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The blistering heat waves that set temperature records across much of the US in recent days have strained electricity systems, threatening to knock out power in vulnerable regions of the country. 

The electricity has largely stayed online so far this summer, but there have been scattered problems and close calls already. 

Heavy use of energy-sucking air-conditioners is the biggest problem. But intense heat can also reduce the output of power plants, blow transformers, and force power lines to sag. Severe droughts across large parts of the country have also significantly reduced the availability of hydroelectric power, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). 

It’s unlikely to get better soon. A number of grid operators may struggle to meet peak summer demand, creating the risk of rolling blackouts, the NERC report notes.

The nation’s isolated and antiquated grids are in desperate need of upgrades to keep the lights, heat, and air-conditioning on in the midst of extreme weather events that climate change is making more common, severe, and dangerous. One clear way to ease many of these issues is to more tightly integrate the country’s regional grids, stitching them together with more long-range transmission lines. 

If electricity generated in one area can be more easily shared across much wider regions, power can simply flow to where it’s needed at those moments when customers crank up air-conditioners en masse, or when power plants or fuel supply lines fail amid soaring temperatures, wildfires, hurricanes, or other events, says Liza Reed, a research manager focused on transmission at the Niskanen Center, a Washington, DC, think tank.  

The problem is it’s proved difficult to build more long-range transmission and grid interconnections for a variety of reasons, including the permitting challenges of erecting wires through private and public lands across cities, counties, and states and the reluctance of local authorities to forfeit control or submit to greater federal oversight.

The case of Texas

The unreliability of the US grid is not a new problem. Severe heat and winter storms have repeatedly exposed the frailty of electricity systems in recent years, leaving thousands to millions of people without power as temperatures spiked or plunged.

One of the fundamental challenges is that the grids today are highly fragmented. There are three main electricity networks within the US: the Eastern Grid, the Western Grid, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). But there are numerous regional transmission organizations within those first two systems, including the California Independent System Operator, Southwest Power Pool, PJM Interconnection, New York ISO, and more. 

These grids form a complex web of networks operating under different regulators, rules and market structures, and often with limited connections between them.

Map USA grid
A variety of regional transmission organizations oversee different parts of the nation’s aging and fragmented grids, which operate under different rules and with often limited connections between them.
legend

ERCOT is especially isolated, in part because of the desire among local politicians, citizens, and power companies to avoid added competition, the hassle of following other states’ rules, and oversight from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). But the state offers a case study in why that can be a serious problem amid increasingly harsh climate conditions, Reed says.

The Texas grid operator pleaded with customers several times earlier this month to cut electricity use as blistering summer temperatures created  demand surges that threatened to outstrip supply and require rolling blackouts.  Low wind conditions, cloud cover, and outages at fossil-fuel power plants added to the strains.

Shutting off the electricity needed to run air-conditioning in triple-digit temperatures

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By: James Temple
Title: Stitching together the grid will save lives as extreme weather worsens
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/28/1056483/stitching-together-the-grid-will-save-lives-as-extreme-weather-worsens/
Published Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 +0000

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The Download: the threat of microplastics, and mitigating AI bias

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12 hours ago

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June 4, 2023

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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds

The news: While we know that tiny pieces of plastic are everywhere, we don’t fully understand what they’re doing to us or other animals. Now, new research in seabirds hints that it might affect gut microbiomes—the trillions of microbes that make a home in the intestines and play an important role in animals’ health.

The findings: Seabirds ingest plastic from the ocean, which can accumulate in their stomachs. The research shows it leaves the birds with more potentially harmful microbes in the gut, including some that are known to be resistant to antibiotics, and others with the potential to cause disease.

Why it matters: The report expands our view on what plastic pollution is doing to wildlife, and shines a light on the wide spectrum of adverse effects brought about by current plastic levels in the environment. The next step is to work out what this might mean for their health and the health of other animals, including humans. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

What if we could just ask AI to be less biased?

Think of a teacher. Close your eyes. What does that person look like? If you ask Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2, two of the most popular AI image generators, it’s a white man with glasses.

But what if you could simply ask AI models to give you less biased answers? A new tool called Fair Diffusion makes it easier to tweak AI models to generate the types of images you want, such as swapping out the white men in the images for women or people of different ethnicities. A similar technique also seems to work for language models.

These methods of combating AI bias are welcome—and raise the obvious question of whether they should be baked into the models from the start. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

Melissa’s story is from The Algorithm, her weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

New report: Generative AI in Consumer Products

In the fast-paced world of consumer products, it’s essential for designers and other creatives to stay ahead of the curve. MIT Technology Review has compiled a new report exploring how generative AI will change the way consumer products are designed and made, digging into how new generative tools could inspire early adopters, and help them to gain an edge on the competition.

It contains case studies plus practical guidance explaining how generative tools can help designers, and what AI’s successful integration into the consumer goods sector could look like. Download and share the report with up to 10 colleagues today for $975.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US has banned the use of commercial spyware
It comes after at least 50 government workers were targeted using spyware. (WP $)
What’s next in cybersecurity. (MIT Technology Review)

2 AI is creating convincing historical records of fake events
This demonstrates how easily AI systems can be used for generating misinformation. (Motherboard)
Fake images of the Pope have also spread across the internet. (The Verge)
Chatbots aren’t going to read our minds any time soon. (NYT $)
Why those cashing in from AI right now may lose out in the future. (The Atlantic $)
ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China is restricting researchers from accessing a major database
Researchers outside China won’t be able to access its biggest academic database from next month. (FT $)

4 US regulators are suing crypto’s biggest exchange
They claim Binance has willfully evaded US law. (Reuters)+ The company reportedly encouraged its customers to use VPNs. (The Verge)

5 Twitter won’t recommend unverified accounts anymore
Its default “For You” feed will only show tweets from users paying $8 a month. (Bloomberg $)

6 A grim market for deepfake porn is surging
Demand is so high, some of the creators are hiring staff to help them. (NBC News)+ A horrifying AI app swaps women into porn videos with a click. (MIT Technology Review)

7 When and why Facebook bends its own rules
Researchers worry that malleable moderation policies are open to exploitation. (Rest of World)
Facebook employees are on course for lower bonuses this year. (WSJ $)

8 What happens when our device backups fail
📱
When we lose our photos and messages, our memories disappear with them. (The Guardian)

9 The internet just loves packing

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By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: the threat of microplastics, and mitigating AI bias
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/28/1070396/download-threat-of-microplastics-mitigating-ai-bias/
Published Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2023 12:10:00 +0000

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Delivering insights at scale by modernizing data 

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13 hours ago

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June 4, 2023

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PwC 16 9RatioCoverimage 1

Greater speed and agility are helping organizations address an increasingly competitive marketplace, heightened customer expectations, and the lingering impact of the pandemic. To compete more effectively, companies are gathering and analyzing increasingly large and disparate sets of data. But only with cloud solutions, like Microsoft Azure, can this data provide insight into every corner of the enterprise, from maintenance of the factory floor to boosting customer loyalty.

cover art with data, industrial, travel, and health care icons

However, companies that continue to rely on legacy systems and fragmented IT environments to gather and store data will fall behind faster. The problem, says Lindsey Allen, general manager of Azure Databricks & Applied AI at Microsoft, is that “organizations need to be able to access their data in a reasonable amount of time to support business decision-making.” Accessing and analyzing this data across the enterprise at speed and scale is difficult to impossible with siloed data.

This data is often siloed in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, with ERP data modernization, businesses can integrate data from multiple sources, which will ensure data accessibility and create the framework for digital transformation. Migrating legacy databases to the cloud also gives companies access to AI and ML capabilities that can reinvent their organization. According to Anil Nagaraj, principal in Analytic Insights, Cloud & Digital at PwC, companies that modernize their ERP data see increased efficiencies, costs savings, and greater customer engagement, especially when it’s built on a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure.

MIT PWC 60DataPoint 32323

Cloud transformation—along with ERP data modernization—democratizes data, empowering employees to make decisions that directly impact their segment of business. And in an increasingly competitive marketplace, becoming data-driven means organizations can make faster, timelier, and smarter decisions.

Download the report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: Delivering insights at scale by modernizing data 
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/28/1070180/delivering-insights-at-scale-by-modernizing-data/
Published Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2023 16:00:00 +0000

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https://mansbrand.com/the-emergent-industrial-metaverse/

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The emergent industrial metaverse

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15 hours ago

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June 4, 2023

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MIT Siemens Cover REV

The industrial metaverse—a metaverse sector that mirrors and simulates real machines, factories, cities, transportation networks, and other highly complex systems—will offer to its participants fully immersive, real-time, interactive, persistent, and synchronous representations and simulations of the real world.

MIT Siemens Cover REV 1

Existing and developing technologies, including digital twins, artificial intelligence and machine learning, extended reality, blockchain, and cloud and edge computing, will be the building blocks of the industrial metaverse. These will converge to create a powerful interface between the real and digital worlds that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Annika Hauptvogel, head of technology and innovation management at Siemens, describes the industrial metaverse as “immersive, making users feel as if they’re in a real environment; collaborative in real time; open enough for different applications to seamlessly interact; and trusted by the individuals and businesses that participate”—far more than simply a digital world.

The industrial metaverse will revolutionize the way work is done, but it will also unlock significant new value for business and societies. By allowing businesses to model, prototype, and test dozens, hundreds, or millions of design iterations in real time and in an immersive, physics-based environment before committing physical and human resources to a project, industrial metaverse tools will usher in a new era of solving real-world problems digitally.

MITTR Siemens Timeline

“The real world is very messy, noisy, and sometimes hard to really understand,” says Danny Lange, senior vice president of artificial intelligence at Unity Technologies, a leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3-D content. “The idea of the industrial metaverse is to create a cleaner connection between the real world and the virtual world, because the virtual world is so much easier and cheaper to work with.”

While real-life applications of the consumer metaverse are still developing, industrial metaverse use cases are purpose-driven, well aligned with real-world problems and business imperatives. The resource efficiencies enabled by industrial metaverse solutions may increase business competitiveness while also continually driving progress toward the sustainability, resilience, decarbonization, and dematerialization goals that are essential to human flourishing.

This report explores what it will take to create the industrial metaverse, its potential impacts on business and society, the challenges ahead, and innovative use cases that will shape the future. Its key findings are as follows:

MITTR Siemens SagiQuote

• The industrial metaverse will bring together the digital and real

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By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: The emergent industrial metaverse
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/29/1070355/the-emergent-industrial-metaverse/
Published Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:00:00 +0000

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