An anonymous reader shares a report: Lenovo has dumped a whole bunch of new ThinkPads into the world, and there's some exciting stuff in there. We're getting a brand-new ThinkPad X13s powered by Snapdragon chips, a fifth-generation ThinkPad X1 Extreme with a WQXGA 165Hz screen option, and new additions to the P-series and T-series as well. The news I'm personally most excited about is the screen shape. A few months ago, Lenovo told me that much of its portfolio would be moving to the 16:10 aspect ratio this year. They appear to be keeping their word. Across the board, the new models are 16:10 -- taller and roomier than they were in their 16:9 eras. Some news that's a bit more... intriguing is the all-new ThinkPad X13s, which is the first laptop to feature the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform. Qualcomm made some lofty claims about this platform upon its release, including "60 percent greater performance per watt" over competing x86 platforms and "multi-day battery life." The ThinkPad X13s will run an Arm version of Windows 11, with its x64 app emulation support. The P-series models and Intel T-series models will all be here in April, with prices ranging from $1,399 to $1,419.

This week the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming announced plans for a "hydrogen hub," reports the Associated Press.

The states hope to use $8 billion in recently approved federal infrastructure funding to make hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — "more available and useful as clean-burning fuel for cars, trucks and trains." Hydrogen can be derived from water using an electric current and when burned emits only water vapor as a byproduct. The fuel could theoretically reduce greenhouse emissions and air pollution, depending on how it's obtained. As with electric vehicles, however, hydrogen's potential has been limited by infrastructure. Lack of fueling stations limits the market for hydrogen-fueled vehicles. Few hydrogen-fueled vehicles limits investment in producing and moving hydrogen....

Critics point out that as it's now produced, hydrogen isn't green, carbon-free or unlimited. Currently nearly all hydrogen commercially produced in the U.S. comes not from water but natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While advocates say using fossil fuels to produce hydrogen now can help to develop a clean industry later, environmentalists are skeptical. "It's essentially a push for expanded oil and gas development. More oil and gas development is completely at odds with the need to confront the climate crisis and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels," Jeremy Nichols with the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based environmental group WildEarth Guardians said by email.

Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming rank seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, for U.S. onshore gas production. Utah also is significant gas-producing state, according to the Energy Information Administration.

America's power grid consists of 3,000 public and private sector power companies, with 55,000 substations scattered across the country. On the CBS News show 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker notes that each grid hold grid-powering transformers — then tells the story of "the most serious attack on our power grid in history" on the night of April 16, 2013: For 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain link fence.

Jon Wellinghoff: They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation.

At the time, Jon Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the U.S. high voltage transmission system.... [T]he attackers had reconnoitered the site and marked firing positions with piles of rocks. That night they broke into two underground vaults and cut off communications coming from the substation.

Jon Wellinghoff: Then they went from these vaults, across this road, over into a pasture area here. There were at least four or five different firing positions.

Bill Whitaker: No real security?

Jon Wellinghoff: There was no security at all, really.

They aimed at the narrow cooling fins, causing 17 of 21 large transformers to overheat and stop working.

Jon Wellinghoff: They hit them 90 times, so they were very accurate. And they were doing this at night, with muzzle flash in their face.

Someone outside the plant heard gunfire and called 911. The gunmen disappeared without a trace about a minute before a patrol car arrived. The substation was down for weeks, but fortunately PG&E had enough time to reroute power and avoid disaster.

Bill Whitaker: If they had succeeded, what would've happened?

Jon Wellinghoff: Could've brought down all of Silicon Valley.

Bill Whitaker: We're talking Google, Apple; all these guys--

Jon Wellinghoff: Yes, yes. That's correct.

Bill Whitaker: Who do you think this could have been?

Jon Wellinghoff: I don't know. We don't know if they were a nation state. We don't know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could in fact plan out this kind of a very sophisticated attack....

A few months before the assault on Metcalf, Jon Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts... The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations....

In 2016, an eco terrorist in Utah shot up a large transformer, triggering a blackout. He said he'd planned to hit five substations in one day to shut down the West Coast. In 2020, the FBI uncovered a white supremacist plot called "lights out" to simultaneously attack substations around the country.
While the threats can also come from the internet, America's deputy national security advisor for cyber (formerly at the NSA) tells the reporter "We've taken any information we have about malicious software or tactics that the Russian government has used, shared that with the private sector with very practical advice of how to protect against it."

The reporter later spoke to the president's homeland security advisor, who points out there's no specific national regulation for the power plants, arguing that one of the system's strengths is "the resources for energy are different in different regions."

But they also acknowledged the federal government is now setting standards "in a variety of arenas."

Countries imposing sanctions on Russia also depend on it for oil and natural gas, notes Slate's web editor.

"Noah J. Gordon, an adviser at the Berlin-based, climate-focused think tank Adelphi, thinks there's an opening here for Europe to take a different route — to pursue more energy self-sufficiency not by building out gas reserves, but by expanding its renewable energy sources at a faster pace." Noah Gordon: [O]nly about 15 percent of Germany's huge gas consumption — almost all imports — is used in power production, and only 15 percent of German power is generated from gas. Most of that gas from Russia or elsewhere is used for heating buildings and in industry.... I think this crisis has really changed the terms of debate. There's a lot of talk today on massive European mobilization to build heat pumps so that Germany and the rest of Europe could heat their buildings with electricity instead of gas, and to renovate buildings for energy efficiency. This is a thing called the EU Renovation Wave, which is a buzzword that can now really get going....

[T]he answer is to reduce fossil fuel use as much as we can. There might not be a wartime mobilization to build weapons for this conflict, but there could be to build heat pumps and to renovate buildings. That's really the way out of this, and to get the clean energy to back it up.... Building a heat pump today isn't going to cut emissions on its own, and you need clean electricity to power the heat pumps, or you haven't made that much progress. But at least with heat pumps and efficiency, you're not locking in future fossil fuel use....

[Y]ou could get a paradigm shift after this, like we did after 1973 and the Arab oil embargo with a greater focus on alternative energy, such as nuclear, and an energy efficiency drive back then in the EU and Japan and even the U.S. in terms of car fuel economy standards.

"Volkswagen AG has lost hope that many of its roughly 4,000 vehicles aboard a cargo ship that caught fire last week in the Atlantic can be saved," Bloomberg reported Friday, citing estimates that the total cargo loss for the Felicity Ace could exceed a third of a billion dollars.

"The blaze is believed to have lasted more than a week after the Panama-flagged ship's crew members were evacuated and it was left adrift." VW's Golf compact cars and ID.4 electric crossovers were among the vehicles aboard the ship, according to an internal email last week from the automaker's U.S. operation. Headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, the group manufactures cars under brands including VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini — all of which were on the ship.
Earlier this week Qz.com argued that the fire was being fueled by lithium-ion batteries. Slashdot reader McGruber shared their report: It's not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place — a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires — but the batteries are keeping the flames going now.

A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause. [Last] Saturday, João Mendes CabeÃas, captain of the port of Faial, the nearest Azorean island, told Reuters that the batteries in the ship's cargo are "keeping the fire alive...." Large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process. Pouring water onto the Felicity Ace wouldn't put out a lithium-ion battery fire, CabeÃas told Reuters, and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable.

Electric vehicle fires are rare, but pose their own kind of flammability risk, and one that becomes heightened as EVs go mainstream. Large numbers of EVs grouped together, as when they are transported by cargo ship, or electric buses parked in an overnight lot, raise the risk that one flaming battery could ignite a chain reaction in adjacent batteries. According to a research proposal at the National Academy of Sciences' Transportation Research Board, "Lithium-ion battery fire risks are currently undermanaged in transit operations."

There have been more than 35 large lithium-ion battery fires since 2018, Paul Christensen, an expert in lithium fires, told the Financial Times, including a 13-ton Tesla megapack storage battery in Victoria Australia that burned for three days. An electric ferry in Norway caught fire in 2019, and in April 2021, a battery fire at a Beijing mall killed two firefighters.

In addition, car-carrying ships and ferries can face higher risks from fires, according to insurer Allianz Global's head of marine risk. Due to the internal areas not being divided to make it easier to transport cars, when a fire starts it can spread more easily.

Redwood Materials, founded by ex-Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel, is launching an electric vehicle battery-recycling program in California. Automakers Ford and Volvo are the first to partner with the Carson City, Nevada-based company. Protocol reports: Redwood Materials announced in a press release this week that it will be collecting and recycling hybrid and EV battery packs at the end of their useful life into new battery materials. It says it will accept all lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries in the state of California. Though hybrids have been around for decades, we're still a few years out from the first major wave of EV getting retired from the road. But Redwood Materials is not alone in getting a head start on developing recycling technology and infrastructure to deal with the coming influx of tapped-out batteries. Last year, Massachusetts-based startup Ascend Elements announced a partnership with Honda to provide the automaker with new cathodes made from recycled lithium-ion batteries, with plans to build the largest battery recycling plant in North America.

Redwood Materials currently recycles more than 6 gigawatt hours of batteries each year, enough for 60,000 EVs, according to the company. Volvo is aiming for its lineup to be fully electric by 2030 and be a circular business by 2040, something battery recycling will help it achieve. Ford's carbon-neutral target date is 2050, and the company had previously invested $50 million in Redwood Materials. "It goes without saying that California is in the front lines of climate change," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in the company's promotional video. "With raging wildfires and record droughts, we know there's no time to waste."

echo123 shares a report from the Washington Post: The U.S. Postal Service finalized plans Wednesday to purchase up to 148,000 gasoline-powered mail delivery trucks (Warning: paywalled; alternative source), defying Biden administration officials' objections that the multibillion dollar contract would undercut the nation's climate goals. The White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency asked the Postal Service this month to reassess its plan to replace its delivery fleet with 90% gas-powered trucks and 10% electric vehicles, at a cost of as much as $11.3 billion. The contract, orchestrated by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, offers only a 0.4-mile-per-gallon fuel economy improvement over the agency's current fleet.

Federal climate science officials said the Postal Service vastly underestimated the emissions of its proposed fleet of "Next Generation Delivery Vehicles," or NGDVs, and accused the mail agency of fudging the math of its environmental studies to justify such a large purchase of internal combustion engine trucks. But DeJoy, a holdover from the Trump administration, has called his agency's investment in green transportation "ambitious," even as environmental groups and even other postal leaders have privately questioned it. [...] Environmental advocates assailed the agency's decision, saying it would lock in decades of climate-warming emissions and worsen air pollution. The Postal Service plans call for the new trucks, built by Oshkosh Defense, to hit the streets in 2023 and remain in service for at least 20 years.

DeJoy said in a statement that the agency was open to pursuing more electric vehicles if "additional funding - from either internal or congressional sources -- becomes available." But he added that the agency had "waited long enough" for new vehicles. The White House and EPA had asked the Postal Service to conduct a supplemental environmental impact statement on the new fleet and to hold a public hearing on its procurement plan. The Postal Service rejected those requests: Mark Guilfoil, the agency's vice president of supply management, said they "would not add value" to the mail service's analysis. Now that the Postal Service has finalized it agreement with Oshkosh, environmentalists are expected to file lawsuits challenging it on the grounds that the agency's environmental review failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. They will probably base their case on the litany of problems Biden administration officials previously identified with the agency's technical analysis.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Three men pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a plot to attack power grids in the United States, which they believed could lead to economic and civil unrest and create the opportunity for white leaders to rise, federal prosecutors said. The men, Christopher Brenner Cook, 20, of Columbus, Ohio; Jonathan Allen Frost, 24, of West Lafayette, Ind., and of Katy, Texas; and Jackson Matthew Sawall, 22, of Oshkosh, Wis., each pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Columbus on Wednesday to one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. They will each face up to 15 years in prison when they are sentenced. A date has not been scheduled.

In fall 2019, Mr. Frost and Mr. Cook met in an online chat group, and they began talking about the possibility of attacking a power grid, according to plea agreements. Within weeks, the two men began making efforts to recruit others and began sharing reading material that promoted white supremacy and neo-Nazism. By late 2019, Mr. Sawall, a friend of Mr. Cook's, also joined the efforts, prosecutors said. As part of their plot, each man focused on substations in different regions of the country, and how to attack the power grids with rifles, according to court documents. The three men discussed that by knocking out power across the country for an extended period, civil unrest would spread, a race war could break out and the next Great Depression could be induced, according to court documents.

In February 2020, the three men met in Columbus for more talks about their plot, according to court documents. When they met, Mr. Frost gave Mr. Cook an AR-47, and the two men trained with the rifle at a shooting range, according to court documents. Mr. Frost also gave Mr. Cook and Mr. Sawall suicide necklaces that he had filled with fentanyl, which were to be ingested if they were caught by the police, according to court documents. While they were in Columbus, Mr. Sawall and Mr. Cook bought spray paint and used it to write the phrase "Join the Front" on a swastika flag under a bridge at a park, according to court documents. The men had more plans to spread propaganda while they were in Ohio until they encountered the police during a traffic stop, during which Mr. Sawall ingested his suicide necklace but survived, according to a plea agreement. The F.B.I. searched the homes of the three men in August 2020. Agents found multiple firearms, chemicals that could have been used to create an explosive device, and Nazi-related books and videos, according to court documents. Samuel Shamansky, a lawyer for Mr. Frost, said on Wednesday that Mr. Frost had "accepted complete responsibility for his reprehensible conduct."

"He has completely disavowed the racist viewpoints previously embraced," Mr. Shamansky said. "Regrettably, Mr. Frost fell prey to the misinformation espoused on the internet and now recognizes how dangerous the medium can be. Moreover, Mr. Frost has committed himself toward rehabilitation and doing everything within his power to remedy his misdeeds."

"Slashdot has always had an interest in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which CNN describes as 'the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster,'" writes Slashdot reader DevNull127. "Today, CNN is reporting that Chernobyl has been captured by Russian troops." From the report: Troops overran the plant on the first day of Russia's multi-pronged invasion of Ukraine, a spokesperson for the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, Yevgeniya Kuznetsov, told CNN. "When I came to the office today in the morning (in Kyiv), it turned out that the (Chernobyl nuclear power plant) management had left. So there was no one to give instructions or defend," she said.

Earlier Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russian forces were attempting to wrest control of the nuclear plant. "Russian occupation forces are trying to seize the Chernobyl (nuclear power plant). Our defenders are sacrificing their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated," Zelensky tweeted."This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe." The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry echoed the President's warning, raising the specter of another nuclear disaster in the city. "In 1986, the world saw the biggest technological disaster in Chernobyl," the ministry tweeted. "If Russia continues the war, Chernobyl can happen again in 2022." "A map shows the power plant is nearly adjacent to the northern border of Ukraine -- so when Russian troops began their invasion, it was one of the first things they encountered," adds DevNull127.

Latest Slashdot stories regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine:
Ukraine War Flashes Neon Warning Lights for Chips
Companies Shut Ukraine Operations and Watch for Sanctions as Russia Attacks
Russia Attacks Ukraine
Twitter Accounts Sharing Video From Ukraine Are Being Suspended When They're Needed Most

Russia's invasion of Ukraine by land, air and sea risks reverberating across the global chip industry and exacerbating current supply-chain constraints. Reuters Breakingviews: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas critical for lasers used in chipmaking and supplies more than 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon, according to estimates from research firm Techcet. About 35% of palladium, a rare metal also used for semiconductors, is sourced from Russia. A full-scale conflict disrupting exports of these elements might hit players like Intel, which gets about 50% of its neon from Eastern Europe, according to JPMorgan. ASML, which supplies machines to semiconductor makers, sources less than 20% of the gases it uses from the crisis-hit countries.

DidgetMaster writes: Hard drive costs now hover around $20 per terabyte (TB). Drives bigger than 20TB are now available. Fast SSDs are more expensive, but the average user can now afford these in TB capacities as well. Yet, we are still using antiquated file systems that were designed decades ago when the biggest drives were much less than a single gigabyte (GB). Their oversized file records and slow directory traversal search algorithms make finding files on volumes that can hold more than 100 million files a nightmare. Rather than flexible tagging systems that could make searches quick and easy, they have things like "extended attributes" that are painfully slow to search on. Indexing services can be built on top of them, but these are not an integral part of the file system so they can be bypassed and become out of sync with the file system itself.

It is time to replace file systems with something better. A local object store that can effectively manage hundreds of millions of files and find things in seconds based on file type and/or tags attached is possible. File systems are usually free and come with your operating system, so there seems to be little incentive for someone to build a new system from scratch, but just like we needed the internet to come along and change everything we need a better data storage manager.

See Didgets for an example of what is possible. In a Substack article, Didgets developer Andy Lawrence argues his system solves many of the problems associated with the antiquated file systems still in use today. "With Didgets, each record is only 64 bytes which means a table with 200 million records is less than 13GB total, which is much more manageable," writes Lawrence. Didgets also has "a small field in its metadata record that tells whether the file is a photo or a document or a video or some other type," helping to dramatically speed up searches.

Do you think it's time to replace file systems with an alternative system, such as Didgets? Why or why not?

Intel launched the first wave of its 12th Gen Alder Lake chips at CES 2022 -- but only for its H-series lineup of chips, destined for the most powerful and power-hungry laptops. And now, it's rolling out the rest of its Alder Lake laptop lineup: the P-series and U-series models it briefly showed off in January, which are set to power the thinner, lighter, and cheaper laptops of 2022. From a report: In total, there are a whopping 20 chips fit for a wide range of hardware across the P-series, U-series (15W), and U-series (9W) categories, with the first laptops powered by the new processors set to arrive in March. Like their more powerful H-series cousins (and the Alder Lake desktop chips that Intel launched in late 2021 and at CES 2022), the new P-series and U-series chips have a lot more cores than 2020's 11th Gen models, with a hybrid architecture approach that combines performance and efficiency cores to maximize both power and battery life. And Intel is promising some big improvements focused around those boosted core counts, touting up to 70 percent better multi-thread performance than previous 11th Gen (and AMD) hardware. The company also says that it wins out in benchmarks against chips like Apple's M1 and M1 Pro (although not the M1 Max), and AMD's Ryzen R7 5800U in tasks like web browsing and photo editing.

Elon Musk said that Tesla is working to make Steam's library of video games work on its onboard vehicle computer. Electrek reports: As we previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle and they recently started building a similar team in Austin. The automaker has been building a video game platform called Tesla Arcade inside its vehicles, and it has been working with video game studios to port games to it. Right now, it is mainly to create some added value to its ownership experience, but Tesla might have bigger plans for gaming inside its vehicles. In preparation for that, the automaker has been releasing more video games in its Tesla Arcade and it has indicated that it might turn it into a business.

Now Musk announced on Twitter today that Tesla is working to make Steam's library of games work directly on Tesla's software instead of porting specific games: "We're working through the general case of making Steam games work on a Tesla vs specific titles. Former is obviously where we should be long-term." In the Twitter thread, Musk reiterated his goal to make Cyberpunk, a demanding game graphic-wise, work on the upcoming Cybertruck.

Microsoft MVP Rudy Ooms has discovered that the built-in Windows data wiping functions leave user data behind in the latest versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11. "This error applies to both local and remote wiping of PCs running Windows 10 version 21H2 and Windows 11 version 21H2," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: Ooms first discovered that there were problems with the disk wipe functionality provided by Microsoft when doing a remote wipe via Microsoft Intune system management. However, he has tested several Windows versions and both local and remote wiping over the weekend to compile the following summary table [embedded in the article]. At the bottom of the table you can see that both Wipe and Fresh Start options appear to work as expected in Windows 10 and 11 version 21H1, but are ineffectual in versions 21H2. Ooms installed and tested these four OSes, with local and remote wipe operations, then checked the results. The most common issue was the leaving behind of user data in a folder called Windows.old on the "wiped" or "fresh start" disk. This is despite Microsoft warning users ahead of the action that "This removes all personal and company data and settings from this device."

In his blog post, Oooms notes that some users might feel assured that their personal data was always stored on a Bitlocker drive. However, when a device is wiped, Bitlocker is removed, and he discovered that the Windows.old folder contained previously encrypted data, now non-encrypted. It was also noted that OneDrive files, which had been marked as "Always Keep on this device" in Windows previously, remained in Windows.old too. Ooms has kindly put together a PowerShell Script to fix this security blunder by Microsoft. One needs to run the script ahead of wiping/resetting your old device. Hopefully Microsoft will step up and fix this faulty behavior in the coming weeks, so you don't need to remember to run third party scripts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last September, Amazon debuted a household robot named Astro that was supposed to usher in -- or at least point to -- a Jetsons-like future. Fifty-three minutes into a press conference otherwise focused on new Ring cameras, a thermostat and a giant Echo speaker with a wall screen, the three-wheeled robot rolled out on stage at the command of Amazon devices chief Dave Limp. With Astro looking on, Limp ticked off the gadget's attributes: advanced computer vision that lets the bot know where it is, home monitoring, media playback and the ability to summon emergency help for elders. Astro would eventually sell for about $1,450, but Limp said people lucky enough to score an invitation could get their hands on one for $1,000 -- or about the price of an iPhone 13 Pro -- and test it out at home.

In a video presentation of the unveiling, Henrik Christensen, a computer science and robotics professor at the University of California at San Diego, said, "Astro is a huge step forward. The next question will be: 'When should I get one?'" A more apt question might have been: When can I get one? Six months later, Astro is tough to find. Hardly anyone is talking about the robot -- which is confounding because early adopters typically love to share their experiences online. A scan for Astro users on YouTube, Twitter and Instagram turned up just two people, who posted brief videos of the bot. Turns out Amazon has so far shipped at most a few hundred Astros, according to people familiar with the situation.

Midwestern fast-food chain White Castle is outsourcing some of its jobs to robots. The hamburger chain announced plans last week to install Miso Robotics' "Flippy 2" in 100 locations. From a report: The Ohio-based chain has been experimenting with the robotic fry cook since September 2020, when the original "Flippy" was installed in a Chicago area restaurant. After upgrading to "Flippy 2" at the original test location in November 2021, White Castle decided to roll out a larger version of the program. "By taking over the work of an entire fry station, Flippy 2 alleviates the pain points that come with back-of-house roles at quick-service restaurants to create a working environment for its human coworkers that maximizes the efficiency of the kitchen," Miso Robotics said in a statement. "The improved workflow allows for the redeployment of team members to focus on creating memorable moments for customers."

"Thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts," reports the Houston Chronicle.

"With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations." From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said.

Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said.

"I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.

"Around this time last year, millions of Texans were shivering without power during one of the coldest spells to hit the central United States," remembers the Washington Post. "For five days, blackouts prevented people from heating their homes, cooking or even sleeping. More than 200 people died in what is considered the nation's costliest winter storm on record, amounting to $24 billion in damages.

"Twelve months later, the state's electrical grid, while improved, is still vulnerable to weather-induced power outages." "If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again," said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "This is still a huge risk for us."

Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy. "Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today," said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation's electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow.

The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people's health....

The team found the actual energy demand decreased significantly by simply shifting to renewable resources, which are more efficient. For the entire United States, total end-use energy demand decreased by around 57 percent. Per capita household annual energy costs were around 63 percent less than a "business as usual" scenario.... In Texas, a complete green transition would reduce the annual average end-use power demand by 56 percent. It also reduces peak loads, or the highest amount of energy one draws from the grid at a time. Jacobson said many homes would also have their own storage and wouldn't need to rely on the grid as much.

The team also found interconnecting electrical grids from different geographic regions can make the power system more reliable and reduce costs. Larger regions are more likely to have the wind blowing, the sun shining or hydroelectric power running somewhere else, which may be able to help fill any supply gaps. "The intermittency of renewable energy declines as you look at larger and larger areas," said Dessler. "If it's not windy in Texas, it could be windy in Iowa. In that case, they could be overproducing power and they could be shipping some of their extra power to us." The study stated costs per unit energy in Texas are 27 percent lower when interconnected with the Midwest grid than when isolated, as it currently is.
Interestingly, long-duration batteries aren't important for grid stability. the team found, since our current 4-hour batteries can just be connected for longer-term storage. Professor Dessler tells the Post we should think of "renewables" as a system which includes storage technology and easily-dispatchable energy solutions.

And the Post adds that a grid powered by renewables "would also produce cleaner air, which could reduce pollution-related deaths by 53,000 people per year and reduce pollution-related illnesses for millions of people in 2050."

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS "is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS's Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust "combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java."

But there's another reason they're promoting Rust: Worldwide, data centers consume about 200 terawatt hours per year. That's roughly 1% of all energy consumed on our planet... [C]loud and hyperscale data centers have been implementing huge energy efficiency improvements, and the migration to that cloud infrastructure has been keeping the total energy use of data centers in balance despite massive growth in storage and compute for more than a decade... [I]s the status quo good enough? Is keeping data center energy use to 1% of worldwide energy consumption adequate..? [Will] innovations in energy efficiency continue to keep pace with growth in storage and compute in the future? Given the explosion we know is coming in autonomous drones, delivery robots, and vehicles, and the incredible amount of data consumption, processing, and machine learning training and inference required to support those technologies, it seems unlikely that energy efficiency innovations will be able to keep pace with demand...

[J]ust like security, sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS customers are responsible for energy efficient choices in storage policies, software design, and compute utilization, while AWS owns efficiencies in hardware, utilization features, and cooling systems.... In the same way that operational excellence, security, and reliability have been principles of traditional software design, sustainability must be a principle in modern software design. That's why AWS announced a sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. What that looks like in practice is choices like relaxing service-level agreements for non-critical functions and prioritizing resource use efficiency. We can take advantage of virtualization and allow for longer device upgrade cycles. We can leverage caching and longer times-to-live whenever possible. We can classify our data and implement automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. When we choose algorithms for cryptography and compression, we can include efficiency in our decision criteria.

Last, but not least, we can choose to implement our software in energy efficient programming languages.

There was a really interesting study a few years ago that looked at the correlation between energy consumption, performance, and memory use.... What the study did is implement 10 benchmark problems in 27 different programming languages and measure execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory use. C and Rust significantly outperformed other languages in energy efficiency. In fact, they were roughly 50% more efficient than Java and 98% more efficient than Python. It's not a surprise that C and Rust are more efficient than other languages. What is shocking is the magnitude of the difference. Broad adoption of C and Rust could reduce energy consumption of compute by 50% — even with a conservative estimate....

No one developer, service, or corporation can deliver substantial impact on sustainability. Adoption of Rust is like recycling; it only has impact if we all participate. To achieve broad adoption, we are going to have to grow the developer community.
That "interesting study" cited also found that both C and Rust execute faster than other programming languages, the blog post points out, so "when you choose to implement your software in Rust for the sustainability and security benefits, you also get the optimized performance of C."

And the post also notes Linus Torvalds' recent acknowledgement that while he really loves C, it can be like juggling chainsaws, with easily-overlooked and "not always logical" type interactions. (Torvalds then went on to call Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution.")

The Rust Foundation is a non-profit partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

Reuters reports: Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.... The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion....

Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation's oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation's gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports.
"Today, most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel..." reports Ars Technica: The extra land put under the plow released a significant amount of carbon, enough to flip the assessment of corn ethanol from a carbon-negative fuel to a carbon-emitting one. The biggest decline came when new cropland released carbon that had been stored in soils and vegetation, including roots of living plants. Farmers were also less likely to enter a field into the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to plant perennial vegetation on unused farmland.

After the fertilizer was applied, it released a significant amount of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere 300 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over 100 years. The researchers' estimates of the carbon impact of the fertilizer are probably low, too, since the authors didn't calculate how much additional pollution the manufacturing process released or the extent to which degraded water quality in downstream waterways released more greenhouse gases.