Free Republic

An apparently homeless thief was electrocuted to death while trying to steal copper wiring from a California construction site — as power was knocked out to 2,500 homes, reports said. The unidentified man was killed Sunday in a vacant strip mall that’s in the process of being demolished, with witnesses saying they heard a loud explosion at around 2 p.m. before electricity went out for several hours, police told CBS News. The explosion is believed to be a transformer that blew up, knocking out power for several hours, Pomona police said. One neighbor rushed to the scene where a woman...

Weeks after the Trump Media and Technology Group announced a merger with nuclear power company TAE Technologies, the new organization has unveiled plans for a fusion plant in the US — aiming to make it the biggest power generation site in the world. On Tuesday morning, the company unveiled criteria for selecting the building site of the new project. CEO Devin Nunes tells me they are accepting applications from state and local governments — much like Amazon HQ did — and will make a decision within weeks, with construction to begin later this year. And Nunes is clear about one...

The first year of Donald Trump’s second term in office was marked by the rapid implementation of his far-right program. From ICE to DOGE, from anti-DEI to anti-antifa, and from bombing boats to $400 million bribes, Trump’s regime has turned out even more extreme than feared after he was elected to a second term in November 2024. His words and actions as president have been covered extensively over the past year, as have those of a number of internal advisers and outside confidants, like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. However, the grassroots far right, and its influence over the administration,...

We’ve seen plenty of leftist violence in America in recent times, but we are hardly immune. Across the Pond, in Berlin, Germany, they’re finding out just how damaging crazed anarchists can be when they put their minds to it. To wit, a far-left pro-environmental organization called the Vulkan group claimed responsibility for an attack on the power grid that has left thousands of residents without electricity for days — even as freezing temperatures engulf the region.According to the newspaper Berlin Zeitung, the group posted a 4,163-word letter saying they did it to protest the energy industry, adding that they targeted...

n Monday, Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) initiated an overhaul of the country’s constitution that will codify the rule of longtime dictator Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, as “co-presidents.” The reform follows an escalating campaign of persecution against the Catholic Church, the last bastion of opposition against the Ortegas, who nonetheless claim that their regime is a beacon of “Christian socialism.” Days prior, they had celebrated the New Year by expelling all Catholic nuns from the country. Nicaragua’s attacks on the Church and broader descent into tyranny culminates the stunning fall from grace of an erstwhile...

The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there is abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers. Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work,...

Japan is restarting the world's largest nuclear power plant, after a 15-year shutdown following the Fukushima disaster. Nuclear power used to account for over 30% of Japan's national electricity, so seeing these reactors come back online restores a key pillar of Japan's energy system. Japan's mountainous terrain forced each region to establish large, redundant energy systems; therefore, the return of nuclear power gives Japan surplus capacity and flexibility in an otherwise stagnant environment. With the global energy trade growing more unreliable by the day, Japan is now better positioned than most to weather the storm.

Problems in the last 24 hours in Morgan Hill, California The chart below shows the number of PG&E reports we have received in the last 24 hours from users in Morgan Hill and surrounding areas December 25: Problems at PG&E PG&E is having issues since 09:20 AM EST.

Power was restored Sunday morning to the bulk of the 130,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco impacted by a massive outage on Saturday that caused major disruptions in the city. Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s outage map showed more than 20,000 customers still remained without electricity as of 5 a.m. PST, while crews worked to fully restore service. The outage, which occurred shortly after 1 p.m. on Saturday, left a large swath of the northern part of the city without power that began to grow in size. At its peak, the outage represented roughly one-third of the utility company’s...

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would not be releasing the full Epstein files to Congress on Friday as required under new legislation, instead sending over a partial batch. Blanche told Fox News the Justice Department would release “several hundred thousand” documents on Friday, “and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.” Blanche attributed the delay to the need to redact any names or identifying information about witnesses, but failing to turn over the full unclassified files could run afoul of the law, which gave the department 30 days to...

A major power outage in Central America cut electricity to some 15 million residents on Wednesday, with the worst impact felt in Honduras and Nicaragua. The two most-affected countries saw power for nearly all residents “practically go down to zero volts,” siad EOR communications head Evelyn Flores. The grid operator said the outage began at 1 p.m. (1900 GMT) but the cause and specific origin of the massive loss of power still being determined. Energy use fell from 8,300 megawatts to just 2,400 megawatts across the region with the exception of Panama and Costa Rica, which were mostly unaffected, EOR...

America's electricity supply is becoming increasingly strained... As of March, the U.S. has 5,426 artificial intelligence ("AI") data centers. That's up from about 1,000 in 2018. As you're probably aware, data centers are gluttons for energy. In 2022, they consumed about 17 gigawatts ("GW") of power. (For reference, the Hoover Dam only produces about 2 GW per year.) But the power has to come from somewhere. Today, it's being pulled from American homes. Last year, a study by Bloomberg and Whisker Labs found that U.S. power supplies are being "distorted" by electricity-hungry data centers. It sounds like the plot of...

And deserves to get it good and hard.Last night was the (well, not mid-term elections — those are next year — “quarter-term” elections?) and the areas that thought that Kamala Harris was a damned fine pick for POTUS last cycle stayed Blue. That should not have been a big surprise to anyone with a licence to adult..In Newt Yack City, a CAIR1-funded communist Democratic Socialist is now mayor.Whee. As long-time readers of my little scribblings have probably already figured out, I doubt that Mamdani will be as bad as his detractors say; but I damned sure don’t think he’s going...

A shuttered plant is reimagined as Manresa Wilds, an example of an old facility repurposed to solve a new century’s problems. The hike up to the roof involved Escher-like flights of metal stairs and grated catwalks like high wires, dangling above a spectacular abyss of rusted machinery. The ’60s-era control room, straight out of “Apollo 13,” opened onto a turbine hall the size of the concourse at Grand Central.I was blown away. The plant has been shuttered since 2013 and parts of it look like workers walked out one day and left everything as it was. Suburban Connecticut is not...

In 2020, California imported about 25% of its demand for electricity from Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona due to the capacity limitations of the three utilities that serve the State (Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric). These capacity limitations resulted from the closure of fossil fuel plants and environmental restrictions imposed by regulatory authorities in California to meet climate change standards. New England, New Jersey, and New York combined imported about 30% of their demand from either neighboring states or Canada. Many utilities in PJM and MISO import electricity from TVA and the...

Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought. As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly. For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.

The US power grid is under significant stress due to rapidly increasing electricity demand from AI data centers and electric vehicles, coupled with the retirement of traditional power plants.The grid faces mounting vulnerabilities from extreme weather events, cybersecurity threats, and physical sabotage, while policy gridlock and infrastructure delays hinder necessary upgrades.Despite challenges, the situation presents investment opportunities in grid modernization, diversified generation, and solutions for energy storage and load management.America’s power grid is straining under the weight of a fast-changing energy landscape. Beyond the usual summer hum of air conditioners, power demand is surging from electric vehicle chargers and sprawling...

What if we told you that DARPA, the U.S. government agency, has developed a way to send electricity through great distances… with no batteries or cables involved in the process? That’s right, like out of a cartoon (it actually looks like a Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz’s idea), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been able to transmit energy using focused light beams. Of course, they have decided to call their project POWER —great copywriting, even better science. But, how does the DARPA’s POWER project work? This scientific experiment turns electricity into a tightly focused beam of light, sends that beam...

Summary Radioactive, fissile plutonium from Cold War a headache for US US wants to halt disposal of it, use 20 metric tons for fuel Trump administration sees it as potential fuel for new reactors Critic points out similar program failed due to costs WASHINGTON, Aug 22 (Reuters) - The Trump administration plans to make available about 20 metric tons of Cold War-era plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads to U.S. power companies as a potential fuel for reactors, according to a source familiar with the matter and a draft memo outlining the plan. Plutonium has previously only been converted to fuel...

Florida Power and Light will face considerable opposition next week when it goes before a typically utility-friendly Florida Public Service Commission with a request that board members approve what would be the biggest rate hike in Florida and U.S., history. ... FPL's rate hike, requested in February, will pull in $1.545 billion in 2026 and tack on an additional $927 million every year thereafter through 2029. That total additional revenue of $8.9 billion would likely rise if the company gets, as also requested, authority to further increase customer costs when it brings new solar and battery projects online in 2028-29....