Much of the country lost electricity today in a blackout affecting millions of people. It’s disrupted business and traffic with lights out and intermittent mobile service, ABC reports. Officials are still investigating the cause, according to the national disaster response service, Senapred.
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A giant battery-powered dual-zone refrigerator / freezer on wheels.
DeepSeek claims to use far less energy than its competitors, but there are still big questions about what that means for the environment.
Here’s the unelected government official speaking about his part-time hobby, Tesla:
“I recommend anyone who can afford it, get Tesla’s solar roof and Powerwall. Your family’s life might depend on it.”
Electrical grids are old, overtaxed, and increasingly unstable in the face of climate change. That’s why the energy independence business is booming inside Tesla (up a record 113 percent year-over-year) and from alternatives like Anker, Bluetti, EcoFlow, and Jackery which just announced its new solar roofs that mimic curved red clay tiles.
The Senate confirmed his nomination today. Zeldin has been tasked by Donald Trump to “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses.” That seems to include removing roadblocks to building energy-hungry AI data centers in the US.
[politico.com]
It’s 89 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. Rest assured, the clock merely “visualizes humanity’s metaphorical proximity to global catastrophe,” according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that sets the time each year and updated it today.
They moved the clock forward this year, citing risks posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, “misuse of biological science,” and the potential use of artificial intelligence in warfare and to spread disinformation.
Necropsies tie whale deaths off the east coast to ship strikes, not offshore wind, as Trump claimed during his inauguration eve rally. The US has very few offshore wind turbines anyway.
“We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said. He has pledged to end federal leasing for wind energy development.
“Emissions of greenhouse gasses trap heat,” Lee Zeldin, said during today’s Senate confirmation hearing when pressed about climate science. Whether he’ll take action is another issue.
Zeldin accepted over $269,000 from the oil and gas industry while running for Congress, and has said he’ll work to “unleash US energy dominance” and “make America the AI capital of the world” while leading the Environmental Protection Agency.
The $319 1.8kW Solar/Car Super Fast Charger will charge the company’s giant batteries at 600W off the alternator when the engine’s on, plus an additional 1200W max from rooftop solar that’ll continue to provide a charge when parked at the job site or campground (unlike DJI’s $299 1kW car charger). It can also reverse charge the starter battery in your van, truck, or RV.
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Hundreds of thousands of people are without power, and tens of thousands are under evacuation orders with blazes out of control in Southern California.
The Palisades, Hurst, and Eaton fires are growing fast, fanned by strong Santa Ana winds.
More than 625 million acres of the US oceans are now protected after Biden prohibited all future oil and gas leasing.
President-elect Donald Trump has already said he plans to undo the move. But that likely depends on Congress taking action, CNN reports.
More than 96 percent of the island now has power, according to Luma, the local energy company. An outage on New Year’s Eve took out power for close to 90 percent of the US territory, the latest in a series of blackouts.
Power outages affected close to 90 percent of customers in the US territory today, the Associated Press reports. Local energy company Luma says it’s investigating the cause and suspects a damaged underground power line. Getting the lights back on could take 24 to 48 hours. Blackouts have been a persistent problem for Puerto Rico’s struggling electricity grid since Hurricane Maria.
“Tesla Recharged” gives customers year-end insights in the Tesla app for stats such as how often users’ homes are powered off-grid.
As Not a Tesla App reports, Tesla Energy users get trophies like “Solar Punk” if they’re in the top 25 percent generating solar energy for the year or “Team Player” for being in the top 1 percent of sending electricity back to the grid.
The Montana Supreme Court upheld a district judge’s 2023 ruling that the state violated young people’s right to a clean and healthy environment.
A group of 16 youths filed suit to push the state to drop a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act that barred officials from considering greenhouse gas emissions and the consequences of climate change when permitting new energy projects.
It’s the latest example of the Biden team approving massive loans for clean energy, battery, and electric vehicle projects as the clock winds down on the president’s time in office. The PG&E loan is the biggest to-date and will go toward investments in “hydroelectric power generation, batteries and power lines,” according to the New York Times.
[The New York Times]
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) published its top 10 priorities for the incoming Trump administration and managed to omit any reference to climate change, Reuters reports. President-elect Donald Trump has called climate change a scam.
Instead, SEIA is focusing on “American energy dominance,” ending “dependence on China,” and even supplying electricity for crypto mining and AI data centers.
