Green Energy from Storage Batteries are Replacing Fossil Fuels in California – and Texas

1.9 million solar panels began operating this year in California — at a Mortenson facility with 120,000 installed batteries that give it a storage capacity of 3,280 megawatts. An article in El Pais notes that this helped California pass 10,000 megawatts of photovoltaic storage in April — enough to meet 20% of demand — for the first time ever. (In 2019, the state had just 770 megawatts of storage capacity.)

Mark Rothleder, the vice president of the independent grid operator, California ISO (CAISO), said earlier this year that they will add another 1,134 megawatts in the first eight months of 2024. This is growth on top of the leap made last year. “In 2023 alone, the ISO successfully onboarded 5,660 megawatts of new power to the grid,” Rothleder said at a conference in San Diego…

Renewable production was enough to supply the grid on 40 out of 48 days this spring, compared to seven days in the whole of last year. Lithium batteries appear to be undercutting the use of fossil fuels. Gas accounts for 40% of California’s grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years. “The data clearly shows that batteries are displacing natural gas when solar generation is ramping up and down each day in CAISO,” notes an analysis by Grid Status, a firm specializing in energy issues. Natural gas was king on the grid in April 2021, 2022 and 2023. CAISO was sending between 9,000 and 10,000 megawatts produced from gas to the grid once solar ran out. Last April, however, it amounted to only 5,000 megawatts… [California’s goal: run on 100% renewable energy by 2045.]
Arizona and Georgia have followed California’s lead. But it is Texas, the other major U.S. giant in this industry, that is snapping at its heels. At the end of April, batteries supplied 4% of the grid’s electricity, enough to power several million homes. Batteries are beginning to look like an alternative to a system heavily dependent on gas and coal.

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Investigation Finds ‘Little Oversight’ Over Crucial Supply Chain for US Election Software

Politico reports U.S. states have no uniform way of policing the use of overseas subcontractors in election technology, “let alone to understand which individual software components make up a piece of code.”

For example, to replace New Hampshire’s old voter registration database, state election officials “turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market,” Politico: “a small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.”

But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.

The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain. The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia [“probably by accident,” they write later] and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it… New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.

None of the findings amounted to evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said, and the company resolved the issues before the new database came into use ahead of the presidential vote this spring. This was “a disaster averted,” said the person familiar with the probe, citing the risk that hackers could have exploited the first two issues to surreptitiously edit the state’s voter rolls, or use them and the presence of the Ukrainian national anthem to stoke election conspiracies. [Though WSD only maintains one other state’s voter registration database — Vermont] the supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.

The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems. Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure.
The article also points out that many state and federal election officials “insist there has been significant progress” since 2016, with more regular state-federal communication. “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, now the lead federal agency on election security, didn’t even exist back then.

“Perhaps most importantly, more than 95% of U.S. voters now vote by hand or on machines that leave some type of paper trail, which officials can audit after Election Day.”

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Python Developer Survey: 55% Use Linux, 6% Use Python 2

More than 25,000 Python developers from nearly 200 countries took the 7th annual Python Developers Survey between November 2023 and February 2024, with 85% saying Python was their main language.

Some interesting findings:

Though Python 2 reached “end-of-life” status in April of 2020, last year’s survey found 7% of respondents were still using Python 2. This year’s survey found that number has finally dropped… to 6%.
“Almost half of Python 2 holdouts are under 21 years old,” the survey results point out, “and a third are students. Perhaps courses are still using Python 2?”

Meanwhile, 73% are using one of the last three versions of Python (3.10, 3.11, or 3.12)
“The share of developers using Linux as their development environment has decreased through the years: compared with 2021, it’s dropped by 8 percentage points.” [The graphic is a little confusing, showing 55% using Linux, 55% using Windows, 29% on MacOS, 2% on BSD, and 1% on “Other.”]
Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE (22%), followed by Jupyter Notebook (20%) and Vim (17%). The next-most popular IDEs were PyCharm Community Edition (13%), JupyterLab (12%), NotePad++ (11%) and Sublime Text (9%). Interestingly, just 23% of the 25,000 respondents said they only used one IDE, with 38% saying they used two, 21% using three, and 19% using four or more. [The annual survey is a collaboration between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains.]
37% said they’d contributed to open-source projects within the last year. (77% of those contributed code, while 38% contributed documentation, 35% contributed governance/leadership/maintainer duties, and 33% contributed tests…)

For “age range,” nearly one-third (32%) said 21-29 (with another 8% choosing 18-20). Another 33% said 30-39, while 16% said 40-49, 7% said 50-59, and 3% chose “60 or older.”

49% of respondents said they had less than two years of programming experience, with 33% saying “less than 1 year” and 16% saying “1-2 years.” (34% of developers also said they practiced collaborative development.)

And here’s how the 25,000 developers answered the question: how long have you been programming in Python?

Less than 1 year: 25%
1-2 years: 16%
3-5 years: 26%
6-10 years: 19%
11+ years: 13%

So what are they doing with Python? Among those who’d said Python was their main language:

Data analysis: 44%
Web development: 44%
Machine learning: 34%
Data engineering: 28%
Academic research: 26%
DevOps / Systems administration / Writing automation scripts 26%
Programming of web parsers / scrapers / crawlers: 25%

62% were “fully employed by a company,” while the next-largest category was “student” (12%) with another 5% in “working student”. There were also categories for “self-employed” (6%), “freelancer” (another 6%), and “partially employed by a company” (4%). Another 4% said they were unemployed.

In other news, the Python Software Foundation board has also “decided to invest more in connecting and serving the global Python community” by hosting monthly “office hours” on their Discord channel.

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Tech Worker Builds Free AI-Powered Tool For Fighting US Health Insurance Denials

The online news site San Francisco Standard profiles an open-source platform “that takes advantage of large language models to help users generate health insurance appeals with AI…

“A Fight Health Insurance user can scan their insurance denial, and the system will craft several appeal letters to choose from and modify.”

With the slogan “Make your health insurance company cry too,” [San Francisco tech worker Holden Karau’s site] makes filing appeals faster and easier. A recent study found that Affordable Care Act patients appeal only about 0.1% of rejected claims, and she hopes her platform will encourage more people to fight back…

The “dirty secret” of the insurance industry is that most denials can be successfully appealed, according to Dr. Harley Schultz, a patient advocate in the Bay Area. “Very few people know about the process, and even fewer take advantage of it, because it’s rather cumbersome, arcane, and confusing, by design,” he said. “But if you fight hard enough and long enough, most denials get overturned….”

While some doctors have turned to artificial intelligence themselves to fight claims, Karau’s service puts the power in the hands of patients, who likely have more time and motivation to dedicate to their claims. “In an ideal world, we would have a different system, but we don’t live in an ideal world, so what I’m shooting for here is incremental progress and making the world suck a little less,” she said.

Karau estimates she’s spent about $10,000 building the platform, according to the article, which adds that “it’s free for users, though she might eventually charge for added services like faxing appeals.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader mirro_dude for sharing the news.

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