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 Read more…
Contrary to what you may have heard about U.S. sales of electric vehicles — sales are up. JD Power is projecting that 1.2 million EVs will be sold in the US by the end of 2024, an increase over 1 million sold last year. That’s 9 percent of total vehicles Read more…
Long Covid has pushed around one million Americans out of the labor force, economists estimate. More than 5% of adults in the U.S. have long Covid, and it is most prevalent among Americans in their prime working years. About 3.6 million people reported significantly modifying their activities because of the Read more…
Though the ocean covers about 70% of earth, we humans have only mapped a quarter of its floor to a high resolution, reports CNN. Many of the world’s highest mountains aren’t visible on land — they rise up thousands of meters from the seafloor. An expedition to the Nazca Ridge, Read more…
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. Read more…
Remember when a door-sized panel blew off a Boeing aircraft back in January? The Seattle Times reports that the “door plug” incident “was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews” in a Boeing assembly plant in Renton, Washington last fall. (And that Boeing’s quality control system “failed to Read more…
The Biden administration has finalized a plan to expand solar on 31 million acres of federal lands in 11 western states. The proposed updated Western Solar Plan is a roadmap for Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) governance of solar energy proposals and projects on public lands. It bumps up the Read more…