppliers are having a rough time sourcing non-memory components. The insinuation is that Micron can make enough DDR5 chips to satisfy demand, it's just that the other parts that comprise a memory module are not as readily available. The good news is, this should ease a bit next year.

"Across the PC industry, demand for DDR5 products is significantly exceeding supply due to non-memory component shortages impacting memory suppliers' ability to build DDR5 modules. We expect these shortages to moderate through 2022, enabling bit shipments of DDR5 to grow to meaningful levels in the second half of calendar 2022," Micron CEO and president Sanjay Mehrotra said during the call. Micron did not get into specifics about the components that are in short supply, but it likely means power management ICs (PMICs), voltage regulating modules (VRMs), and possibly even printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are strained right now. It's those first two parts that are the most likely culprits, though. DDR5 employs both components rather than continue to have the motherboard handle those chores, and it will take some time for the industry to adjust.

Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. From a report: In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described today in the journal Materials Today. [...] The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system that starts with a larger cylinder containing all the components and then heats it to just below its melting point. The material is drawn through a narrow opening to compress all the parts to a fraction of their original diameter, while maintaining all the original arrangement of parts.

While others have attempted to make batteries in fiber form, [says MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyey, a lead author on the paper], those were structured with key materials on the outside of the fiber, whereas this system embeds the lithium and other materials inside the fiber, with a protective outside coating, thus directly making this version stable and waterproof. This is the first demonstration of a sub-kilometer long fiber battery which is both sufficiently long and highly durable to have practical applications, he says. The fact that they were able to make a 140-meter fiber battery shows that "there's no obvious upper limit to the length. We could definitely do a kilometer-scale length," he says.

The 140-meter fiber produced so far has an energy storage capacity of 123 milliamp-hours, which can charge smartwatches or phones, he says. The fiber device is only a few hundred microns in thickness, thinner than any previous attempts to produce batteries in fiber form. In addition to individual one-dimensional fibers, which can be woven to produce two-dimensional fabrics, the material can also be used in 3D printing or custom-shape systems to create solid objects, such as casings that could provide both the structure of a device and its power source. To demonstrate this capability, a toy submarine was wrapped with the battery fiber to provide it with power. Incorporating the power source into the structure of such devices could lower the overall weight and so improve the efficiency and range they can achieve.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Hornsea 2 offshore wind farm has produced its first power, Danish energy firm Orsted has said, with the announcement representing a significant milestone in the facility's development. Situated in waters around 89 kilometers off the U.K.'s east coast, the scale of Hornsea 2 is considerable. Spread across an area of 462 km2, it will use 165 turbines from Siemens Gamesa and boast a capacity of more than 1.3 gigawatts. The company says it will power "well over" 1.3 million homes when finished.

The project generated its first power late on Saturday night. According to Orsted, Hornsea 2 will assume the title of "world's largest operating offshore wind farm" once fully operational in 2022. The firm has also described Hornsea 2 as the "world's biggest offshore wind farm." That accolade, the company says, is currently held by Hornsea 1, the "sibling project" of Hornsea 2. "Together, the two projects will be capable of providing enough power for well over 2.3 million homes," Orsted said on Monday. In a statement issued alongside the company's announcement, Patrick Harnett, senior program director for Hornsea 2, said: "From here, we have the finishing line in sight as we install the remaining turbines and continue testing, commissioning, and energizing our wind farm into the new year."

New York-based firm Pliant Energy Systems is building a marine system reminiscent of the cuttlefish with its rippling underwater motion, a report from The Economist reveals. The company's biomimetic machine, called Velox, is based on the principle that propellers are nowhere near as efficient as the fins of sea creatures that are prevalent in nature. Interesting Engineering reports: Unlike propellers, fins and flippers can extend around a sea creature, meaning more propulsion without the need for a large protruding propeller that could get caught or damaged by hitting the seabed. Fins are also flexible, meaning that if they do come in contact with any other object in the sea, they are less likely to get damaged. In an interview with The Economist, an ex-marine biologist and founder of Pliant Energy Systems, Benjamin Pietro Filardo, explained how he is designing submersible machines that are propelled using flexible fin-like materials. He said Velox will produce approximately three times as much thrust per unit energy as the average propeller of a small boat. The system can travel underwater and even come out onto land, using its fins almost like robotic legs. The video below shows Velox skating on ice and swimming in a pool.

Filardo showed his new design to America's Office of Naval Research, leading them to commission a new iteration, called C-Ray, that will be faster and lighter than Velox. C-Ray also won't be tethered, unlike Velox, which is currently controlled via a cable. Autonomous swarms of the machine could eventually be used for missions such as undersea patrols, mine removal, and deepsea exploration and monitoring. [...] Filardo said the system has great potential for scalability, giving the blue whale as an example of a massive sea mammal that uses fins for propulsion. Impressively, he also revealed that he is also working on a concept that would allow his system to moor itself, and then use the undulations of its fins, thanks to the sea current, to recharge. A lot of testing is still needed, but if Filardo's system delivers on its promise, we might eventually see giant mechanical sea beasts silently gliding through the oceans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: The Biden administration has pledged to create a carbon-free energy sector by 2035, but because renewable resources generate only around 19 percent of US electricity as of 2020, climate experts warn that our transition to a green grid future needs to speed up. A group of researchers at Stanford led by Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has set out to prove that a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050 is not only feasible but can be done without any blackouts and at a lower cost than the existing grid. Jacobson is the lead author of a new paper, published in Renewable Energy, which argues that a complete transition to renewable energy -- defined as wind, water, and solar energy -- would benefit the US as a whole and individuals by saving costs, creating jobs, and reducing air pollution and carbon emissions.

They modeled how wind turbines, tidal turbines, geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, rooftop and utility photovoltaic panels, and other sources could generate energy in 2050. A host of different sources powered these projections: Jacobson used data from a weather-climate-air pollution model he first built in 1990, which has been used in numerous simulations since. Individual state and sector energy consumption was taken from the Energy Information Administration. Current fossil fuel energy sources were converted to electric devices that are powered by wind, water, and solar. This was then used to create projections for energy use in 2050. Time-dependent energy supply was matched with demand and storage in a grid integration model for every 30 second interval in 2050 and 2051. The study authors analyzed US regions and countrywide demand until the model produced a solution with what the authors called zero-load loss -- meaning, essentially, no blackouts with 100 percent renewable energy and storage. According to Jacobson, no other study is conducting this kind of modeling, which is unique in part because it checks conditions for any simulation every 30 seconds.

As the cost of renewables falls, researchers predict power companies and consumers will migrate to using renewables. Solar and wind are already half the cost of natural gas. Policy may also motivate adoption -- or hinder it. While the current administration has set out goals for a renewable energy grid, new permits for gas and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico counteract those same efforts. [...] The researchers quantified these benefits by looking at private costs, such as those to individuals or corporations, and social ones, which also include health and climate costs. Zero-emissions leads to few air pollution related deaths and illness, and a reduced toll on the healthcare system. [...] The model cannot address emissions from things like long-distance shipping or aviation, though the authors argue that green hydrogen could be a possible alternative to explore. They did not include nuclear energy or carbon capture, which [Anna-Katharina von Krauland, a PhD candidate in the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford and a co-author of the paper] views as "distractions from getting to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible" because the technologies are costly, unproven, or lacking in their promises. "The best path forward would be to invest in what we know works as quickly as we can," she says -- such as wind, water, and solar energy.