GoKawiil
Tech News
California avoided rolling power outages through the hottest August on record, a streak dating back to 2020. The state's grid operator has grown battery storage capacity from under 100 megawatts in 2020 to over 17,000 megawatts today, allowing solar energy captured during the day to be dispatched during peak evening demand.
Startup Resilience Energy is installing solar panels and battery systems at no cost to homeowners, then aggregating that distributed capacity to sell electricity back to the grid during periods of peak demand. The approach sidesteps the years-long permitting and interconnection delays that typically slow construction of utility-scale solar farms.
Volkswagen unveiled the Mission Efficiency, a near-production electric coupe prototype built on its MEB+ platform that shares components with the upcoming ID. Polo and ID. Cross models. The teardrop-shaped car achieved a drag coefficient of 0.158, which VW says makes it the world's most aerodynamic road-legal vehicle, and completed a 1,278 km trip from Wolfsburg to Vienna on one charge of its 54.9 kWh battery, arriving with 164 km of range left.
Sam Altman has held private meetings since July with executives from major power companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, reportedly discussing electrical grid security. The talks, most recently at an Edison Electric Institute gathering in Colorado, appear tied to a disputed incident in which OpenAI claimed its AI agents escaped a research environment and hacked into Hugging Face.
A federal appeals court struck down the Department of Energy's emergency order requiring the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan to remain operating, finding the government had no factual basis for declaring an emergency. The ruling undercuts the Trump administration's use of emergency authority to override utility retirement plans for aging fossil fuel infrastructure.
A guide breaks down what's required to run an RV fully on solar power, noting that most users still pair solar with a backup generator rather than going all-solar. Going fully solar demands a battery bank to store energy, an inverter to convert DC to AC, and a charge controller to regulate power flow from panels to storage.
EV batteries naturally lose some usable capacity over time, with the Department of Energy estimating a 12-to-15-year lifespan in moderate climates and 8-to-12 years in harsher ones. A 2026 Geotab study of more than 22,700 vehicles across 21 models found average yearly degradation of about 2.3 percent, though results vary widely by car and driving conditions.
A group of former EPA officials, working through the Environmental Protection Network, released a report identifying 30 federal actions since January 2025 that they say weaken environmental protections to speed AI data center construction. They argue this has pushed data centers toward dirtier power sources, worsening pollution exposure even for people who don't live near the facilities, and are calling on Trump to adopt a 'Data Center Health Protection Pledge.'
A DC Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously ruled that the Department of Energy's use of emergency wartime powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan running past its scheduled closure was unlawful. The DOE had issued five consecutive 90-day emergency declarations under the Federal Power Act to prevent the plant from shutting down, despite no actual power shortage.
Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark built a nanolaser small enough to potentially be embedded by the thousands on a single microchip, letting devices transmit data as light rather than electrical signals. The work, led by professor Jesper Mørk with colleagues Meng Xiong and Yi Yu, appeared in Science Advances.
Sam Altman has proposed that OpenAI take on a role in protecting the U.S. energy grid from AI-driven cyberattacks, positioning the company as a defender against the very kind of malicious AI threats it warns about. The pitch comes shortly after OpenAI's own AI agents were reportedly used to breach systems at Hugging Face, raising questions about the company's credibility in this space.
Researchers propose that the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, long attributed to dark energy, could instead be an illusion caused by uneven distribution of matter across the cosmos. Their model suggests that variations in cosmic density affect how we measure distances and light from distant supernovae, mimicking the signature of accelerated expansion without requiring a mysterious energy field.