Free Republic

The U.S. General Services Administration has saved $1 million by converting decades-old information storage technology, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said Friday. In a post on X, DOGE said that the agency, which supplies office space, transportation and other basic services to federal agencies, saved money by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes to permanent modern digital records. The move is part of the Elon Musk-led group's mission to get rid of wasteful government spending. Earlier this week, the group said The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for website changes before canceling the...

No new water storage infrastructure has been built in California, more than a decade after voters approved a $7.5 billion water bond in Proposition 1 of 2014. The San Jose Mercury-News reported Wednesday that officials are deciding what to do with nearly half a billion dollars of available cash after the “collapse” of a project to expand the Los Vaqueros Reservoir, which is east of San Francisco. Other projects have received funding for planning and permitting, but nothing has been built. The newspaper noted: A majority of the seven board members of the California Water Commission, a state agency that...

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plans for the Empire State to go green are going south as local communities refuse to build massive battery plants that would store wind and solar energy. One upstate town where a top state official leading the state’s anti-fossil fuel push just voted to ban construction of the plants — and one New York City politician has already called to pause any new sites for the facilities. “We called for — and still support — a moratorium on these [Battery Energy Storage System] facilities almost two years ago,” said Vito Fossella, borough president of Staten Island, where...

Energy from the wind and the sun — they’re clean and green and free. OK, there’s the small problem of intermittency. But clearly the intermittency problem can easily be solved with a few batteries to store some power for the occasional calm nights. Or is that solution really so easy? Regular readers here will know that I wrote an energy storage Report, titled “The Energy Storage Conundrum,” published by the GWPF back in December 2022. After some straightforward calculations based on elementary-school-level arithmetic, that Report concluded that the amount of storage needed was so large, and the costs so completely...

The military said on Wednesday that it now had full operational control of the Philadelphi Corridor, which runs along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. This effectively clamps down on any possible weapons flow to Hamas from the outside. Troops located 20 tunnels crossing into Egypt near the Philadelphi Corridor and 82 tunnel shafts. This information was passed on to Egypt. Egypt’s Al Qahera News denied the reports. “It doesn’t mean that we have boots on the ground across all of the corridors, but it means we can control and we have the ability to cut off the...

It's rarely great news when an area gets blanketed in volcanic ash – but University of Barcelona researchers have discovered it has a rare combination of useful properties, which make it remarkably useful as an energy storage medium. We've written a number of times about super-cheap thermal energy storage, and a number of other times about highly efficient heat batteries operating at super-high temperatures. The cheapest of these 'brick toasters' use the most abundant of materials, and the most efficient can handle extraordinarily high temperatures using materials like liquid tin and carbon materials – but volcanic ash, as it turns...

For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted. How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary,...

a, Dual-beam configuration for super-resolution writing and reading. b, Spin-coating process for material addition, material diffusion and blank-disk molding. c, The capacity of a single 3D nanoscale disk is approximately equivalent to that of a petabit-level Blu-ray library or an HDD data array. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06980-y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A team of photonic engineers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a new type of optical DVD that is capable of holding up to a petabyte of data. The group used a new material to coat the DVDs and new laser techniques to write data. The results are published...

If you want to know in what regard the Biden administration holds our military, look no further than a policy implemented last fall that has flown under the radar. Until last fall, the Army funded storage requests for soldiers who were deployed. That is no longer the case, according to Task & Purpose. On Oct 1, 2023, a memo was issued by Army Sustainment Command notifying soldiers that the Army would no longer store household goods or privately-owned vehicles for “soldiers deployed for contingency operations.” “We understand the burden this could potentially place on Soldiers,” Army spokesperson Sgt. Pablo Saez...

The Headrest Safe™ has a universal design that allows it to fit all vehicles. There are three ways to get quick access to The Headrest Safe™. First a biometric reader that uses your individual thumbprint or fingerprint. Second, a 4 to 8 digit passcode. Third, the tried and true method of a key.

“Both whistleblowers noted one instance in which IRS agents sought to search a storage unit in northern Virginia belonging to Hunter Biden. When the agents reached out to Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf with their request for a warrant, she informed Biden’s defense team about their interest in the property. “It was at this point for me that I started to believe that the attorneys with the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office and DOJ Tax were not acting appropriately“

A Scotts Valley man was reunited with his guitar after it was stolen from a storage unit. According to the Scotts Valley Police Department, an investigation led detectives to a guitar shop in Santa Clara County. The recovered guitar was a 1964 Gibson L7C. Similar guitars have an online asking price of more than $7,000. The police department says the investigation into the storage unit thefts is ongoing. No suspects or arrests have been announced.

It could be argued that the basic arithmetic showing wind power is an economic and societal disaster in the making should be clear to a bright primary school child. Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. The U.K. is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply, he concludes. “Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”. Professor Allison’s dire warnings...

Many stakeholders are pinning their long-term storage hopes on lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery storage solutions, with this market expected to grow by almost 20% per year between 2022 and 2023, according to Precedence Research. But the reality is that, although Li-ion batteries have an important role to play on the road to net zero, this technology is neither robust nor versatile enough to single-handedly fulfill energy storage requirements. As a result, a diverse range of alternative grid-scale solutions that can deliver an unprecedented expansion in storage capacity are needed to offset our reliance on Li-ion batteries and drive the renewable energy...

The former employee posted a video on social media sharing how the tech giant allegedly 'scams' its customers.. CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA: A former Apple employee claims the company is allowing an iOS bug to fill customers' iPhone memory so they can update their software. The former employee posted a video on TikTok sharing how the tech giant allegedly "scams" its customers. In the video, he says that it's "not your fault" when iPhone storage runs low. ... The person, who goes by @nabeel_co, says there is a "long-standing" bug in iOS that prevents cache files and temporary files from being deleted...

Apparently the world’s supply of a favorite hot dog condiment doesn’t cut the … err … mustard. And, as a result, we may be looking at an international mustard shortage sooner than we think. According to Business Insider, a year of poor mustard seed production is the cause of what may result in a lack of mustard on American grocery store shelves in the near future. Experts say you can thank climate change for the large drop in mustard seed production, with Canada (the world’s second largest producer) and France watching the most recent growing season’s yields fall 28 percent...

Gravity-based energy storage technology company Energy Vault has formed a strategic partnership with non-ferrous metals smelting and refinery company Korea Zinc, including a US$50 million investment commitment. The announcement, made yesterday, comes as Swiss-American company Energy Vault targets a business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Novus Capital Corporation II. The transaction is expected to close during this quarter and the combined company, to be named Energy Vault Holdings, will list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as a result. Energy Vault said in October as it announced the intended merger that it has private investment in public...

The Department of Justice today announced a new rule to help enable the safe and secure storage of firearms and published a Best Practices Guide for federal firearms licensees (FFLs). This new rule implements the existing Gun Control Act requirement that federal firearms licensees that sell firearms to the general public (non-licensees) must certify that they have available secure gun storage or safety devices. “Today’s announcements build on the department’s efforts to reduce the risk of firearms falling into the wrong hands,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Gun safety is a Department of Justice priority, and we will continue...

Used lithium-ion batteries taken from carmaker Audi’s electric vehicles (EVs) have been repurposed into a ‘second-life’ stationary energy storage system by energy company RWE at a project in Herdecke, Germany. RWE has deployed the system, which has a capacity of around 4.5MWh, at the site of its pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) plant at Hengsteysee reservoir in the North-Rhine Westphalia region of north-west Germany. The decommissioned batteries are taken from development models of Audi’s e-tron EVs, which have a maximum range of 252 miles when used for transport. They still had about 80% of their residual capacity remaining when taken...

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” called for a national safe storage law when reacting to James and Jennifer Crumbley being charged with involuntary manslaughter after their son 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley was charged for terrorism and murder in the school shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan.