Here’s a scary thing that happened: South Korean authorities found evidence that a worm was recently removed from devices connected to nuclear power facilities. The news comes a little over a week after the country’s nuclear plant operator received warnings on Twitter that its network had been compromised . Thankfully, the reactor controls were not infected. Read more…
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Hackers Uploaded a Worm to South Korean Nuclear Plants
HughPickens.com writes In the U.S., a new solar project is installed every 3.2 minutes and the number of cumulative installations now stands at more than 500, 000. For years, homeowners who bought solar panels were advised to mount them on the roof facing south to capture the most solar energy over the course of the day. Now Matthew L. Wald writes in the NYT that panels should be pointed west so that peak power comes in the afternoon when the electricity is more valuable. In late afternoon, homeowners are more likely to watch TV, turn on the lights or run the dishwasher. Electricity prices are also higher at that period of peak demand. “The predominance of south-facing panels may reflect a severe misalignment in energy supply and demand, ” say the authors of the study, Barry Fischer and Ben Harack. Pointing panels to the west means that in the hour beginning at 5 p.m., they produce 55 percent of their peak output. But point them to the south to maximize total output, and when the electric grid needs it most, they are producing only 15 percent of peak. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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You’re Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South
Rosetta’s lander lasted just 60 hours on a comet before bouncing into the dark shadows of a cliff, where its solar panels couldn’t power the spacecraft. Why didn’t it carry a more reliable power source, say a nuclear battery like one that’s unfailingly fueled Voyager for decades? It’s a simple question with a fascinating answer, one that begins with the Cold War and ends with the future space exploration. Read more…
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We Are Running Out of the Nuclear Fuel That Powers Space Travel
The power shortages, brown-outs, and rolling blackouts that have long plagued Los Angeles county during times of peak energy usage may soon be a thing of the past now that the region’s energy utility has signed on with battery-maker AES Southland to install a massive, 400MW auxiliary power solution. Read more…
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A California Power Plant Is Getting the World’s Biggest Lithium Battery
Lucas123 writes: The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices of coal-powered energy and other conventional sources in all 50 U.S. states in just two years, a leap from today where PV energy has price parity in only 10 states, according to Deutsche Bank’s leading solar industry analyst. The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs, Deutsche Bank’s Vishal Shah stated in a recent report. The cost of solar-generated electricity in the top 10 states for capacity ranges from 11-15 cents per kilowatt hour (c/kWh), compared to the retail electricity price of 11-37 c/kWh. Amit Ronen, a former Congressional staffer behind legislation that created an investment tax credit for solar installations, said one of the only impediments to decreasing solar electricity prices are fees proposed by utilities on customers who install solar and take advantage of net metering, or the ability to sell excess power back to utilities. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Rooftop Solar Could Reach Price Parity In the US By 2016
jones_supa writes We all are aware of various chirping and whining sounds that electronics can produce. Modern graphics cards often suffer from these kind of problems in form of coil whine. But how widespread is it really? Hardware Canucks put 50 new graphics cards side-by-side to compare them solely from the perspective of subjective acoustic disturbance. NVIDIA’s reference platforms tended to be quite well behaved, just like their board partners’ custom designs. The same can’t be said about AMD since their reference R9 290X and R9 290 should be avoided if you’re at all concerned about squealing or any other odd noise a GPU can make. However the custom Radeon-branded SKUs should usually be a safe choice. While the amount and intensity of coil whine largely seems to boil down to luck of the draw, at least most board partners are quite friendly regarding their return policies concerning it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world’s most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter’s night with little wind. “We are really worried about this situation, ” says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. “If we don’t do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts.” Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy
Even the latest generation of nuclear power reactors can only harvest about five percent of the energy stored in their radioactive fuel supplies, and the toxic leftovers must then be buried deep underground to slowly decay over hundreds of thousands of years. But thanks to a new breed of sodium-cooled pool reactor, we may soon be able to draw nearly 100 times more energy from nuclear fuels, while slashing their half-lives by two orders of magnitude. Read more…
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Fast-Acting Nuclear Reactor Will Power Through Piles of Plutonium
It’s been a while since we heard anything new about Nest’s flagship product, the quiet elder brother to the attention-hogging Protect . But today the company is pushing a new software update to all existing devices this week, and it’s using a clever new bit of software to make them far more efficient. Read more…
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Nest Just Made Your Thermostat Smarter With a New Algorithm
Good news Microsoft Office power users! You’ll soon be able to use the new and improved Outlook for Mac. That’s good news, because the new Outlook for Mac looks pretty awesome . And since a lot of people use Outlook, this upgrade is going to improve a lot of email experiences. Read more…
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Microsoft Finally Announces the New Outlook for Mac and It Looks Great