A Huge Battery Has Replaced Hawaii’s Last Coal Plant

Julian Spector reports via Canary Media: Hawaii shut down its last coal plant on September 1, 2022, eliminating 180 megawatts of fossil-fueled baseload power from the grid on Oahu — a crucial step in the state’s first-in-the-nation commitment to cease burning fossil fuels for electricity by 2045. But the move posed a question that’s becoming increasingly urgent as clean energy surges across the United States: How do you maintain a reliable grid while switching from familiar fossil plants to a portfolio of small and large renewables that run off the vagaries of the weather? Now Hawaii has an answer: It’s a gigantic battery, unlike the gigantic batteries that have been built before.

The Kapolei Energy Storage system actually began commercial operations before Christmas on the industrial west side of Oahu, according to Plus Power, the Houston-based firm that developed and owns the project. Now, Kapolei’s 158 Tesla Megapacks are charging and discharging based on signals from utility Hawaiian Electric. The plant’s 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity match what the old coal plant could inject into the grid, though the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time. Instead of generating power, they absorb it from the grid, ideally when it’s flush with renewable generation, and deliver that cheap, clean power back in the evening hours when it’s desperately needed.

The construction process had its setbacks, as did the broader effort to replace the coal plant with a roster of large-scale clean energy projects. The Kapolei battery was initially intended to come online before the coal plant retired. Covid disrupted deliveries for the grid battery industry across the board, and Kapolei’s remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn’t make things easier. By summer 2021, Plus Power was hoping to complete Kapolei by the end of 2022, but it ended up taking another year. Even then, it has joined the grid before several of the other large solar and battery projects slated to replace the coal plant’s production with clean power.

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HPE To Acquire Juniper Networks For $14 Billion

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced plans to buy data center networking hardware maker Juniper Networks for about $14 billion, or $40 per share, in an all-cash deal. The company expects to close the deal by the end of this year or in early 2025. CNBC reports: The acquisition would double HPE’s existing networking business after years of competition. If it’s completed, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim would lead the combined group and report to HPE’s CEO, Antonio Neri, according to the statement. HP got deeper into the category when it bought Aruba Networks in 2015, and months later, the technology conglomerate split in two, resulting in the formation of HPE, which sells servers and other equipment for data centers, and HP Inc., which makes PCs and printers. HPE said adding Juniper to its portfolio would bolster margins and speed up growth.

Founded in 1996, Juniper spent many years chasing Cisco in the market for networking gear. Revenue grew 12% year over year in 2022, the fastest growth since 2010. In the most recent quarter, Juniper eked out a $76 million profit on $1.4 billion in revenue, which declined 1%. HPE’s networking segment was the company’s top source of earnings before taxes, at $401 million on $1.4 billion in revenue, which was up 41%. Coming together would lead to $450 million in annual cost savings within three years of the deal’s completion, HPE said.

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Amazon’s Twitch To Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

According to Bloomberg, Amazon’s livestreaming site Twitch is expected to cut 35% of its staff, or about 500 workers. “The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months,” notes Bloomberg. Slashdot reader quonset shares the report: Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, company executives have said. In December, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are “prohibitively expensive,” according to a blog post he wrote. Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit. “It’s always bittersweet when talented leaders move on to pursue new opportunities,'” a Twitch spokesperson said at the time. “We are incredibly grateful for their contributions to Twitch and our community, and wish them all the best.”

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Earth Shattered Global Heat Record In 2023

The European climate agency Copernicus said Earth shattered global annual heat records in 2023, flirting with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. “On average, global temperatures in 2023 were 1.48 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times,” reports the Associated Press. “If annual averages reach above 1.5 degrees Celsius, the effects of global warming could become irreversible, climate scientists say.” From the report: The record heat made life miserable and sometimes deadly in Europe, North America, China and many other places last year. But scientists say a warming climate is also to blame for more extreme weather events, like the lengthy drought that devastated the Horn of Africa, the torrential downpours that wiped out dams and killed thousands in Libya and the Canada wildfires that fouled the air from North America to Europe. In a separate Tuesday press event, international climate scientists who calculate global warming’s role in extreme weather, the group’s leader, Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto said “we definitely see in our analysis the strong impact of it being the hottest year.”

The World Weather Attribution team only looks at events that affect at least 1 million people or kill more than 100 people. But Otto said her team was overwhelmed with more than 160 of those in 2023, and could only conduct 14 studies, many of them on killer heat waves. “Basically every heat wave that is occurring today has been made more likely and is hotter because of human-induced climate change,” she said. [….] Antarctic sea ice hit record low levels in 2023 and broke eight monthly records for low sea ice, Copernicus reported.

Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, [Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess] said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit), Copernicus calculated.

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Zoom Will Soon Integrate Anthropic’s Chatbot Across Its Platform

Zoom will be integrating Anthropic’s AI Assistant across its productivity platform, starting with its Contact Center product to help businesses with customer support inquiries. The Verge reports: Zoom says Claude, a chatbot Anthropic launched in March, should help customer support agents by creating “better self-service features” that can help guide customers toward relevant solutions. It will also soon be able to surface necessary resources for agents while they’re serving customers. The company is vague about how it will implement Claude in other areas of the app — like Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, and Zoom IQ — but Zoom will likely leverage the assistant to help it compete with other productivity apps that use AI, like Slack. Zoom already has a suite of AI-powered capabilities available through Zoom IQ, an assistant it built through a partnership with OpenAI. So far, Zoom IQ can generate summaries and message drafts as well as create whiteboards based on text prompts.

Additionally, Zoom Ventures, a Zoom offshoot that invests in startups, also announced that it has made an investment in the Google-backed Anthropic. Zoom says working with both Anthropic and OpenAI helps bolster its “federated approach” to AI.

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Re-Victimization From Police-Auctioned Cell Phones

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Countless smartphones seized in arrests and searches by police forces across the United States are being auctioned online without first having the data on them erased, a practice that can lead to crime victims being re-victimized, a new study found (PDF). In response, the largest online marketplace for items seized in U.S. law enforcement investigations says it now ensures that all phones sold through its platform will be data-wiped prior to auction.

Researchers at the University of Maryland last year purchased 228 smartphones sold “as-is” from PropertyRoom.com, which bills itself as the largest auction house for police departments in the United States. Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns. Phones may end up in police custody for any number of reasons — such as its owner was involved in identity theft — and in these cases the phone itself was used as a tool to commit the crime. “We initially expected that police would never auction these phones, as they would enable the buyer to recommit the same crimes as the previous owner,” the researchers explained in a paper released this month. “Unfortunately, that expectation has proven false in practice.”

Beyond what you would expect from unwiped second hand phones — every text message, picture, email, browser history, location history, etc. — the 61 phones they were able to access also contained significant amounts of data pertaining to crime — including victims’ data — the researchers found. […] Also, the researchers found that many of the phones clearly had personal information on them regarding previous or intended targets of crime: A dozen of the phones had photographs of government-issued IDs. Three of those were on phones that apparently belonged to sex workers; their phones contained communications with clients. “We informed [PropertyRoom] of our research in October 2022, and they responded that they would review our findings internally,” said Dave Levin, an assistant professor of computer science at University of Maryland. “They stopped selling them for a while, but then it slowly came back, and then we made sure we won every auction. And all of the ones we got from that were indeed wiped, except there were four devices that had external SD [storage] cards in them that weren’t wiped.”

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Gas-Powered Cars Won’t Die Off Any Time Soon

According to S&P Global Mobility, the average age of light vehicles on the road in the U.S. is now at an all-time high of 12.5 years, up three months from 2022. Two decades ago, their average was 9.7 years. Axios reports: The impact: The transition from gas to electric cars will take decades.

It’ll likely take until at least 2050 — and possibly longer — before most gas-powered cars are off the road, Campau says.

Of note: EV longevity is going in the opposite direction. Their average age fell from 3.7 years in 2022 to 3.6 years in 2023, in part due to an upswing in new purchases.

By the numbers: About 6.6% of battery-powered EVs bought between 2013-2022 have left the passenger fleet, compared with 5.2% of non-EVs — but […] it’s too early to know why. EVs generally come with an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty — but early evidence suggests they last longer than that, according to an analysis by Recurrent, which tracks battery data. Carmakers say electric cars should last 15 to 20 years, but modern EVs haven’t been around long enough to validate that claim. The report projects that there will be fewer than 100 million passenger cars on the road within the next 18-24 months — a low not seen since 1978. By 2028, at least 7 in 10 vehicles on the road will be pickups, SUVs or crossovers.

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