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 20% of demand — for the first time ever. (In 2019, the state had just 770 megawatts of storage capacity.)

Mark Rothleder, the vice president of the independent grid operator, California ISO (CAISO), said earlier this year that they will add another 1,134 megawatts in the first eight months of 2024. This is growth on top of the leap made last year. "In 2023 alone, the ISO successfully onboarded 5,660 megawatts of new power to the grid," Rothleder said at a conference in San Diego...

Renewable production was enough to supply the grid on 40 out of 48 days this spring, compared to seven days in the whole of last year. Lithium batteries appear to be undercutting the use of fossil fuels. Gas accounts for 40% of California's grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years. "The data clearly shows that batteries are displacing natural gas when solar generation is ramping up and down each day in CAISO," notes an analysis by Grid Status, a firm specializing in energy issues. Natural gas was king on the grid in April 2021, 2022 and 2023. CAISO was sending between 9,000 and 10,000 megawatts produced from gas to the grid once solar ran out. Last April, however, it amounted to only 5,000 megawatts... [California's goal: run on 100% renewable energy by 2045.]

Arizona and Georgia have followed California's lead. But it is Texas, the other major U.S. giant in this industry, that is snapping at its heels. At the end of April, batteries supplied 4% of the grid's electricity, enough to power several million homes. Batteries are beginning to look like an alternative to a system heavily dependent on gas and coal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Thousands of Tennesseans were illegally denied Medicaid and other benefits due to programming and data errors in an algorithmic system the state uses to determine eligibility for low-income residents and people with disabilities, a U.S. District Court judge ruled this week. The TennCare Connect system -- built by Deloitte and other contractors for more than $400 million -- is supposed to analyze income and health information to automatically determine eligibility for benefits program applicants. But in practice, the system often doesn't load the appropriate data, assigns beneficiaries to the wrong households, and makes incorrect eligibility determinations, according to the decision (PDF) from Middle District of Tennessee Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr.

"When an enrollee is entitled to state-administered Medicaid, it should not require luck, perseverance, and zealous lawyering for him or her to receive that healthcare coverage," Crenshaw wrote in his opinion. The decision was a result of a class action lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of 35 adults and children who were denied benefits. [...] ]Crenshaw found that TennCare Connect did not consider whether applicants were eligible for all available programs before it terminated their coverage. Deloitte was a major beneficiary of the nationwide modernization effort, winning contracts to build automated eligibility systems in more than 20 states, including Tennessee and Texas. Advocacy groups have asked (PDF) the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Deloitte's practices in Texas, where they say thousands of residents are similarly being inappropriately denied life-saving benefits by the company's faulty systems.

Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest man and the chairman of Reliance Industries, said this week that his telecom firm will offer users 100 GB of free cloud storage. Oil-to-retail giant Reliance, which is India's most valuable firm by market cap, has upended the telecom market in India by offering free voice calls and dirt-cheap internet access.

Jio, Reliance's telecom subsidiary, serves 490 million subscribers, more than any rival in India. Jio offers access to at least 2GB of data per day for 14 days to subscribers for a total of $2.3. TechCrunch adds: Reliance plans to offer Jio users up to 100 GB of free cloud storage through its Jio AI Cloud service, set to launch around Diwali in October, Ambani said.

A recent indictment (PDF) of an Alaska man stands out due to the sophisticated use of multiple encrypted communication tools, privacy-focused apps, and dark web technology. "I've never seen anyone who, when arrested, had three Samsung Galaxy phones filled with 'tens of thousands of videos and images' depicting CSAM, all of it hidden behind a secrecy-focused, password-protected app called 'Calculator Photo Vault,'" writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson. "Nor have I seen anyone arrested for CSAM having used all of the following: [Potato Chat, Enigma, nandbox, Telegram, TOR, Mega NZ, and web-based generative AI tools/chatbots]." An anonymous reader shares the report: According to the government, Seth Herrera not only used all of these tools to store and download CSAM, but he also created his own -- and in two disturbing varieties. First, he allegedly recorded nude minor children himself and later "zoomed in on and enhanced those images using AI-powered technology." Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then "turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see." In other words, he created fake AI CSAM -- but using imagery of real kids.

The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have "created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM." He also joined "multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups" and frequented dark websites with taglines like "The Only Child Porn Site you need!" Despite all the precautions, Herrera's home was searched and his phones were seized by Homeland Security Investigations; he was eventually arrested on August 23. In a court filing that day, a government attorney noted that Herrera "was arrested this morning with another smartphone -- the same make and model as one of his previously seized devices."

The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera "tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM." Presumably, this "apparent" CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it. In the end, given that fatal click, none of the "I'll hide it behind an encrypted app that looks like a calculator!" technical sophistication accomplished much. Forensic reviews of Herrera's three phones now form the primary basis for the charges against him, and Herrera himself allegedly "admitted to seeing CSAM online for the past year and a half" in an interview with the feds.

The Register's Iain Thomson reports: The FBI has made serious slip-ups in how it processes and destroys electronic storage media seized as part of investigations, according to an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. Drives containing national security data, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act information and documents classified as Secret were routinely unlabeled, opening the potential for it to be either lost or stolen, the report [PDF] addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray states. Ironically, this lack of identification might be considered a benefit, given the lax security at the FBI's facility used to destroy such media after they have been finished with.

The OIG report notes that it found boxes of hard drives and removable storage sitting open and unattended for "days or even weeks" because they were only sealed once the boxes were full. This potentially allows any of the 395 staff and contractors with access to the facility to have a rummage around. To deal with this, the FBI is installing wire cages to lock away storage media. In December, the bureau said it would install a video surveillance system at the evidence destruction storage facility to tighten security. As of June this year, it was still processing the paperwork to do so. The OIG also found that FBI agents aren't tracking hard drives and removable storage sent into the central office and the destruction facility. Typically, seized computers are tagged for tracking, but as a cost-saving measure, agents are advised to send in media storage devices containing national security information without the chassis. While there is a requirement to tag removable storage, there isn't the same requirement for internal hard drives. [...]

The FBI has assured the regulator that it has the problem in hand and has drafted a Physical Control and Destruction of Classified and Sensitive Electronic Devices and Material Policy Directive, which will require data to be marked up and destroyed safely. The agency says this policy is in the final editing stage and will be issued as soon as possible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Blue Origin sustained failures in recent weeks of testing including a factory mishap that damaged a portion of a future New Glenn rocket, the long-awaited centerpiece of the Jeff Bezos-backed startup's push to take on SpaceX. The upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar, according to people familiar with the situation.

In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded, the people said. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode. The previously unreported incidents illustrate the hurdles Blue Origin is grappling with while ramping up production of New Glenn, which is four years overdue. At the same time, new Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp has hired a slate of executives to shake the company out of a years-long R&D slump.

In the 1980s, a radio show about home computers was broadcast on a handful of California radio stations. 40 years later, reel-to-reel tapes of the shows were re-discovered — and digitized — by an Internet Archive special collections manager.

An Internet Archive blog post tells the story: Earlier this year archivist Kay Savetz recovered several of the tapes in a property sale, and recognizing their value and worthiness of professional transfer, launched a GoFundMe to have them digitized, and made them available at Internet Archive with the permission of the show's creators...

Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari's Jack Tramiel, Apple's Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others. The recovered shows span November 17 1984 through July 12, 1985.

Many more of the original reel-to-reel tapes — including shows with interviews with Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond, and Gene Roddenberry — are still lost, and perhaps are still waiting to be found in the Los Angeles area. [Though there appears to be a transcript of the Gene Roddenberry interview.]

The stories of how The Famous Computer Cafe was created — and saved, 40 years later — is explored in an episode of the Radio Survivor podcast. The podcast interviewed show co-creator Ellen Fields and archivist Kay Savetz, providing a dual perspective of how the show was created and how it was recovered.

The recovery of these interviews, 40 years after their original airing, holds out hope that many more relics and treasures still await discovery.
You get another perspective on the past from the show's advertisements for 1980s software (and from the production values of 1980s-era radio technology).

Bill Gates was just 29 when he recorded his interview. And Douglas Adams was 32.

"I've been somewhat okay about backing up our home data," writes long-time Slashdot reader 93 Escort Wagon.

But they could use some good advice: We've got a couple separate disks available as local backup storage, and my own data also gets occasionally copied to encrypted storage at BackBlaze. My daughter has her own "cloud" backups, which seem to be a manual push every once in a while of random files/folders she thinks are important. Including our media library, between my stuff, my daughter's, and my wife's... we're probably talking in the neighborhood of 10 TB for everything at present. The whole setup is obviously cobbled together, and the process is very manual. Plus it's annoying since I'm handling Mac, Linux, and Windows backups completely differently (and sub-optimally). Also, unsurprisingly, the amount of data we possess does seem to be increasing with time.

I've been considering biting the bullet and buying an NAS [network-attached storage device], and redesigning the entire process — both local and remote. I'm familiar with Synology and DSM from work, and the DS1522+ looks appealing. I've also come across a lot of recommendations for QNAP's devices, though. I'm comfortable tackling this on my own, but I'd like to throw this out to the Slashdot community.

What NAS do you like for home use. And what disks did you put in it? What have your experiences been?
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo asks "Have you considered just building one?" while suggesting the cheapest option is low-powered Chinese motherboards with soldered-in CPUs. And in the comments on the original submission, other Slashdot readers shared their examples:

• destined2fail1990 used an AMD Threadripper to build their own NAS with 10Gbps network connectivity.
• DesertNomad is using "an ancient D-Link" to connect two Synology DS220 DiskStations
• Darth Technoid attached six Seagate drives to two Macbooks. "Basically, I found a way to make my older Mac useful by simply leaving it on all the time, with the external drives attached."

But what's your suggestion? Share your own thoughts and experiences. What NAS do you like for home use? What disks would you put in it?

And what have your experiences been?

IKEA is expanding its stock-counting drone system to operate alongside workers in the U.S., starting with its Perryville, Maryland distribution center. The Verge reports: The Verity-branded drones also come with a new AI-powered system that allows them to fly around warehouses 24/7. That means they'll now operate alongside human workers, helping to count inventory as well as identify if something's in the wrong spot. Previously, the drones only flew during nonoperational hours. Parag Parekh, the chief digital officer for Ikea retail, says in the press release that flights are prescheduled and that the drones use a "custom indoor positioning system to navigate higher levels of storage locations." They also have an obstacle detection system that allows them to reroute their paths to avoid collisions. Ikea is also working on several upgrades for the drones, including the ability to inspect unit loads and racks.

So far, Ikea's fleet consists of more than 250 drones operating across 73 warehouses in nine countries. Ikea first launched its drone system in partnership with Verity in 2021 and expanded it to more locations throughout Europe last year. Now, Ikea plans on bringing its AI-upgraded drones to more distribution centers in Europe and North America, which the company says will help "reduce the ergonomic strain on [human] co-workers, allowing them to focus on lighter and more interesting tasks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A patent lawsuit filed by one of 3D printing's most established firms against a consumer-focused upstart could have a big impact on the wider 3D-printing scene. In two complaints, (1, 2, PDF) filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, against six entities related to Bambu Lab, Stratasys alleges that Bambu Lab infringed upon 10 patents that it owns, some through subsidiaries like Makerbot (acquired in 2013). Among the patents cited are US9421713B2, "Additive manufacturing method for printing three-dimensional parts with purge towers," and US9592660B2, "Heated build platform and system for three-dimensional printing methods."

There are not many, if any, 3D printers sold to consumers that do not have a heated bed, which prevents the first layers of a model from cooling during printing and potentially shrinking and warping the model. "Purge towers" (or "prime towers" in Bambu's parlance) allow for multicolor printing by providing a place for the filament remaining in a nozzle to be extracted and prevent bleed-over between colors. Stratasys' infringement claims also target some fundamental technologies around force detection and fused deposition modeling (FDM) that, like purge towers, are used by other 3D-printer makers that target entry-level and intermediate 3D-printing enthusiasts.

"The artificial turf industry has had a great deal of success convincing millions of people that its short-lived, nonrecyclable, fossil-fuel-derived product is somehow good for the environment," complains the head of Los Angeles' chapter of the advocacy nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project. In an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times, he argues that "In fact, it's clear that artificial turf is bad for our ecosystems as well as our health."

The piece's title? "What's more environmentally irresponsible than a thirsty L.A. lawn? A fake plastic one." Artificial turf exacerbates the effects of climate change. On a 90-degree Los Angeles day, the temperature of artificial turf can reach 150 degrees or higher — hot enough to burn skin. And artificial turf is disproportionately installed to replace private lawns and public landscaping in economically disadvantaged communities that already face the greatest consequences of the urban heat-island effect, in which hard surfaces raise local temperatures.

Artificial turf consists of single-use plastics made from crude oil or methane. The extraction, refining and processing of these petrochemicals, along with the transporting and eventual removal of artificial turf, come with a significant carbon footprint.

Artificial turf is full of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, known as "forever chemicals" because they accumulate in the environment and living tissue. The Synthetic Turf Council has noted manufacturers' efforts to ensure that their products "contain no intentionally-added PFAS constituents." So what? Tobacco companies don't intentionally add carcinogens to cigarettes; they're built into the product. PFAS have been linked to serious health effects, and while artificial turf is by no means the only source of them, it is one we can avoid. Because artificial turf is a complex product made of multiple types of plastic, it will never be recycled. After its relatively short lifespan of about eight to 15 years, artificial turf ends up in indefinite storage, landfills and incinerators, creating a whole host of additional pollution problems...

Remarkably, artificial turf doesn't even save water compared with grass... [A]rtificial turf must be regularly cleaned with water, and in warm climates such as Los Angeles', artificial fields get so hot that schools must water them down before children play on them.
Astroturf also doesn't absorb rainwater, the piece poitns out.

In fact, studies show the maintenance costs of artificial turf often exceed those of natural grass.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article,

Nikhilesh De writes via CoinDesk: A federal judge ordered Ripple to pay $125 million in civil penalties and imposed an injunction against future securities law violations on Wednesday. District Judge Analisa Torres, of the Southern District of New York, imposed the fine (PDF) after finding that 1,278 institutional sale transactions by Ripple violated securities law, leading to the fine. The $125.035 million fine is well below the $1 billion in disgorgement and prejudgment interest and $900 million in civil penalties the SEC sought. Wednesday's order on remedies follows the judge's July 2023 ruling in the case itself, finding that Ripple violated federal securities laws through its direct sale of XRP to institutional clients, though she also ruled that Ripple's programmatic sales of XRP to retail clients through exchanges did not violate any securities laws. The SEC tried unsuccessfully to appeal that portion of the ruling while the case was ongoing.

At the Flash Memory Summit 2024 this week, NVM Express published the NVMe 2.1 specifications, which hope to enhance storage unification across AI, cloud, client, and enterprise. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: New NVMe capabilities with the revised specifications include:

- Enabling live migration of PCIe NVMe controllers between NVM subsystems.
- New host-directed data placement for SSDs that simplifies ecosystem integration and is backwards compatible with previous NVMe specifications.
- Support for offloading some host processing to NVMe storage devices.
- A network boot mechanism for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF).
- Support for NVMe over Fabrics zoning.
- Ability to provide host management of encryption keys and highly granular encryption with Key Per I/O.
- Security enhancements such as support for TLS 1.3, a centralized authentication verification entity for DH-HMAC-CHAP, and post sanitization media verification.
- Management enhancements including support for high availability out-of-band management, management over I3C, out-of-band management asynchronous events and dynamic creation of exported NVM subsystems from underlying NVM subsystem physical resources. You can learn more about these updates at NVMExpress.org.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has revealed technical details of its in-house data transfer tool, called Effingo, and bragged that it uses the project to move an average of 1.2 exabytes every day. As explained in a paper [PDF] and video to be presented on Thursday at the SIGCOMM 2024 conference in Sydney, bandwidth constraints and the stubbornly steady speed of light mean that not even Google is immune to the need to replicate data so it is located close to where it is processed or served.

Indeed, the paper describes managed data transfer as "an unsung hero of large-scale, globally-distributed systems" because it "reduces the network latency from across-globe hundreds to in-continent dozens of milliseconds." The paper also points out that data transfer tools are not hard to find, and asks why a management layer like Effingo is needed. The answer is that the tools Google could find either optimized for transfer time or handled point-to-point data streams -- and weren't up to the job of handling the 1.2 exabytes Effingo moves on an average day, at 14 terabytes per second. To shift all those bits, Effingo "balances infrastructure efficiency and users' needs" and recognizes that "some users and some transfers are more important than the others: eg, disaster recovery for a serving database, compared to migrating data from a cluster with maintenance scheduled a week from now."

Google today unveiled its new Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box replacing the Chromecast. The device, shipping September 24, boasts improved performance with a 22% faster processor (over its predecessor), doubled RAM, and 32GB storage. It integrates Thread and Matter for smart home control, featuring a side-panel accessible via the remote. The Streamer supports Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and includes an Ethernet port. Design changes include a low-profile form factor in two colors and a redesigned remote with a finder function. Software enhancements use Gemini AI for content summaries and custom screensavers.

Slashdot reader Seven Spirals brings news about the lossless compression algorithm LZ4: The already wonderful performance of the LZ4 compressor just got better with multi-threaded additions to it's codebase. In many cases, LZ4 can compress data faster than it can be written to disk giving this particular compressor some very special applications. The Linux kernel as well as filesystems like ZFS use LZ4 compression extensively. This makes LZ4 more comparable to the Zstd compression algorithm, which has had multi-threaded performance for a while, but cannot match the LZ4 compressor for speed, though it has some direct LZ4.
From Linuxiac.com: - On Windows 11, using an Intel 7840HS CPU, compression time has improved from 13.4 seconds to just 1.8 seconds — a 7.4 times speed increase.
- macOS users with the M1 Pro chip will see a reduction from 16.6 seconds to 2.55 seconds, a 6.5 times faster performance.
- For Linux users on an i7-9700k, the compression time has been reduced from 16.2 seconds to 3.05 seconds, achieving a 5.4 times speed boost...

The release supports lesser-known architectures such as LoongArch, RISC-V, and others, ensuring LZ4's portability across various platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Angry T-Mobile customers have filed a class action lawsuit over the carrier's decision to raise prices on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price guarantee. "Based upon T-Mobile's representations that the rates offered with respect to certain plans were guaranteed to last for life or as long as the customer wanted to remain with that plan, each Plaintiff and the Class Members agreed to these plans for wireless cellphone service from T-Mobile," said the complaint (PDF) filed in US District Court for the District of New Jersey. "However, in May 2024, T-Mobile unilaterally did away with these legacy phone plans and switched Plaintiffs and the Class to more expensive plans without their consent."

The complaint, filed on July 12, has four named plaintiffs who live in New Jersey, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. They are seeking to represent a class of all US residents "who entered into a T-Mobile One Plan, Simple Choice plan, Magenta, Magenta Max, Magenta 55+, Magenta Amplified or Magenta Military Plan with T-Mobile which included a promised lifetime price guarantee but had their price increased without their consent and in violation of the promises made by T-Mobile and relied upon by Plaintiffs and the proposed class." The complaint seeks "restitution of all amounts obtained by Defendant as a result of its violation," plus interest. It also seeks statutory and punitive damages, and an injunction to prevent further "wrongful, unlawful, fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair conduct." The report notes that the lawsuit centers around T-Mobile's broken "Un-contract" promise made in January 2017, which assured customers that their T-Mobile One plan prices would never increase unless they decided to change their plans. Despite the guarantee, T-Mobile included a significant caveat in a FAQ on its website, stating they would only cover the final month's bill if the price was raised and the customer decided to cancel. Many customers missed this caveat, leading to confusion and frustration when prices were later hiked.

The lawsuit also addresses the transition from the "Un-contract" to a new "Price Lock" guarantee, which initially offered more protection but was later weakened, causing further dissatisfaction. The FCC said it has received around 1,600 complaints regarding these price hikes by late June.

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users are being notified that their systems aren't backed up with the built-in Windows backup solution. A corresponding message appears with the advice that it's best to make backups so that all data is stored "in case something happens to the PC." It almost reads like an indirect threat, but Microsoft is actually just pointing out the option to store file backups on its own OneDrive cloud service. And it's also advertising more storage space.

SolarWinds still faces some legal action over its infamous 2020 breach, reports NextGov.com. But a U.S. federal judge has dismissed most of the claims from America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which "alleged the company defrauded investors because it deliberately hid knowledge of cyber vulnerabilities in its systems ahead of a major security breach discovered in 2020."

Slashdot reader krakman shares this report from the Washington Post: "The SEC's rationale, under which the statute must be construed to broadly cover all systems public companies use to safeguard their valuable assets, would have sweeping ramifications," [judge] Engelmayer wrote in a 107-page decision. "It could empower the agency to regulate background checks used in hiring nighttime security guards, the selection of padlocks for storage sheds, safety measures at water parks on whose reliability the asset of customer goodwill depended, and the lengths and configurations of passwords required to access company computers," he wrote. The federal judge also dismissed SEC claims that SolarWinds' disclosures after it learned its customers had been affected improperly covered up the gravity of the breach...

In an era when deeply damaging hacking campaigns have become commonplace, the suit alarmed business leaders, some security executives and even former government officials, as expressed in friend-of-the-court briefs asking that it be thrown out. They argued that adding liability for misstatements would discourage hacking victims from sharing what they know with customers, investors and safety authorities. Austin-based SolarWinds said it was pleased that the judge "largely granted our motion to dismiss the SEC's claims," adding in a statement that it was "grateful for the support we have received thus far across the industry, from our customers, from cybersecurity professionals, and from veteran government officials who echoed our concerns."
The article notes that as far back as 2018, "an engineer warned in an internal presentation that a hacker could use the company's virtual private network from an unauthorized device and upload malicious code. Brown did not pass that information along to top executives, the judge wrote, and hackers later used that exact technique." Engelmayer did not dismiss the case entirely, allowing the SEC to try to show that SolarWinds and top security executive Timothy Brown committed securities fraud by not warning in a public "security statement" before the hack that it knew it was highly vulnerable to attacks.

The SEC "plausibly alleges that SolarWinds and Brown made sustained public misrepresentations, indeed many amounting to flat falsehoods, in the Security Statement about the adequacy of its access controls," Engelmayer wrote. "Given the centrality of cybersecurity to SolarWinds' business model as a company pitching sophisticated software products to customers for whom computer security was paramount, these misrepresentations were undeniably material."

Longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a report from the Sacramento Bee: California's power grid handled a nearly three week long record-setting heat wave with few issues. The heat wave was the hottest 20-day period on record around Sacramento and set an all-time temperature record of 124 degrees in Palm Springs. Emergency alerts and calls for voluntary conservation were avoided this time around. Officials credit years of investment in renewable energy, especially battery storage that store solar power for use when the sun stops shining.

CAISO last issued calls for voluntary conservation two years ago, during a 2022 bout of extreme heat. Since then, roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California's electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. California is now home to the most grid batteries in the world outside of China, [said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator (CAISO)].

"Batteries performed very well in this event, they were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid," he added. "That made a big, big difference." [...] Apart from battery storage, Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California as well as noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.