The Motley Fool writes: AMD held just under 18% of the CPU market at the end of 2016 before Ryzen arrived. The latest third-party estimates suggest that the chipmaker now controls close to 37% of the market. Other reliable estimates from the likes of video gaming platform Steam also suggest that AMD has been consistently chipping away at Intel's CPU dominance. And AMD isn't done hammering Intel in CPUs just yet — especially since the arrival of its latest Ryzen 5000 CPUs...

According to AMD's own claims, a high-end Ryzen 5000 processor can deliver a 26% jump in gaming performance over the previous-generation chip. AMD also claims that the chip is 7% faster in gaming performance than the competing Intel chip...

Rumors suggest that Intel may not launch its 12th-generation 10nm Alder Lake processors until the second half of 2021 to compete with AMD's 7nm process. So AMD is likely to continue enjoying a technology lead over Intel, especially considering that it could make the move to a 5nm manufacturing process with the Zen 4 microarchitecture by the end of 2021, according to rumors. As such, don't be surprised to see AMD continuing to eat Intel's market share, and remaining a top growth stock in the future thanks to a combination of improved CPU sales and stronger pricing power.

The official public repository for CUPS, an Apple open-source project widely used for printing on Linux, is all-but dormant since the lead developer left Apple at the end of 2019. From a report: Apple adopted CUPS for Mac OS X in 2002, and hired its author Michael Sweet in 2007, with Cupertino also acquiring the CUPS source code. Sweet continued to work on printing technology at Apple, including CUPS, until December 2019 when he left to start a new company. Asked at the time about the future of CUPS, he said: "CUPS is still owned and maintained by Apple. There are two other engineers still in the printing team that are responsible for CUPS development, and it will continue to have new bug fix releases (at least) for the foreseeable future." Despite this statement, Linux watcher Michael Larabel noted earlier this week that "the open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020." This contrasts with 355 commits in 2019, when Sweet still worked at Apple, and 348 the previous year. We asked Apple about its plans for CUPS and have yet to hear back.

Researchers at the Department of Chemistry, American University, used spinach to make a carbon-rich catalyst that can be used to improve the performance of fuel cells and metal-air batteries. IEEE Spectrum reports: The spinach was a used a precursor for high-performance catalysts required for the oxygen reduction reactions (ORRs) in fuel cells. Traditionally, fuel cells have used platinum-based catalysts, but not only is platinum very expensive and difficult to obtain, it can be vulnerable to chemical poisoning in certain conditions. Consequently, researcher have looked into biomass-derived, carbon-based, catalysts to replace platinum, but there have been bottlenecks in preparing the materials in a cost-effective and non-toxic way. "We were a little bit lucky to pick up spinach," says [Shouzhong Zou], because of its high iron and nitrogen content. "At this point [our method] does require us to add a little bit more nitrogen into the starting material, because even though [spinach] has a lot of nitrogen to begin with, during the preparation process, some of this nitrogen gets lost."

The preparation of the spinach-based catalyst sounds as first suspiciously like a smoothie recipe at first -- wash fresh leaves, pulverize into a juice, and freeze-dry. This freeze-dried juice is then ground into a powder, to which melamine is added as a nitrogen promoter. Salts like sodium chloride and potassium chloride -- "pretty much like the table salt that we use in our kitchen," says Zou -- are also added, necessary for creating pores that increase the surface area available for reactions. Nanosheets are produced from the spinach -- melamine -- salt composites by pyrolyzing them at 900 C a couple of times. "Obviously... we can optimize how we prepare this material [to make it more efficient]."

An efficient catalyst means a faster, more efficient reaction. In the case of fuel cells, this can increase the energy output of batteries. This is where the porosity of the nanosheets helps. "Even though we call them nanosheets," Zou says, "when they are stacked together, it's not like a stack of paper that is very solid." The addition of salts to create tiny holes that allows oxygen to penetrate the material rather than access only the outer surfaces. "We need to make it porous enough that... all the active sites can be used." The other factor that favorably disposed the American University team towards spinach was that it is a renewable source of biomass. "Sustainability is a very important factor in our consideration," says Zou. The big question to explore, he adds, is how can we avoid competition "with the dinner table." (Biofuel production has already raised concerns about food crops being diverted away from hungry mouths.) "And the second is, how do we keep the carbon footprint down in terms of his catalyst preparation... because currently we do use high temperatures in our preparation procedure?" If we can find different ways to do these to achieve the same type of material, that will cut back the energy consumption and reduce significantly the carbon footprint."

If you're one of the Google Drive users who is taking advantage of unlimited storage for $12 per month on G Suite, beware. Workspace is replacing G Suite and offers more features for those who do, but you might not want to switch: unlimited storage on Workspace will cost you at least $20 a month. Jaron Schneider reports via PetaPixel: Currently G Suite business subscribers (which do not need to be actual businesses, but any individuals looking for greater storage capacity) can access unlimited storage on Drive for just $12 a month. For photographers with considerable backlogs of photos, this was a relatively inexpensive cloud storage backup solution. Google states in its plans that groups using this particular plan with four or fewer members are supposed to be only eligible for 1 TB of storage each, but in testing by Android Police and others have shown that Google has never enforced that limit.

Unfortunately, this appears to be changing with the transition to Workplace. According to the company's list of plans, which you can view here, there is a limit of 2 TB for individual Business Standard users and 5 TB per person on its new Business Plus plan. To get more, you will have to go to the Enterprise level which Google says requires you to work directly with a Google sales representative (this appears to actually be the case), but Google does promise they can offer as much storage "as you need" in this category. That doesn't explicitly say unlimited, but should realistically operate as such for now. Pricing in that Enterprise level will cost you $20 per month ($30 per month on Enterprise Plus), nearly double the previous price for the same amount of storage. For now, G Suite customers will be able to stick with their current plans if they do not switch to Workplace, but Google is intending to transition all users over to the new system eventually.

Apple has announced a new version of its HomePod smart speaker, the $99 HomePod mini -- a smaller version of the speaker that shrinks down the original model into a more compact size. The Verge reports: Like the full-size HomePod, the HomePod mini still features a mesh fabric exterior in both black and white colors, along with a small display on top to show the Siri waveform and volume controls. The new model is more of a short, spherical shape, however, instead of the oblong design of the original. The HomePod mini features one main driver, two passive radiators, and an "acoustic waveguide" on the bottom. The new HomePod mini also features an Apple S5 chip, which Apple says allows for "computational audio" processing to adjust how your music sounds 180 times per second. Multiple HomePod mini speakers can play music in sync and "intelligently" create stereo pairing when placed in the same room. Apple is also using the U1 chips that it debuted in last year's iPhones to create a better Handoff experience later this year. Apple said third-party support is coming later this year for Pandora, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

There's also a new "Intercom" feature that allows for customers with multiple HomePod devices in different rooms to communicate throughout the house. "Intercom messages will also appear on connected iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches (although they won't immediately play out loud like they do on the HomePod mini)," adds The Verge. Preorders for the HomePod Mini start on November 6th and shipping begins on November 16th.

At the end of September, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other: a small autonomous surveillance drone, called Ring Always Home Cam, and a palm recognition scanner, called Amazon One. "Both products aim to make security and authentication more convenient -- but for privacy-conscious consumers, they also raise red flags," reports Wired. From the report: Amazon's latest data-hungry innovations are not launching in a vacuum. The company also owns Ring, whose smart doorbells have had myriad security issues and have been widely criticized for bringing unprecedented surveillance to traditionally semi-private spaces. Meanwhile, the biometric data that Amazon Go will collect is particularly sensitive, because unlike a password you can't simply change it if a hacker steals it or it gets unintentionally exposed. Amazon has a strong record for maintaining the security of its massive cloud infrastructure, but there have been lapses across the sprawling business. The stakes are already phenomenally high; the more data the company holds the more risk it takes on. "Amazon has a major genomics cloud platform, so maybe they hold your DNA and now they're going to have your palm as well? Plus all of these devices inside your house. And your purchase history on Prime. That's a lot of information. That's a lot of personal information," says Nina Alli, executive director of Defcon's Biohacking Village and a health care security researcher. "When you give away this data you're giving a company the ability to access and manage you, not the other way around."
[...]
Additionally, while companies like Apple and Samsung have brought biometric fingerprint and face scanners to the masses by making sure the data never leaves the device, Amazon One takes the opposite approach. Kumar writes that "palm images are never stored" on Amazon One itself. Instead they are encrypted and sent to a special high security area of Amazon's cloud to be converted into "palm signatures" based on the unique and distinctive features of a user's hand. Then the service compares that signature to the one on file in each user's account and returns a match or no match answer back down to the device. It makes sense that Amazon doesn't want to store databases of people's palm data locally on publicly accessible machines that could be manipulated. But the system could perhaps have been set up to generate a palm signature locally, delete the image of a person's hand, and send only the encrypted signature on for analysis. The fact that all of those palm images will be going for cloud processing creates a single point of failure. "I'm worried that people could read your palm vein pattern in other ways and construct an analog. It's only a matter of time," says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a longtime security and privacy researcher and a senior vice president at the nonprofit Internet Society. "Both the home drone and the palm payment are going to rely heavily on the cloud and on the security provided by that cloud storage. That's worrying because it means all the risks -- rogue employees, government data requests, data breach, secondary uses -- associated with data collection on the server-side could be possible. I'm much more comfortable having a biometric template stored locally rather than on a server where it might be exfiltrated."

An Amazon spokesperson told WIRED, "We are confident that the cloud is highly secure. In addition, Amazon One palm data is stored separately from other personal identifiers, and is uniquely encrypted with its own keys in a secure zone in the cloud."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One in 10 new cars sold across Europe this year will be electric or plug-in hybrid, triple last year's sales levels after carmakers rolled out new models to meet emissions rules, according to projections from green policy group Transport & Environment. The market share of mostly electric cars will rise to 15 percent next year, the group forecasts, as carmakers across the continent race to cut their CO2 levels. The projections are based on sales data for the first half of the year, as well as expected increases as manufacturers scramble to comply with tightening restrictions in 2021.

Under the rules, carmakers must reduce the average emissions from their vehicles to 95g of CO2 per km or face fines that could run into billions of euros. In the first six months of the year, average emissions fell from 122g to 111g, the largest six-month drop in more than a decade. While five percent of the cars sold this year are excluded from the calculations, a concession from the EU to help carmakers ease into the new regime, every vehicle counts towards the total from next year. [...] Several carmakers are still lagging behind the new rules, according to T&E calculations, requiring a late spurt of electric sales, or the purchase of credits from a rival that has already exceeded the rules if they are to avoid large fines. The system allows those who have generated "credits" by selling pure electric cars or plug-in hybrids to sell them to rivals that are struggling to meet the rules. The value of credits falls over time.

Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7% from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis. From a report by the research firm: This is the highest growth the market has seen in the past 10 years. After a weak Q1, the recovery in Q2 continued into Q3 this year, and it even grew on top of a strong market the previous year. Global notebook shipments touched 64 million units (almost as much as the record high of Q4 2011 when notebook shipments were 64.6 million) as demand continued to surge due to second waves of COVID-19 in many countries and companies continued to invest in longer-term transitions to remote working. Shipments of notebooks and mobile workstations grew 28.3% year-on-year. This contrasted with desktop and desktop workstations, which saw shipments shrink by 26.0%. Lenovo regained top spot in the PC market in Q3 with growth of 11.4% and shipments surpassed the 19 million mark. HP posted a similarly impressive growth of 11.9% to secure second place with 18.7 million units shipped. Dell, in third, suffered a small decline of 0.5% in shipments from a year ago. Apple and Acer rounded out the top five rankings, posting stellar growth of 13.2% and 15.0% respectively.

The world's biggest provider of wind and solar energy is now more valuable than the giant oil company Exxon Mobil, "once the largest public company on Earth," reports Bloomberg: NextEra ended Wednesday with market value of $145 billion, topping Exxon's $142 billion... NextEra has emerged as the world's most valuable utility, largely by betting big on renewables, especially wind. Exxon has seen its fortunes shift in the other direction as electric vehicles become more widespread and the fight against climate change takes on more urgency. "People believe that renewable energy is a growth story and that oil and gas is a declining story," said Jigar Shah, co-founder of the green financier Generate.

NextEra had about 18 gigawatts of wind and solar farms at the end of last year, enough to power 13.5 million homes. And it's expanding significantly, with contracts to add another 12 gigawatts of renewables. Its shares have surged more than 20% this year. At the same time, Exxon's shares have tumbled more than 50% as the pandemic quashed global demand for fuels. The company's second-quarter loss was its worst of the modern era and, in August, Exxon was ejected from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company was worth $525 billion in 2007, more than three times its current value.
Peter McNally, an energy expert at research firm Third Bridge, tells ExtremeTech that it all comes down to the cheaper price of renewable energy.

"Alternative power is now getting competitive with traditional forms of electricity, coal and natural gas fired generation."

"To fight a disease that thrives on human contact, robots have increasingly taken the place of vulnerable humans," writes Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle: Sentry robots have performed screenings and patrolled streets, looking for lockdown violators. Avatars have allowed family members to visit loved ones in senior homes and enabled graduating students to walk across the stage. In hospitals, germ zappers have blasted UV-C light through hospital rooms, while doctor assistant bots have checked on patients. This photo essay takes a tour of essential robot workers during the time of COVID.
"Robots don't need masks, can be easily disinfected, and, of course, they don't get sick," the article notes, noting they're being deployed "all over the world." Not all robots operate autonomously — many, in fact, require direct human supervision, and most are limited to simple, repetitive tasks. But robot makers say the experience they've gained during this trial-by-fire deployment will make their future machines smarter and more capable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechXplore: After decades of embracing fossil fuels, Wall Street appears to be shifting its allegiance to renewable energy, a sharp turn apparent in the contrasting fortunes of NextEra Energy and Exxon Mobil. Florida-based NextEra is the biggest producer of wind energy in North America and among the biggest solar producers in the United States. It has overtaken the global oil giant as the most valuable US energy company by market value. NextEra's market capitalization has surged to $145 billion compared with ExxonMobil's $142 billion, another emblem of the Texas giant's diminished status after it was bumped this year from the prestigious Dow Jones index after more than 90 years. In 2019, NextEra reported $3.8 billion in profits on $19 billion in revenues. During the same period, ExxonMobil garnered $14.3 billion in profits on revenues of $265 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel wants to build his startup Redwood Materials into the world's top battery recycling company and one of the largest battery materials companies, he said at a technology conference Wednesday. Straubel aims to leverage two partnerships, one with Panasonic, the Japanese battery manufacturer that is teamed with Tesla at the Nevada gigafactory, and one announced weeks ago with e-commerce giant Amazon. With production of electric vehicles and batteries about to explode, Straubel says his ultimate goal is to "make a material impact on sustainability, at an industrial scale."

Established in early 2017, Redwood this year will recycle more than 1 gigawatt-hours' worth of battery scrap materials from the gigafactory -- enough to power more than 10,000 Tesla cars. That is a fraction of the half-million vehicles Tesla expects to build this year. At the company's Battery Day in late September, Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was looking at recycling batteries to supplement the supply of raw materials from mining as Tesla escalates vehicle production. [...] Straubel's broader plan is to dramatically reduce mining of raw materials such as nickel, copper and cobalt over several decades by building out a circular or "closed loop" supply chain that recycles and recirculates materials retrieved from end-of-life vehicle and grid storage batteries and from cells scrapped during manufacturing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Mercedes-Benz teases a new super-efficient electric car concept, the Vision EQXX, with more than 750 miles of range on a single charge. At Daimler's latest company update, the automaker teased a new technical program to develop "the longest-range and highest-efficiency electric car the world has ever seen." Mercedes-Benz's head of research and development, Markus Schafer, commented: "We have set up a group of our engineers to take on an extraordinary task: to build the longest-range and highest-efficiency electric car the world has ever seen. This is a serious project, chasing next-generation technologies. We intend to incorporate the learning into the next generation of series production cars."

The German automaker said that the electric vehicle should be able to travel from Beijing to Shanghai, a journey that covers about 750 miles (1,200 km), on a single charge. This incredible range will be achieved through efficiency improvements rather than just a bigger battery pack. Daimler noted that the program will be used to test new technologies to improve efficiency and bring those to production cars: "While Vision EQXX is a technology program, it is expected to result in innovations that will quickly make their way into series production cars." They haven't disclosed when they plan to unveil the Vision EQXX electric prototype.

Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has today announced the company's next generation mainstream Ryzen processor. From a report: The new family, known as the Ryzen 5000 series, includes four parts and supports up to sixteen cores. The key element of the new product is the core design, with AMD's latest Zen 3 microarchitecture, promising a 19% raw increase in performance-per-clock, well above recent generational improvements. The new processors are socket-compatible with existing 500-series motherboards, and will be available at retail from November 5th. AMD is putting a clear marker in the sand, calling one of its halo products as 'The World's Best Gaming CPU.' With the new Ryzen 5000 series, AMD is keeping a similar structure to the previous generation. The first four processors to market will include products in the key Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 segments, as well as a pair of high-performance parts with Ryzen 9. These will stretch from six cores to sixteen cores, with increased frequencies and increased performance-per-clock, but with no additional increase in power. The processors are still chiplet-based, with one chiplet having either six or eight cores. Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 will have one chiplet, while Ryzen 9 will have two chiplets -- the easy way to identify this is through the amount of L3 cache each processor has. Full details here.

Intel's 10th Gen Comet Lake S desktop CPUs debuted earlier this year, with the Core i9-10900K in particular offering sizeable gains in gaming performance from the previous generation. The mid-range Core i7-10700K and Core i5-10600K also come with exciting gains in a lot of areas, but one downside is that the 10th Gen designs don't support PCIe 4.0, unlike their AMD counterparts. Intel is aiming to fix that with the 11th Gen Rocket Lake series. The chip manufacturer has confirmed that the 11th Gen Rocket Lake series will make its debut in Q1 2021, and that it will include PCIe 4.0 support. From a report: Intel didn't go into architectural details on Rocket Lake, but recent leaks give us a high-level overview of the platform. The Rocket Lake S desktop designs will be based on a 14nm node -- much like Intel's last four generations -- but Intel is introducing a new Willow Cove architecture that should deliver decent gains over the current 10th Gen platform. In particular, Rocket Lake will deliver significant IPC gains thanks to the switch to Willow Cove, with Intel once again able to leverage 5.0GHz boost frequencies because of the mature 14nm platform.

French company Nawa technologies says it's already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long. NewAtlas reports: Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits. It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today's typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they're typically stuck on in a jumbled, "tangled spaghetti" fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.

Nawa's vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else. The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions -- the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery -- since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. "The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometres through the lithium material," Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, "instead of micrometres with a plain electrode."

According to Taiwanese publication DigiTimes, Qualcomm is planning to launch new premium smartphones under its own brand name. It's reportedly partnering with ASUS to manufacture and distribute the devices globally. HotHardware reports: It would appear that Qualcomm's intent is to showcase ultra-premium experiences for Snapdragon Android phones in the market. This would in effect be a "super phone" of sorts that is designed by and powered by Qualcomm, but manufactured by ASUS. It would likely be a high-end, Snapdragon 875 flagship smartphone with all the bells and whistles that would compete with the best that other Android OEMs have to offer (we'd expect a stock Android experience as well). The most obvious comparison would be Microsoft's Surface line of premium hardware used to showcase new ideas and form factors.

ASUS is already a known quantity in the Android smartphone market, and produces its own line of gaming smartphones like the lightning-fast ROG Phone 3, which is powered by Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 865+ SoC. However, ASUS would also be producing a device that would be directly competing against its own high-end offerings. It would seemingly make sense for Qualcomm to announce this new partnership and gaming smartphone brand at the upcoming Snapdragon Tech Summit, which will be held virtually December 1st through December 2nd. At that time, Qualcomm is expected to launch its Snapdragon 875 flagship SoC along with a new generation of Snapdragon 700 Series mid-range SoCs.

Sony's recently-released PS5 teardown video gives us a closer look at the PS5, and confirms that the speed of the console's Wi-Fi antenna and USB ports are faster than those available in the Xbox Series X. GamesRadar+ reports: As spotted by VG247, the teardown confirms a few new hardware details about PS5. For starters, we know the console's Wi-Fi antenna supports the new Wi-Fi 6 standard, which allows for a new maximum speed of 9.6 Gbps -- more than twice the 3.5 Gbps ceiling for Wi-Fi 5. This doesn't mean your PS5 will be able to use all of that to send your download speeds through the roof. The practical benefit is that Wi-Fi 6 routers can better distribute all that speed to a bunch of devices at once, and to maintain their performance over time. So if you have a Wi-Fi 6 router and a home full of connected devices, there's a good chance you will notice the improvement. For reference, the Xbox Series X Wi-Fi antenna supports Wi-Fi 5.

As for the USB ports, we already knew that PS5 has a USB-C port and a USB-A port on the front. The teardown video confirms the type-C port will support 10Gbps transfer speeds, and it confirms that the two USB-A ports on the back will as well. The type-A port on the front isn't as quick, so if you plan to plug in an external PS5 SSD make sure you use one of the ports on the back. Xbox Series X doesn't include any type-C ports, and all of its type-A ports run at the standard 5gbps speed. If you know that fast connection speeds will make a big difference to your play experience, you may want to lean toward PS5 -- but as always, the biggest deciding factor should be what games you want to play and how well each console plays them. The Verge also notes the PS5 includes removable sides, dust catchers, and storage expansion.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced today that the company expects shortages for the Nvidia RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards will continue to for the remainder of the year. The Verge reports: During a Q&A with press to cover its GTC announcements, Huang responded to the continuous shortages for both graphics cards. "I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year," Huang said. The RTX 3080 and 3090 had extremely rough launches, with both cards selling out within minutes of preorders going live, but Huang says the issue is not with supply but rather the demand of both GPUs. "Even if we knew about all the demand, I don't think it's possible to have ramped that fast," Huang said. "We're ramping really really hard. Yields are great, the product's shipping fantastically, it's just getting sold out instantly." Nvidia has apologized for the launch of the RTX 3080 and the limited supply of the cards. The company plans to launch the $499 RTX 3070, but the release date has been pushed to October 29th "in the hopes that the company can work with retailers to get the cards to more customers on launch day," reports The Verge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: After analyzing the most recent data from two of America's largest electricity markets -- ERCOT in Texas and PJM in the Northeast -- the Rocky Mountain Institute has come to a startling conclusion. Renewables are muscling in on natural gas as the preferred choice for new electricity generation. In fact, according to RMI, what happened to coal is now happening to gas. What is needed, the organization argues, is a move away from the monopoly markets that have been the norm in the utility industry for more than 100 years and toward more open competition. Because when renewables compete head to head with thermal generation, they win hands down 95% of the time.

The data doesn't lie. RMI looked at the interconnection queues for both ERCOT and PJM and found over the past two years there has been a dramatic shift away from building new gas fired generating plants and toward more renewable energy projects. Interconnection queues track new generation projects proposed to be added to regional grid. That information provides a leading indicator of market trends for new power plants. Not all projects in these queues are ultimately built, but the mix of resources in the queue represents the investments the market is prioritizing, according to RMI. [...] RMI finds that since 2018, the queue for clean energy projects has more than doubled while the queue for gas projects has been cut in half. In all, more than $30 billion worth of gas projects have been canceled or abandoned. Currently, the capacity of wind, solar, and storage projects slated for construction in ERCOT and PJM is ten times greater than for new gas projects. "Though COVID-19 may be contributing to some recent decline in planned gas additions, it's not the only driver," says RMI. "The trend has been building for years and investors more broadly are now waking up to the implications. For example, just five years ago in ERCOT, the interconnection queue contained an even split between proposed gas and renewables generation capacity. However, gas capacity in the queue started falling steadily in 2015, well before the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic downturn. Meanwhile, renewable energy and storage projects in the queue have continued to grow even during the pandemic."

"Therefore, it is likely that a more fundamental driver is at play -- raw economics, driven by the continually falling costs of clean energy and the associated risks of investment in new gas-fired capacity."