Perpetual threats of flex alerts causing more people to go solar
Perpetual threats of flex alerts causing more people to go solar
The Bay Area was spared on Wednesday as the latest flex alert expired. But the constant threat of power outages and rate hikes has customers concerned. KTVU s Jana Katsuyama says solar panel installers are seeing an uptick in business.
OAKLAND, Calif. - Power customers who are facing growing concerns over losing power are prompting a renewed interest in adding renewable energy to residential rooftops.
Californians have faced multiple flex alerts from Cal ISO this year which has warned that heat waves could lead to blackouts if demand overwhelms supplies. Wildfire danger has also led to concerns about PG&E planned outages to prevent sparks.
July 9, 2021 by Sarah Yang Delivery services may be able to overcome snow, rain, heat and the gloom of night, but a new class of legged robots is not far behind. Artificial intelligence algorithms developed by a team of researchers from UC Berkeley, Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University are equipping legged robots with an enhanced ability to adapt to and navigate unfamiliar terrain in real time. Their test robot successfully traversed sand, mud, hiking trails, tall grass and dirt piles without falling. It also outperformed alternative systems in adapting to a weighted backpack thrown onto its top or to slippery, oily slopes. When walking down steps and scrambling over piles of cement and pebbles, it achieved 70% and 80% success rates, respectively, still an impressive feat given the lack of simulation calibrations or prior experience with the unstable environments.
Power/Performance Bits: April 20
Multiplexing twisted light; flexible body heat harvesting; carbon quantum dots.
Multiplexing twisted light
Researchers from University of California San Diego and University of California Berkeley found a way to multiplex light by using discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings.
“It’s the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed,” said Boubacar Kanté, an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. “We’ve been experiencing an explosion of data in our world, and the communication channels we have now will soon be insufficient for what we need. The technology we are reporting overcomes current data capacity limits through a characteristic of light called the orbital angular momentum. It is a game-changer with applications in biological imaging, quantum cryptography, high-capacity communications and sensors.”
Light Unbound: Data Limits Could Vanish with New Optical Antennas
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips.
The new work, reported in a paper published Feb. 25 in the journal Nature Physics, throws wide open the amount of information that can be multiplexed, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source. A common example of multiplexing is the transmission of multiple telephone calls over a single wire, but there had been fundamental limits to the number of coherent twisted light waves that could be directly multiplexed.
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