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This week's EYE ON NPI is a super connector - it's the Texas Instruments SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC33xx Family (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/texas-instruments/simplelink-wi-fi-cc33xx-family) with 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi 6 support, plus optional Bluetooth LE, in a low cost co-processor you can add to any microcontroller project you have to instantly IoT-ify it. This family of chips is a big upgrade in the CC3 family, and looks like a very competitive solution to existing market chips - we're excited to see how TI has adapted to the existing market to bring this compelling offering. Oh the TI CC3x series, how you've grown! We first met you back when it was the CC3000, a radical WiFi co-processor with the (at-the-time) astonishing price of ~$10 per module. At the time, we crafted an Arduino-compatible shield and a breakout board (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cc3000-wifi/overview) as well as an Arduino port of the TCP/IP mini-stack so that folks could do amazing things like get the time (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cc3000-wifi/internettime), read a web page (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cc3000-wifi/webclient) or even send a Tweet (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-cc3000-wifi/sendtweet). The big thing was making it so you weren't spending the $50 it cost up-till-then to add a full-linux-system-as-peripheral (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1498). Since then, TI has released some updated versions, such as the CC3100 (https://www.digikey.com/short/9cp431pr), which added 802.11n and lower power draw - we saw it featured in a few micropython projects (https://blog.adafruit.com/2016/08/24/micropython-name-badge-from-emf-2016/) thanks to the core driver support (https://github.com/micropython/micropython/tree/master/drivers/cc3100). And after that, the CC3200 series (https://www.digikey.com/short/9289jcq3), which added TLS/SSL support and had an internal ARM Cortex-M4 that could run code on its own, like MicroPython! (https://github.com/micropython/micropython/blob/master/ports/cc3200/README.md) So it's no surprise that TI is continuing to press their WiFi family forward, to now the CC33xx! The new Texas Instruments SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC33xx Family (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/texas-instruments/simplelink-wi-fi-cc33xx-family) comes with 4 variants: the CC330x have 2.4GHz WiFi only, where-as the CC335x add 5GHz for an additional cost. Likewise, the CC33x0 have only WiFi, and the CC33x1 have WiFi+BLE. Since all the chips / modules are pin-compatible, you can develop with one and then change in production to whatever final setup suits your product. Like the earlier chips, these chips are expected to be connected to a main processor: either a microcontroller or microcomputer, over SPI or SDIO. SPI will work great for your smaller micros, SDIO is great when you have the speed and bandwidth to shift a lot more data around. When connecting over BLE, use the UART-with-flow control - that's the standard for a "BTLE Host Controller Interface" communications (https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specification/HTML/Core-60/out/en/host-controller-interface/uart-transport-layer.html). Of course, there's no way you'll want to write a driver for this kind of complex chip - so visit the CC33xx software download page (https://www.ti.com/tool/CC33XX-SOFTWARE) which has software in the form of Linux kernel patch/drivers for beefy chips, or an microcontroller with an RTOS - follow their porting guide to get it running on a non-TI chipset (https://dev.ti.com/tirex/explore/node?node=A__AEIJm0rwIeU.2P1OBWwlaA__CC33XX-RTOS-MCU__dzPVh4K__LATEST) Now you're probably saying "OK cool but I don't want to do a bunch of RF layout, I want a nice tinned module i can slap down and connect my RP-SMA or chip antenna" - and not surprisingly, it looks like there's a CC3301 module (https://www.ti.com/product/CC3301MOD) in pre-production with an optimistic budgetary price of $2.88 - that's for 2.4GHz + BLE. For the 5GHz CC3351MOD (https://www.ti.com/product/CC3351MOD) the price is $3.50. Sans BLE the CC3350MOD (https://www.ti.com/product/CC3350MOD) is $3.13. If you want a peek at what the CC3301 module might look like, the BoosterPack product page has a tantalizing glimpse (https://www.ti.com/tool/BP-CC3301MOD). You can sign up at TI's site for updates on the release schedule, or chat with your DigiKey sales rep and they'll let you know when the part makes it into general distribution. Until then, you can get plenty of TI CC3350 (https://www.digikey.com/short/3z7tqtrp) and CC3351 (https://www.digikey.com/short/hmqzwv5j) bare chips: they're both in stock at DigiKey for immediate shipment! Order today and you'll quickly add low-cost WiFi 6 + BLE support to your next design, with 2.4/5 GHz support so you're ready for any customer or configuration. With ready-to-go software, and great low prices, you can get your design set up with cutting-edge networking without breaking the BOM bank.
Unlocking Energy Storage Value: PJM Market Reforms with Brattle Group's Serena Patel Episode Overview: In this special live episode of the Solar Maverick Podcast, recorded at the 2025 Mid-Atlantic Solar & Storage Industries Association (“MSSIA”) Solar & Storage Insight Conference in New Brunswick, NJ, host Benoy Thanjan sits down with Serena Patel, Energy Research Associate at The Brattle Group, to unpack critical energy storage market reforms in the PJM interconnection. The conversation focuses on a groundbreaking report from Brattle, commissioned by the American Clean Power Association, that lays out a roadmap for unlocking the full value of energy storage across U.S. energy markets. Key Topics Covered: Why PJM's current market design undervalues flexible storage resources The two most urgent market reforms: ▪ Opportunity cost bidding for energy storage ▪ Creation of new ancillary service and ramping reserve products How suppressed price signals hinder storage operators' revenue Lessons from other RTOs like CAISO and NYISO that PJM can implement now The case for all-source procurement in local reliability planning The critical role of stakeholder engagement and policy advocacy to push reforms forward Featured Report: Energy Storage Market Design Reforms: A Roadmap to Unlock the Potential of Energy Storage By: Brattle Group for the American Clean Power Association Released: April 2025 https://www.brattle.com/insights-events/publications/brattle-experts-prepared-an-energy-storage-market-reform-roadmap-for-several-us-electricity-markets/ Notable Quotes: “Our current systems were built for legacy fossil fuel generators. If we don't reform the markets now, we risk undervaluing the flexibility that storage offers.” – Serena Patel “Opportunity cost bidding would help storage developers maximize revenue by bidding strategically, rather than being constrained by outdated market rules.” – Serena Patel Takeaway for Developers & Policymakers: To accelerate storage deployment, developers must actively engage in PJM stakeholder processes and advocate for reforms that enable revenue stacking and flexibility compensation. The Brattle report offers actionable insights to guide that involvement. Thanks to MSSIA: Special thanks to the MiSSIA for hosting the Solar Maverick Podcast at their first annual conference and for their continued solar and storage advocacy in NJ, PA, and DE. Benoy Thanjan Benoy Thanjan is the Founder and CEO of Reneu Energy and he is also an advisor for several solar startup companies. He has extensive project origination, development, and financial experience in the renewable energy industry and in the environmental commodities market. This includes initial site evaluation, permitting, financing, sourcing equipment, and negotiating the long-term energy and environmental commodities off-take agreements. He manages due diligence processes on land, permitting, and utility interconnection and is in charge of financing and structuring through Note to Proceed (“NTP”) to Commercial Operation Date (“COD”). Benoy composes teams suitable for all project development and construction tasks. He is also involved in project planning and pipeline financial modeling. He has been part of all sides of the transaction and this allows him to provide unique perspectives and value. Benoy has extensive experience in financial engineering to make solar projects profitable. Before founding Reneu Energy, he was the SREC Trader in the Project Finance Group for SolarCity which merged with Tesla in 2016. He originated SREC trades with buyers and co-developed their SREC monetization and hedging strategy with the senior management of SolarCity to move into the east coast markets. Benoy was the Vice President at Vanguard Energy Partners which is a national solar installer where he focused on project finance solutions for commercial scale solar projects. He also worked for Ridgewood Renewable Power, a private equity fund, where he analyzed potential investments in renewable energy projects and worked on maximizing the financial return of the projects in the portfolio. Benoy also worked on the sale of all of the renewable energy projects in Ridgewood's portfolio. He was in the Energy Structured Finance practice for Deloitte & Touche and in Financial Advisory Services practice at Ernst & Young. Benoy received his first experience in Finance as an intern at D.E. Shaw & Co., which is a global investment firm with 37 billion dollars in investment capital. He has a MBA in Finance from Rutgers University and a BS in Finance and Economics from the Stern School of Business at New York University. Benoy was an Alumni Scholar at the Stern School of Business. Serena Patel Serena Patel is an Energy Research Associate at The Brattle Group, where she focuses on electricity market design and energy storage economics. She was a lead author on the ACP-sponsored market reform report and is deeply involved in clean energy policy development. Stay Connected: Benoy Thanjan Email: info@reneuenergy.com LinkedIn: Benoy Thanjan Website: https://www.reneuenergy.com Serena Patel Website: https://www.brattle.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/serena-naresh-patel/ Summer Solstice Fundraiser Join Reneu Energy, Rosemawr Management, Polar Racking, Positive Deviancy, and the Solar Maverick Podcast for the 2025 Summer Solstice Fundraiser! This special evening will take place on Thursday, June 5th, from 6 PM to 10 PM at Hudson Hall in Jersey City, NJ. We'll also be raising funds for the Let's Share the Sun Foundation, which aids impoverished communities in harnessing solar energy. Event Highlights: -Venue: Hudson Hall, a Czech biergarten and smokehouse co-owned by Benoy, CEO of Reneu Energy. -Time: 6 PM to 10 PM, with delicious food throughout the evening. -Tickets: $50 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/reneuenergy/1653652
Functional safety is no longer a “nice to have” or “should have” in many applications, having moved to “must have” in spaces like automotive, industrial automation, medical devices, and aviation. Passing the functional safety testing process can be rigorous, especially if you're going through it for the first time. But even the best experts take at least six months to get software certified. To understand exactly what functional safety is, what the testing process is like, and how and when a developer should get started, I spoke to Bill Lamie, the President and CEO of PX5 RTOS, and someone who's been through the rigors of functional safety testing on this week's Embedded Executives podcast.
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. TITLE A Radically Transparent Computer Without Complex VLSI VENUE 1st IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy CyberInfrastructure for IoT and Microelectronics (SaTC 2025), Wright State University, February 25-27, 2025. This is a recording of the final rehearsal that occurred three hours before this invited talk. No slides were used. ABSTRACT Foreign adversaries have colonized America's computers from at least 1986. Four decades later, online safety is the largest failure in the history of human engineering. Radical stewardship in cybersecurity would bring radical progress, but responsibility for losses will need to flow from the bottom up. The buck stops with victims, who must accept all blame for cyberattacks. Only then will people at risk properly vet the products and vendors they select. A leading challenge in stewardship is balancing the opaque, proprietary nature of VLSI complex logic with the owner's need for complete control. Since these aspects are incompatible and owner control is essential, it's necessary to design computers that avoid complex VLSI entirely. One such architecture, Dauug | 36, is being developed at Wright State University to deliver 36-bit computing, preemptive multitasking, paged virtual memory, and hundreds of opcodes, all without using a single microprocessor or anything like one. BIOGRAPHY Marc Abel is an engineer-scientist specializing in technology that supports civil rights, economic security, and geopolitical stability. He holds a 1991 B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science (focused on computer science) from Caltech, and a 2022 Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Wright State University. Marc is the sole inventor, architect, implementer, maintainer, documenter, and promoter of the Dauug | 36 open-source minicomputer for critical infrastructure. He is the original and still only author of Dauug | 36's firmware, designer and implementer of Dauug | 36's assembly language and assemblers, writer of several related software tools, especially open-source electronic design automation and simulation tools, and the sole author of Osmin, a real-time operating system (RTOS) kernel for the architecture. He is the writer of 200,000 words of system documentation, including his dissertation and its online continuation called The Dauug House. Provide feedback on this episode.
Ever wonder why your recovery time objective seems impossible to meet? In this episode, we challenge the common assumption that a four-hour RTO is achievable for most organizations. Host W. Curtis Preston and guest Prasanna Malaiyandi discuss why these aggressive recovery time objectives often exist only on paper.From ransomware attacks to natural disasters, we examine the real-world factors that make rapid recovery more complex than most realize. We break down the differences between recovery time objectives (RTOs) and actual recovery times (RTAs), exploring why organizations need to be more realistic about their recovery capabilities. Whether you're managing backups, planning disaster recovery, or responsible for business continuity, this episode will help you understand what's actually possible when disaster strikes.Check out these older episodes about how a real disaster unfolds:https://www.backupwrapup.com/real-life-hurricane-disaster-recover-story/https://www.backupwrapup.com/disaster-recovery-after-a-hurricane-a-first-hand-account/
Sajna a hang ezúttal nem sikerült túl jól, pedig sokat küszködtünk vele. De aki mégis nekiveselkedik az új adásunknak, az megtudhatja Tóka Gábor (Vox Populi) vendégünktől, honnan ered a „gerrymandering” kifejezés, miért olyan nehéz igazságos választókerületi beosztást készíteni, és még azt is, hogy szerintünk reális-e egy előrehozott választás. 00:00 - beköszönés és a pártos térképrajzolásról általánosságban 24:40 - gerrymandering magyar módra 30:25 - hozzá nyúlhatnak-e a választási szabályokhoz még? 31:40 - lesz-e szerintünk előrehozott választás 39:00 - közvéleménykutatások követése: aggregált módszer 44:00 - jobbak vagy rosszabbak a közvéleménykutatások manapság? 55:19 - refutálás 1:00:51 - podcast ajánló ℹ️ SHOWNOTES ℹ️ • Vox Populi választási kalauz (Tóka Gábor): https://www.facebook.com/valasztasi.kalauz/ • Vox Populi weboldal: https://kozvelemeny.org/ • Vox Populi a 444-en: https://voxpopuli.444.hu/ • Gerrymandering, wiki: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1laszt%C3%B3ker%C3%BClet-manipul%C3%A1ci%C3%B3 • Még jobban lejt a pálya: így változtatja meg az esélyeket a választási térkép átrajzolása, atlatszo.hu: https://atlatszo.hu/adat/2024/11/20/meg-jobban-lejt-a-palya-igy-valtoztatja-meg-az-eselyeket-valasztasi-terkep-atrajzolasa/ • Térképen, hogy miként változik meg Budapest választókerületi beosztása, telex.hu: https://telex.hu/belfold/2024/11/19/terkepen-budapest-valasztokeruletei-valtoznak • Választási Földrajz: Így lehetne új és arányos választókerületi rendszerünk 2026-ban, telex.hu: https://telex.hu/valasztasi-foldrajz/2024/08/12/uj-valasztasi-rendszer-2026-aranytalansag • Év végi kvíz: Miért lett 2025-re előre hozva annak a 8,4 milliárd forintnak az elköltése...: https://www.facebook.com/valasztasi.kalauz/posts/1242434817391304 • Egy költségvetési tételből úgy tűnik, mintha előrehozott választásra készülne a kormány, 444.hu: https://444.hu/2024/12/31/egy-koltsegvetesi-tetelbol-ugy-tunik-mintha-elorehozott-valasztasra-keszulne-a-kormany • Unger Anna: Nincs kőbe vésve, hogy 2026 tavaszán lesz a következő választás, szabadeuropa.hu: https://www.szabadeuropa.hu/a/unger-anna-nincs-kobevesve-hogy-2026-tavaszan-lesz-a-kovetkezo-valasztas-elemzo-podcast/33220414.html
Collaboration between the industry and government will be paramount to maintain robust wholesale markets and ensure grid reliability as the state continues to promote rapid development of renewable resources in the coming year.That was the message from NYISO President and CEO Rich Dewey on the latest Power Trends podcast. In episode 38, Dewey reflected on his annual “State of the Grid” message to market participants and policymakers at the company's Management Committee, highlighting several areas of focus that he says will drive the work of the NYISO in 2025.Dewey outlined pillars necessary for a reliable clean energy transition and related ISO initiatives now underway. These include a major effort to examine options to modernize the capacity market and more accurately assess resources' unique contributions to resource adequacy. Through NYISO planning studies, the organization also continues to examine declining reliability margins, additional transmission needs and extreme weather risks. “We've seen some dramatic changes, but one of the things that has not changed in this time period has been our steadfast commitment to the reliability of the power system and everything that we need to do to ensure that we can keep power flowing for New Yorkers,” Dewey said. “It's just so essential to the health, safety and economy of New York.”In this latest episode of the Power Trends podcast, Dewey also reflected on 2024 and ongoing energy sector trends, including the retirement of legacy power plants, the electrification of housing and transportation, and the influx of large loads like data centers, chip fabrication and traditional manufacturing plants. “There is a fantastic news story of economic development across New York state with the addition of factories and data centers,” Dewey said. “Planning for that load growth — which translates into job growth and expansion of the economy — is exciting, but it's also challenging from the standpoint of making sure we have a reliable electric system that can meet that demand.Dewey highlighted NYISO innovations and successes over the past year including changes to the process of studying the reliability impacts of new generation and large loads that seek to connect to the grid. Hundreds of wind, solar and battery storage projects are currently being evaluated through the NYISO's new streamlined process. Looking at the federal landscape, the NYISO is developing a compliance plan for FERC Order 1920, to strengthen the long-term regional transmission planning process, Dewey said.Dewey also discussed the company's emphasis on creating a “learning culture,” which he says is necessary for innovation in the modern-day energy sector. The NYISO has been able to recruit and develop a talented and diverse workforce prepared to meet the challenges ahead. As the NYISO works to build out a clean and reliable electric grid, the organization also continues to invest in its collaborative relationships with neighboring ISOs, RTOs, state and federal agencies and stakeholders, according to Dewey. “The electric system in the U.S. is one of the largest machines ever built. We're continuously dependent on our neighbors and the power systems that are adjacent to us,” Dewey said. “The ability to work collaboratively across the industry is going to continue to be crucial to our success.”Learn More Follow us on Twitter @NewYorkISO and LinkedIn @NYISO Read our blogs and watch our videos Check out our 2040 grid page
What now? What next? Insights into Australia's tertiary education sector
In this episode of the podcast Dr Rocco Guarnaccia joins Claire to discuss his research on commercial, for-profit, providers. He shares his insights into which RTOs are likely to thrive and which will struggle as the sector continues to change.Rocco's thesis is available at: https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/5de8508e-cc37-49f3-ace6-dcd7e8512dd5The government media release on 'ghost colleges'/lapsed providers: https://ministers.dewr.gov.au/giles/over-150-ghost-colleges-axedClaire's analysis of the data on 'ghost colleges' (lapsed providers):https://clairefield.com.au/the-list-of-144-of-the-150-ghost-colleges-including-more-schools-the-nsw-taxi-council-ausgrid-and-more/ASQA's actions to revoke thousands of VET qualifications:https://www.asqa.gov.au/information-former-students-cancelled-providersContact Claire: Connect with me on LinkedIn: Claire Field Follow me on Bluesky: @clairefield.bsky.social Check out the news pages on my website: clairefield.com.au Email me at: admin@clairefield.com.au The ‘What now? What next?' podcast recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as Australia's traditional custodians. In the spirit of reconciliation we are proud to recommend John Briggs Consulting as a leader in Reconciliation and Indigenous engagement. To find out more go to www.johnbriggs.net.au
The episode features a discussion with Mitch English, a product development team lead at Inertia, about using the QP (Quantum Platform) framework for embedded systems development. Mitch and Jeff recently collaborated on a medical device project where they successfully implemented QP. The framework, created by Miro Samek, implements the actor model with active objects running in their own threads and communicating via messages. This approach helps avoid common concurrency issues found in traditional RTOS implementations.The discussion covers how QP's hierarchical state machine framework makes it easier to manage complex state transitions and system behaviors. They share their experience using QP on a blood analyzer project, discussing how they structured the code with different layers of abstraction and maintained multiple test builds throughout development. The team found that QP's architecture helped make the system's complexity more manageable and testable.A key learning they shared was about event communication - while they initially used direct posting between active objects, they later realized that using the publish-subscribe pattern more extensively would have made testing easier and the system more flexible. They recommend starting with QP's simple examples and gradually building up complexity rather than trying to implement complex examples right away.Key Timestamps:00:00:00 - Introduction and background00:03:00 - Overview of QP framework and actor model00:06:30 - Discussion of hierarchical state machines00:19:30 - Project architecture and implementation approach00:27:00 - Testing strategies and development process00:30:00 - Team structure and collaboration00:35:00 - Hardware/software integration00:39:00 - Advice for getting started with QP00:41:50 - About Inertia and contact informationLinks:Miro Samek's QP framework: https://www.state-machine.com/products/qpMiro's book on QP framework: https://www.state-machine.com/psicc2QP GitHub repository with example code: https://github.com/QuantumLeaps/qpc-examplesInertia website: http://www.inertiapd.com/Mitch English LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchellenglish/ You can find Jeff at https://jeffgable.com.You can find Luca at https://luca.engineer.Want to join the agile Embedded Slack? Click here
Guests: Asaf Dori, Cyber Security Lead, Healthshare NSWOn LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/adori/Ashwin Pal, Partner – Cyber Security and Privacy Services, RSM AustraliaOn LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwin-pal-a1769a5/Hosts: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/sean-martinMarco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast & Audio Signals PodcastOn ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli____________________________Episode NotesAt the AISA CyberCon 2024 in Melbourne, Sean Martin sat down with Asaf Dori and Ashwin Pal to explore the often-overlooked areas of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework: response and recovery. Both guests highlighted the critical gaps organizations face in these domains and shared practical insights on addressing them.Asaf Dori, a cybersecurity professional in healthcare and a researcher at the University of Sydney, underscored the need for governance-driven awareness to improve response and recovery capabilities. His research revealed that while organizations invest heavily in prevention and detection, they frequently neglect robust recovery plans. He emphasized the importance of comprehensive disaster recovery exercises over isolated system-based approaches. By linking governance to practical outcomes, Dori argued that organizations could better align their strategies with business resilience.Ashwin Pal, a partner at RSM with 26 years of experience in IT security, brought a field perspective, pointing out how recovery strategies often fail to meet business requirements. He discussed the disconnect between IT recovery metrics, such as RPOs and RTOs, and actual business needs. Pal noted that outdated assumptions about recovery timeframes and critical systems frequently result in misaligned priorities. He advocated for direct business engagement to establish recovery strategies that support operational continuity.A key theme was the role of effective governance in fostering collaboration between IT and business stakeholders. Both speakers agreed that engaging business leaders through tabletop exercises is an essential starting point. Simulating ransomware scenarios, for instance, often exposes gaps in recovery plans, such as inaccessible continuity documents during a crisis. Such exercises, they suggested, empower CISOs to secure executive buy-in for strategic improvements.The discussion also touched on the competitive advantages of robust cybersecurity practices. Dori noted that in some industries, such as energy, cybersecurity maturity is increasingly viewed as a differentiator in securing contracts. Pal echoed this, citing examples where certifications like ISO have become prerequisites in supply chain partnerships.By reframing cybersecurity as a business enabler rather than a cost center, organizations can align their response and recovery strategies with broader operational goals. This shift requires CISOs and risk officers to lead conversations that translate technical requirements into business outcomes, emphasizing trust, resilience, and customer retention.This dialogue provides actionable insights for leaders aiming to close the response and recovery gap and position cybersecurity as a strategic asset.____________________________This Episode's SponsorsThreatlocker: https://itspm.ag/threatlocker-r974____________________________ResourcesLearn more and catch more stories from Australian Cyber Conference 2024 coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/australian-cyber-conference-melbourne-2024-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-australiaBe sure to share and subscribe!____________________________Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-cybersecurity-society-humanity-conference-and-event-coverageTo see and hear more Redefining CyberSecurity content on ITSPmagazine, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcastTo see and hear more Redefining Society stories on ITSPmagazine, visit:https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-society-podcastWant to tell your Brand Story Briefing as part of our event coverage?Learn More
Guests: Asaf Dori, Cyber Security Lead, Healthshare NSWOn LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/adori/Ashwin Pal, Partner – Cyber Security and Privacy Services, RSM AustraliaOn LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwin-pal-a1769a5/Hosts: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/sean-martinMarco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast & Audio Signals PodcastOn ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli____________________________Episode NotesAt the AISA CyberCon 2024 in Melbourne, Sean Martin sat down with Asaf Dori and Ashwin Pal to explore the often-overlooked areas of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework: response and recovery. Both guests highlighted the critical gaps organizations face in these domains and shared practical insights on addressing them.Asaf Dori, a cybersecurity professional in healthcare and a researcher at the University of Sydney, underscored the need for governance-driven awareness to improve response and recovery capabilities. His research revealed that while organizations invest heavily in prevention and detection, they frequently neglect robust recovery plans. He emphasized the importance of comprehensive disaster recovery exercises over isolated system-based approaches. By linking governance to practical outcomes, Dori argued that organizations could better align their strategies with business resilience.Ashwin Pal, a partner at RSM with 26 years of experience in IT security, brought a field perspective, pointing out how recovery strategies often fail to meet business requirements. He discussed the disconnect between IT recovery metrics, such as RPOs and RTOs, and actual business needs. Pal noted that outdated assumptions about recovery timeframes and critical systems frequently result in misaligned priorities. He advocated for direct business engagement to establish recovery strategies that support operational continuity.A key theme was the role of effective governance in fostering collaboration between IT and business stakeholders. Both speakers agreed that engaging business leaders through tabletop exercises is an essential starting point. Simulating ransomware scenarios, for instance, often exposes gaps in recovery plans, such as inaccessible continuity documents during a crisis. Such exercises, they suggested, empower CISOs to secure executive buy-in for strategic improvements.The discussion also touched on the competitive advantages of robust cybersecurity practices. Dori noted that in some industries, such as energy, cybersecurity maturity is increasingly viewed as a differentiator in securing contracts. Pal echoed this, citing examples where certifications like ISO have become prerequisites in supply chain partnerships.By reframing cybersecurity as a business enabler rather than a cost center, organizations can align their response and recovery strategies with broader operational goals. This shift requires CISOs and risk officers to lead conversations that translate technical requirements into business outcomes, emphasizing trust, resilience, and customer retention.This dialogue provides actionable insights for leaders aiming to close the response and recovery gap and position cybersecurity as a strategic asset.____________________________This Episode's SponsorsThreatlocker: https://itspm.ag/threatlocker-r974____________________________ResourcesLearn more and catch more stories from Australian Cyber Conference 2024 coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/australian-cyber-conference-melbourne-2024-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-australiaBe sure to share and subscribe!____________________________Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-cybersecurity-society-humanity-conference-and-event-coverageTo see and hear more Redefining CyberSecurity content on ITSPmagazine, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcastTo see and hear more Redefining Society stories on ITSPmagazine, visit:https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-society-podcastWant to tell your Brand Story Briefing as part of our event coverage?Learn More
In this two-part interview, Erin Crawford, buy-side expert, board member and chair-elect of the International Business Brokers Association (IBBA), joins host Joanna Oakey to share her unique insights into business broking, leadership, and the psychology behind successful deals.
What now? What next? Insights into Australia's tertiary education sector
In this episode of the podcast Claire is joined by Chemène Sinson and Maria Langwell to discuss the Revised Standards and why it's important that the Standards should still include a definition of 'competency', why there is a need for proper education and support for RTOs during this transition, and how training providers can map their existing practices to the new Standards.If you haven't seen the Revised Standards yet - they're still technically in draft form until they are legislated - but they have been signed off by State, Territory and Australian government Skills Ministers, so for now they're available on the DEWR website: https://www.dewr.gov.au/standards-for-rtosAnd if you don't know Maria or Chemène - here's where you'll find them on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/chemenesinson/https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-langwell-23617766/Contact Claire: Connect with me on LinkedIn: Claire Field Follow me on Bluesky: @clairefield.bsky.social Check out the news pages on my website: clairefield.com.au Email me at: admin@clairefield.com.au The ‘What now? What next?' podcast recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as Australia's traditional custodians. In the spirit of reconciliation we are proud to recommend John Briggs Consulting as a leader in Reconciliation and Indigenous engagement. To find out more go to www.johnbriggs.net.au
In this essential episode of The Backup Wrap-up, we dive deep into RTO vs RPO – the foundational concepts that drive backup and recovery system design. Curtis and Prasanna break down why these aren't just technical metrics, but crucial business decisions that should come from your stakeholders.Learn why different applications need different RTOs and RPOs, how these metrics influence your backup frequency and system design, and why getting them wrong can cost your company millions. We'll show you how to have productive conversations with stakeholders about recovery objectives, and why the common answer of "zero downtime" isn't always the right one. Whether you're new to backup or a seasoned pro, this episode will reshape how you think about recovery objectives.
This week's EYE ON NPI knows where New York Hottest Club is at, it's the Teledyne FLIR Lepton® 3.1R Pocket-Sized Thermal Camera (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/teledyne-flir/pocket-sized-thermal-camera), a bite-sized full-featured video camera for remote thermal measurements. With a resolution of 160x120 pixels, remote temperature measurements of -40°C to +300°C, and the size of a coin, this camera can be embedded into any kind of product, whether it's running Linux, RTOS or a plain old microcontroller. Thermal cameras are multi-purpose, with usage in medical, industrial, construction, maintenance and security industries. Use them to make sure equipment is running at the right temperature and not overheating, that insulation for a room is performing adequately, locating people or animals, or detecting fevers without touching. FLIR makes the best low-cost, small-size thermal cameras and they're available off-the-shelf at DigiKey for quick integration. Each camera outputs either a simple grayscale-valued frame or one with a false-color RGB888 palette - the palette can be configured over I2C. The Lepton 3.1R is one of a series of cameras available from FLIR, including the Lepton 2 and 3.5. What's great is all have the same physical pinout and shape that can plug into a socket. This is great for manufacturing yield and field repair: the expensive module is placed last in the manufacturing line so earlier yield issues don't affect it. Also you can swap different resolution/FOV modules to customize for the end-user. For example, the Lepton 2 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/flir-lepton/500-0763-01/6250105) is a little less expensive but has only 80x60 pixels. Or you can upgrade to the Lepton 3.5 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/flir-lepton/500-0771-01/7606616) with similar resolution but a narrower FOV. Note that the FOV will affect the distortion greatly: a wider FOV requires a lens to focus the IR emissions but will fisheye the middle and compress the edges. There's software from Teledyne FLIR (https://www.flir.com/developer/lepton-integration/lepton-3.1r-dewarping-application-note/) that will "de-warp" the 3.1R's output, using Open CV, to give you more realistic imagery. To learn how to work with these modules, we recommend the Lepton engineering integration guide (https://flir.netx.net/file/asset/13333/original/attachment). Unlike the simplest thermal camera modules and sensors, which use only I2C, or the most complex USB-video output devices, the Leptons use a combination on I2C for configuration - called the CCI Command and Control Interface - and SPI for VoSPI - a.k.a. video over SPI. This makes them possible to integrate with a wide range of microcontrollers or microcomputers. As mentioned before, you don't solder the cameras to the PCB. Instead they are plugged into a common Molex 1050281001 socket (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/molex/1050281001/3045223) which is only $1 at DigiKey and comes on a pick-and-place reel. If you want to get started very quickly, DigiKey and GroupGets (https://www.digikey.com/en/supplier-centers/groupgets) have partnered up to offer a wide range of breakout boards, USB adapters and dev-boards that feature the Teledyne FLIR Leptons (https://www.digikey.com/short/2djrnzpr) GroupGets also published firmware and example code (https://github.com/orgs/groupgets/repositories?type=all) to get you started with their products so you can quickly evaluate the Lepton and make sure it will work and what resolution/FOV is ideal: simply swap the different models in and out of the Molex socket. GroupGets also works with makers to get their prototypes to market, working with DigiKey for part sourcing (https://www.digikey.com/en/blog/digikey-partners-with-groupgets-to-help-startups-getmade) so if you have an idea and need a help making it to production check them out! If you need a high-quality thermal camera that is plug-and-play, easy to integrate and at a great cost, the Teledyne FLIR Lepton 3.1R Pocket-Sized Thermal Camera is hot hot HOT and in stock right now for immediate purchase from DigiKey (https://www.digikey.com/short/0zr8w59q). Order today, pick up an eval board too, and you can be measuring the world around you by tomorrow afternoon. See on DigiKey at https://www.digikey.com/short/0zr8w59q See the manufacturer's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xsDuiq8eZc
Mark Ma, a research professor at the University of Pittsburgh, studies social and economic issues including Return To Office (RTO) mandates, AI, and tax evasion. A working parent during the pandemic, Mark describes how personal and community experiences initially generated his interest in researching remote work options and hybrid policies. He shares his discoveries that stock market declines generated RTO mandates but not improved corporate results. Mark discusses the dynamics of executives' control, power, and distrust affecting work policies. He advocates for workplace flexibility—giving employees and teams choices. TAKEAWAYS [02:23] While Mark's parents advised him to study accounting, he found it fascinating. [03:01] For his PhD, Mark explores financial analysis, and his tax avoidance research is cited. [03:45] Passionate about research, Mark pursues academia, also appreciating the flexible lifestyle. [05:09] Parental challenges during the pandemic fuels Mark's interest in remote work options. [05:50] Noticing neighbors' complaints about returning to the office, Mark attends a conference and hears about working from home research. [06:41] Mark gets tenure and explores risky research projects that help improve people's lives. [08:25] In late 2022, Mark starts collecting data on companies' return-to-office mandates. [09:25] Leaders say remote workers aren't working hard, while employees keep performing. [11:06] Return-To-Office mandates often happen after a stock price crash—but why? [12:00] How remote work gets blamed—without evidence—for poor performance. [14:36] RTO mandates also result from executives' loss of control and not trusting employees. [15:40] Companies may also use RTO policies to easily/cheaply lay off employees. [18:16] Male and powerful CEOs—with higher relative salaries—issue more RTO mandates to assert control. [21:38] Employee and team choice is recommended combined with intentional office time. [22:32] Mark needs data from companies offering employee choice to confirm the best approach. [24:58] Amazon's shifts to 3-days/wk then 5-days/week RTO has caused employee dissatisfaction and departures. [25:50] One example of Nvidia's flexible policy enables it to benefit from Amazon's rigid one. [26:59] Mark finds no evidence that RTO mandates help firms' performance or stock price. [27:43] Should productivity be measured appropriately and over what time period? [29:12] States level data shows structured hybrid work reduces depression and suicide risks. [32:00] Fully remote workers often self-select which fits their lifestyle and social setup. [32:50] Companies going fully remote need regular off-site engagements to mitigate isolation. [34:18] New research explores RTO mandates' affect turnover, especially in finance and tech. [35:20] Initial findings show higher turnover, especially among women, follows RTO mandates. [36:48] After RTOs announcements, turnover increases quickly as some people can't go back to the office. [39:06] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: “First, allow flexibility so employees have choice. Second, promote flexible team leaders to signal that people working from home will not be penalized. Third, for new graduate hires who want to work at the office, ensure mentors are present to support them. RESOURCES Mark Ma on LinkedIn Is Workplace Flexibility Good for the Environment? Research on Return To Office Mandates Mental Health Benefits of Workplace Flexibility QUOTES “The more powerful CEOs and the male CEOs are more likely to impose return-to-office mandates.” “You should allow team choice plus employee choice. That means teams decide when they want to come to office together. And on those in office days, those meetings should be intentional.” “We clearly do not find any evidence that Return To Office mandates help firms' performance or stock price.” “Five-day in-office work is not necessarily good for your mental health.” “A lot of top executives, when they do not see the employees in the office, they do not trust the employees. They feel they have lost control of the employees.” "Firms are telling their employees, you can work from home, but you will not be promoted. That's not a good strategy because your good employees will leave." "By promoting flexible team leaders, you will send a signal to those people who want to stay remote or hybrid that there is a clear career path for them."
If you're not familiar with Zephyr, shame on you. It's an open-source, real-time operating system (RTOS) for resource-constrained devices. That's how it differs from Linux, which is more of a mainstream OS. That said, Zephyr is growing quite rapidly in popularity, for many reasons. To understand what those reasons are, and why they make sense, I chatted with Benjamin Cabe, the Lead Developer Advocate for the Zephyr Project, which fall sunder the auspices of the Linux Foundation, on this this week's Embedded Executives podcast.
In this episode of The MHP Broker's Tips and Tricks podcast, Maxwell Baker, president of The Mobile Home Park Broker, interviewed The MHP Broker Eric Wanck regarding his sale of a small park in a tertiary market in southern Alabama with a challenging appraisal. As with every Tips and Tricks podcast episode, this one is brought to you by The MHP Broker's proprietary Community Price Maximizer. Use this four-step system to get the highest price possible for your mobile home park or RV community when you sell it through The MHP Broker. Guaranteed. Call Max for details. Here Are the Show Highlights: The MHPBroker Eric Wanck recently sold a small park, for the second time, in a tertiary market in southern Alabama–but not without its challenges (Max, 0:22) The park made for a challenging sale because it was small, with less than 30 pads, and had an abundance of park-owned homes (POH) and rent-to-own (RTO) homes, On the other hand, it had city water and a good septic system. There was plenty of buyer interest, and Eric found a buyer with some industry experience, but not a whole lot. The buyer needed help getting financing, and Eric and The MP Broker were able to find a good debt source. (Eric, 1:22) However, the appraisal process became a hitch. The bank appraisers came back low. Eric didn't give up on the deal, but got his clients to hit the middle ground on price so the deal could go through to the satisfaction of all parties. This took a little more time than he would have liked, but they were able to close in five or six months. (Eric, 2:55) The appraisers didn't appreciate the presence of the several POHs. They didn't take into consideration the significant rent deposits due to all of those POHs and RTOs. Eric worked with the lenders to get that stable income considered, but it was the kind of challenge that park sellers always run into when selling properties with a lot of POHs. Lenders tend to see that as more of a liability than the consistent income-producing asset it might be. (Eric, 4:22) At the end of the day, Eric and the MHP Broker team knew how to handle the obstacles, and they kept in constant communication with the appraisers and put together a deal that was beneficial to their client as well as the buyer. (Eric, 5:56) Even the toughest obstacles can be overcome if you have talented and experienced mobile home park brokers on your side. At The MHP Broker, we guarantee a park sale at the highest possible price. Call Eric Wanck or Max Baker at The Mobile Home Park Broker, (678) 932-0200. You can also drop us a line at info@themhpbroker.com. Power Quotes in This Episode: “...because we had buyers coming to us left and right, saying ‘How am I going to get this done?' and we provided that solution.” (Eric, 1:28) “We're not biased. As long as you can come and you can show that you can get the deal done, we will work with you.” (Eric, 1:28) “...we always figure out a way to get it done, and that's what we pride ourselves in, that we're not just going to toss up our hands and say, ‘Let's cancel the contract.'“ (Eric, 2:55) “We do our best in terms of marketing and providing information to the appraisers.” (Eric, 4:22) “At the end of the day, every deal has a little bit of its bumps, and this one did with the appraisal, but the good news is that we knew how to navigate it, and we got it to the closing table.” (Eric, 5:56) “We do sell the easier ones, which most brokers are fighting over. The ones that they don't fight over are the ones that we are very good at, and those are the value-add deals. We don't mind getting our hands dirty, albeit, we do like the easier ones out there, but, you know, obviously not every mobile home park out there is a beauty up front. They're just diamonds in the rough, and we are very good, especially Eric, at explaining how the next buyer coming into the deal will be able to make some money.” (Max, 6:12)
We're back, this time with Allison Bates Wannop, DERTF's policy lead! We cover an absolute ton of stuff in this one:* Allison's background and introduction, Mother's Day acknowledgments* Mary Powell's influence, DER advocacy, the significance of FERC v. EPSA in shaping energy policy* Favorite DER categories, Vermont initiatives, impact of extreme weather on policy, details about the Green Mountain Power programs* Differences between RTOs and ISOs, complexities in regulatory work, challenges with vertically integrated states* DER Task Force goals and approach, community-driven policy development, the impact of virtual meeting technology in policy advocacy* Role of trade associations and NGOs, gaps in current DER advocacy, examples of community collaboration innovative solutions* Load flexibility, redefining Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), DERs as non-wires alternatives, peaker plant replacements This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dertaskforce.com/subscribe
Puzsér Róbert, Boros Tamás, Csunderlik Péter
Puzsér Róbert, Boros Tamás, Csunderlik Péter
Puzsér Róbert, Horváth Oszkár, Börzsei Dávid
Puzsér Róbert, Horváth Oszkár, Börzsei Dávid
Broadcast on Serenade Radio on 7th March, 2024 Note: The organ played by Dave Wickerham is incorrectly stated on the audio as the Senate, Detroit. And no, I have no idea how that happened! Name Artist Album Year Comments Cheerful Little Earful Gus Farney Giant Pipes [Warner Bros. BS 1433] 1962 5-24 Wurlitzer, Organ Loft, Salt Lake City, UT I Found A Million Dollar Baby Dave Wickerham One Hour With You [WS-105] 2018 3-21 Wurlitzer Hybrid, Unks Residence, Erie, PA Young And Healthy Reginald Dixon Blackpool Switchback, Vol 1 [Sterndale STE 3106] 1933 2-10 Wurlitzer, Tower Ballroom, Blackpool; with vocal Honeymoon Hotel Ty Woodward Plays The Mighty Wurlitzer Organ at the Auditorium Theatre [LP TWP-200] 1986 4-22 Wurlitzer, Auditorium Theatre, Rochester, NY; RTOS, ex-RKO Palace, Rochester You Let Me Down George Wright 42nd Street and "Other Goodies" [Banda LP] 1981 The organ was custom built by Rodgers, probably starting with a 340. The circuitry was updated to provide more pipe-like sounds and two Vox Humana and one Brass Saxophone ranks were added. Jeepers Creepers; Say It With A Kiss Sidney Torch Hot Pipes! [Hot Pipes PH2007] 4-16 Wurlitzer, Gaumont State Theatre, Kilburn, London; recordings 1938-1940 Chattanooga Choo Choo Rob Richards Organ Stop Pizza Presents [ERB 103-CT] 4-30 Wurlitzer, Organ Stop Pizza, Mesa, AZ Serenade In Blue Phil Kelsall Live at the Buttermarket [Langdale Cassette LAN TC 89] 1999 3-8 Wurlitzer, Buttermarket, Shrewsbury; ex-Ritz Cinema, Chatham On The Atchison, Topeka and The Santa Fe Jackie Brown Flying Scotsman [Concert Recording CR-0058-T] 4-14 Wurlitzer, Granada Theatre, Tooting, London That's Amore Justin LaVoie ATOS 2018 Pasadena Highlights 2018 4-26 Wurlitzer, Vic Lopez Auditorium, High School, Whittier, CA; concert July 2, 2018
Join me February 22/24 at 1pm EST, as I once again talk to experienced Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery professional, Ray Holloman. Today we talk about 2 topics. In Segment 1 we talk about 'Are your plans and exercises thinking about equity and inclusion?' where we touch on: 1. Consideration for people with disabilities in tests and exercises, 2. Having those tough conversations, 3. Increasing morale and productivity - making people feel they belong, 4. Addressing fear, 5. Universal Design, 6. Change the thinking, 7. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in exercise plans...and more. In Segment 2 we touch on the topic 'In Resilience, where does disaster recovery and high availability fit?' and talk about: 1. The difference between disaster recovery and high availability, 2. Critical conversations with various parties, 3. New approaches and ideas for DR and HA testing, 4. Resilience in DR and HA, 5. Difficult discussions about RTOs, 6. Selling 'resilience' to leadership, 7. Priorities - making sure you can recover first...and much more. It's another great conversation with Ray, who share many helpful insights DR, HA, BCM, and resilience professionals can use in their daily roles. You don't want to miss what Ray has to share. Enjoy!
Join me February 22/24 at 1pm EST, as I once again talk to experienced Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery professional, Ray Holloman. Today we talk about 2 topics. In Segment 1 we talk about 'Are your plans and exercises thinking about equity and inclusion?' where we touch on: 1. Consideration for people with disabilities in tests and exercises, 2. Having those tough conversations, 3. Increasing morale and productivity - making people feel they belong, 4. Addressing fear, 5. Universal Design, 6. Change the thinking, 7. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in exercise plans...and more. In Segment 2 we touch on the topic 'In Resilience, where does disaster recovery and high availability fit?' and talk about: 1. The difference between disaster recovery and high availability, 2. Critical conversations with various parties, 3. New approaches and ideas for DR and HA testing, 4. Resilience in DR and HA, 5. Difficult discussions about RTOs, 6. Selling 'resilience' to leadership, 7. Priorities - making sure you can recover first...and much more. It's another great conversation with Ray, who share many helpful insights DR, HA, BCM, and resilience professionals can use in their daily roles. You don't want to miss what Ray has to share. Enjoy!
Broadcast on Serenade Radio on 1st February, 2024 Name Artist Album Year Comments Alexander's Ragtime Band Zach Frame It's About Time 2018 3-30 Wurlitzer, Organ Piper Pizza, Milwaukee, WI; console from Seneca Theatre, Buffalo, NY; www.C-2productions.com A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody Jesse Crawford Poet at the Pipe Organ plays the Melodies of Irving Berlin [Decca DL8565] 1958 4-24 Robert Morton, Lorin Whitney Studio, Glendale, CA Always Ken Double The Music Of Casa Loma [TTOS CD] 2008 4-15 Wurlitzer, Casa Loma, Toronto; ex-Shea's Hippodrome Theatre, Toronto in 1922 as 3-15 Blue Skies Ronald Curtis Plays Melodies For You 1991 ?-?? Compton, Paramount Organ Studios, Manchester; ex-Regal/Odeon Theatre, Gateshead, UK I Love A Piano; Say It With Music; Let's Face The Music And Dance; They Say It's Wonderful; You're Just In Love Peter Mintun, Jim Roseveare Piano At The Paramount [Premier PRCD 1060] 1985 4-27 Wurlitzer, Paramount Theatre, Oakland, CA; duet with piano Reaching For The Moon Ernest Broadbent Blackpool Favourites [EMI One-Up OU 2171] 1977 3-14 Wurlitzer, Tower Ballroom, Blackpool Heat Wave Dwight Thomas The All American Music of Irving Berlin [Newport Classic CD] 1990 4-42 Wurlitzer, Paramount Music Palace, Indianapolis, IN; originally Paramount Oakland 4-20 Steppin' Out With My Baby Rob Calcaterra Master of the Organ 4-22 Wurlitzer, Auditorium Theatre, Rochester, NY; RTOS, ex-RKO Palace, Rochester The Ragtime Violin Tom Hazleton Ragtime's Greatest Hits [Pro-Arte CD] 1989 4-48 Wurlitzer, Wilcox Residence, Gig Harbor, Seattle, WA; ex Ramish Theatre, LA (some ranks from Million Dollar Wurlitzer)
Three decades ago, FERC recommended implementing independent entities to manage regional power markets and system planning.The resulting seven RTOs and ISOs have largely been successful. But now experts believe they've become part of the problem, exacerbating the country's woefully inadequate supply of transmission, allegedly by pandering to utility interests.Episode 72 of the Factor This! podcast features Ari Peskoe, an expert on transmission policy and the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard.Peskoe shares his recent research on how regional grid operators have failed to evolve with the advent of clean energy technology, and why a reboot could be the key to realizing an electrified future. Watch the episode on YouTubeRegister for the GridTECH Connect Forum - Southeast event taking place in Orlando on Feb. 26 using promo code "PODCAST" to receive 10%. Take advantage of this unique opportunity for developers, utilities, and regulators to collaborate on the critical issue of interconnection. All GridTECH Connect attendees also receive complimentary access to DISTRIBUTECH International.
Are your backups collecting virtual dust rather than readying you for the next unavoidable disaster? Get back to basics on crafting an ironclad disaster recovery plan. We outline the essential infrastructure, applications, staffing, and execution steps often glossed over by the check-the-box enterprise crowd.Going beyond mere data recovery, we detail considerations around standing up replacement infrastructure, understanding system interdependencies, and restoring functionality faster with increased automation. Cloud's scaling and affordability make DR exercises less daunting these days if configured properly on the front-end.With major outages increasingly likely, the principles detailed could dictate whether your business emerges unscathed or shutters for good. We share tips for pragmatic preparation reflecting our scar tissue from failures past when lackadaisical DR rigor proved painful. Ever try troubleshooting recovery steps in the midst of a raging hurricane...or gotten that dreaded 2AM offline alert while welcoming your newborn? We have!Major takeaways:Start recovery documentation with manual steps, increase automation laterTest often - the cloud enables cost-effective exercising at scaleAvailability outshines recovery - build resilient systems and staff cross-trainingKnow precise RTOs and RPOs aligned to business priority and appetiteStay tuned as we separate the mavens from the mayhem when adverse events strike. Get your data DR ducks in order now before things migrate south!News articles from this episode:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/50k-wordpress-sites-exposed-to-rce-attacks-by-critical-bug-in-backup-plugin/https://jorgedelacruz.uk/2023/12/06/veeam-whats-new-in-veeam-backup-and-replication-v12-1-major-new-features/
Ron Bauer is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with over 20 years of financing businesses. He is focused on the Life Sciences, Technology, EdTech, and Natural Resources sectors. Ron has a track record of nurturing innovative concepts and supporting dynamic entrepreneurs and scientists, consulting them from early-stage angel and seed funding all the way through to public mergers, RTOs, or IPOs as well as trade sales with larger companies, both public and private, as well as SPACs. He is experienced in the M&A and Corporate Finance aspects of business and seasoned in the Capital Markets. He has been a major shareholder and principal investor in many companies that trade on leading senior exchanges in the USA, Canada, and the UK. He was the Co-Founder and Director of Turkana Energy, which merged with Africa Oil (TSX: AOI) in July 2009. The company went on to have a peak market value of over $3 Billion CAD, having raised more than $1 Billion of equity after Tullow Oil successfully drilled Turkana's oil concession, Block 10BB. Ron is the principal and founding investor in many biotech, tech, and natural resources companies. He has a proven track record of raising capital across all sectors and all geographies in ever-changing market conditions. By far Ron's greatest personal quality is his ability to adapt himself to changing economic climates and diversifying sectors. He holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Cambridge. More about him: https://www.instagram.com/ronbauer888 https://thescapital.com/who . . TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Highlights 00:48 - Real Estate in The United States 08:51 - Venture Capital & Ron's Background 25:45 - Concerns With Electric Vehicles 29:39 - Market Changes and How to be Prepared for it 38:38 - Antisemitism in the UK 40:18 - Being Jewish 45:12 - War in Israel 54:33 - Digital Economy . .
From New York to California, what are the top issues facing America's electric grid? We gather leaders from the organizations representing competitive power suppliers in RTOs and ISOs throughout the nation to discuss the top stories from the past year – and what to expect in 2024 when it comes to delivering reliable electricity while reducing carbon emissions, serving rapidly rising demand, and mitigating consumer costs.
On this episode of Know Power, Rob Gramlich discusses various aspects related to the renewable energy sector. He points out that residential rates in the Southeast are higher in four or five key states, and the idea that everything is working fine outside the RTOs is not true. Despite the Standard Market Design not working due to politics and lobbying, FERC nominees who would mandate RTOs are not favored by the Senate Energy Committee. Rob also emphasizes the need for a step-by-step approach towards a voluntary RTO development approach, citing SPP's successful model of operating the system and receiving 90% of their energy from renewables. The podcast highlights the importance of understanding rate pancaking in transitioning to cleaner, renewable resources, and the integration of utilities under a single RTO umbrella to create a more efficient pathway for moving power around the grid. He also discusses the potential for transmission infrastructure in different regions, both centralized and regional, and the need for renewables to support increased demands in load. The episode concludes with policymakers and Congress needing to encourage interregional transmission planning, which is a great investment with huge savings, and the idea of minimum transmission transfer being discussed by the President's negotiators.Guest bio: Rob Gramlich is President of Grid Strategies LLC, a Washington DC-based consultancy focused on transmission and power markets for a reliable, affordable, and sustainable power system. He co-founded Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies (WATT Coalition), Advancing Modern Powerlines, the Macro Grid Initiative, and the Future Power Markets Forum. Rob has been invited to testify by both parties before Congress, FERC, and state agencies. He has earned awards from FERC as Exemplar of Public Service, the Energy Systems Integration Group for contributions to market design and transmission planning, The Hill Magazine for lobbying, and the American Wind Energy Association for Technical Achievement.Rob previously oversaw transmission and power market policy for the American Wind Energy Association as SVP and Interim CEO, served as Economic Advisor to FERC Chairman Pat Wood III, and was Senior Economist at PJM Interconnection.Rob has a Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree from UC Berkeley and a BA with Honors in Economics from Colby College.[00:02:49] Joining FERC in 1995, Rob played a role in restructuring the energy industry[00:04:18] FERC embraced market-oriented policy, nationalized by Energy Policy Act, standardized electricity markets[00:06:01] Markets have changed a lot in 20 years, but some regions are still behind[00:10:07] Slow progress in Southeast, faster in West[00:11:50] Renewables driving regionalization through RTO proposals[00:18:31] California ISO proposes enhanced day ahead market (Edam), SPP offers Markets Plus[00:22:54] Slow RTO development, step by step approach.[00:26:02] RTOs enable efficient power transfer, cost savings, and enhanced reliability[00:29:44] Inter-regional transmission crucial for power reliability[00:33:34] Transmission investment is crucial for a modern and robust grid, but funding remains a challenge[00:37:06] Gates' initiatives and the Inflation Reduction Act provide incentives for transmission and renewable technologies[00:41:17] Advocating for choice in clean energy markets[00:44:34] Promoting competition, clean energy, and regional planning for a more efficient system[00:47:54] Regional markets will expand with transmission growth[00:52:32] Closing...
Tired of backup windows and 24-hour recovery point objectives? Then it's time to learn about how snapshots and replication work together to create near-continuous data protection, or near-CDP.In this episode, backup experts W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi dive into leveraging snapshots for instant point-in-time recovery and replication for an offsite copy. By combining these technologies, you can achieve recovery point objectives measured in minutes rather than hours or days.Listen in to understand what near CDP is, how it differs from backup and true CDP, and the key capabilities it enables. Discover when to take crash-consistent vs application-consistent snapshots. Learn how near CDP integrates with backup software and how you can use replicated snapshots for automated recovery testing.If you need tighter RPOs and near-instant RTOs for your mission-critical systems, you can't afford to miss this explanation of how snap and replicate delivers a high-frequency, budget-friendly data protection option. Tune in to become a hero by enabling your organization to recover quickly from data corruption, ransomware, and other threats!
A Fiesta of the Animal Kingdom Start Name Artist Album Year Comments Run, Rabbit, Run Chris McPhee Celebrate 2007 4-29 Hybrid, Capri Theatre, Goodwood, Adelaide, South Australia 2:49 The March Hare Robert Wolfe Dizzy Fingers [Thursford TE14] 1986 3-19 Wurlitzer, Thursford Collection, Norfolk, England; ex Paramount/Odeon Leeds 5:45 The Whistler And His Dog Dennis James In London [DJP 105] 4-20 Wurlitzer, Tonawanda, Len & Judith Rawle Residence, Chorleywood, Herts; Yamaha Grand Piano 7:41 That Darn Cat Rob Richards At The Milhous Museum [HPR 2000-718] 2000 4-80 Walker Theatre Organ, Milhous Museum, Boca Raton, FL: a digital recreation of the largest Wurlitzer in the world. 11:21 Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep) Clark Wilson ATOS 2014 Indianapolis [Back Home Again In Indiana] Highlights 2014 2-11 Page-Wurlitzer, Hedback Community Theatre, Indianapolis, IN 16:12 Hog Maw Stomp Dick Hyman Cincinnati Fats [Musical Heritage CD] 1987 3-30 Wurlitzer, Emery Theatre, Cincinnati, OH 19:42 The Donkey Serenade Bobby Pagan Cinema Organ Encores Vol 73 [Deroy 1238] 1975 4-19 Compton Noterman, Dreamland Cinema, Margate; (8 Compton 11 Noterman) Installed 1935; Public concert August 31, 1975 22:23 Horses John Muri Concert: Senate Detroit - Tribute to Richard Whiting 4-34 Wurlitzer, Senate Theatre, Detroit, MI 24:36 The Cattle Call Leon Berry The Beast In The Basement [Replica 33x509] 2-6 Wurlitzer, Berry Residence, Chicago, IL 27:37 The Grasshoppers' Dance Stanley Tudor Cinema Organ Encores Vol 6 [Deroy 871] 4-14 Wurlitzer, Gaumont Theatre, Manchester 31:21 Butterfly Noel Briggs The Theatre Organ Club presents Noel Briggs at Abingdon [TOCC 10] 1987 3-9 Compton, Abbey Hall, Abingdon, Berks (TOPS) 36:22 The Elephants' Tango John Mann The Christie Sound [Grosvenor GRS 1114] 1981 3-9 Christie plus grand piano, Tony Manning residence, Farnborough, Hants; ex-Rialto Cinema, Enfield; opened by Douglas Reeve January 27, 1974 38:50 Squirrel Robert Elmore Boardwalk Pipes & Bach On The Biggest 1956 4-55 Kimball, Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City, NJ; Boardwalk Pipes 41:43 Porcupine Rag Kevin Morgan In Party Mood [Audicord ACD 241] 2000 3-13 Compton-Christie, Town Hall, Ossett, Yorkshire 45:18 Bluebird of Happiness Don Springer Don Springer at the Milan Masterworks 3/31 VTPO 49:40 Rubber Duckie George Wright Concert: Auditorium Theatre, Rochester 1972 1972 4-22 Wurlitzer, Auditorium Theatre, Rochester, NY; RTOS, ex-RKO Palace, Rochester 52:15 Silver Swan Bill Coffman, Knocky Parker, Robbie Rhodes From Cakewalk to Ragtime to Ballroom [Solo Art SACD-81] 4-26 Wurlitzer, Old Town Music Hall, El Segundo, CA; plus piano; CD reissue 2014 56:48 Toy Tiger Ramona Gerhard Sutton Intermission Time [Soma MG 1203] 3-10 Wurlitzer-Gottfried, CBS-KNX Studios, Columbia Square, Hollywood, CA; ex-Legion (Capitol) Theatre, Walla Walla, WA 59:27 Carnival of the Animals (Introduction & Royal March of the Lion) Jelani Eddington, David Harris Perpetual Motion [RJE CD] 2005 4-74 Wurlitzer, J.B. Nethercutt Collection, San Sylmar, CA, plus Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano
In this episode, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project shares a progressive vision for permitting reform and the factors that could speed up the US clean-energy buildout.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsTo achieve its Paris climate targets, the US is going to have to build out an enormous amount of clean energy and clean-energy infrastructure in coming years. But that buildout is going slowly — painfully, excruciatingly slowly — relative to the pace that is necessary.This has given rise to considerable debate on the left over what, exactly, is slowing things down. Much of that debate has come to focus on permitting, and more specifically, on permitting under the National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA.A deal that would have put some restrictions on NEPA in exchange for reforms to transmission planning was effectively killed by progressives toward the end of the last congressional session, leading many people inside and outside the climate movement to accuse progressives of being The Problem. They are so attached to slowing down fossil fuel development with NEPA, the accusation goes, that they are willing to live with it slowing clean energy. And that's a bad trade.Progressives, not surprisingly, disagree! Their take on the whole permitting debate is summarized in a new paper from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Project: “A Progressive Vision for Permitting Reform.”The title is slightly misleading, since one of the central points of the paper is that permitting under NEPA is only a small piece of the puzzle — there are many other factors that play a role in slowing clean energy, and many other reforms that could do more to speed it up. I called up one of the paper's co-authors, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project, to ask her about those other reforms, the larger political debate, and the progressive community's take on speed. All right, then. With no further ado, Johanna Bozuwa from the Climate and Community Project. Welcome to Volts, and thank you so much for coming.Johanna BozuwaThank you so much for having me, David.David RobertsThis is a hot topic, as you're well aware, permitting and the larger issues around it. And so, before we jump into specifics, I wanted to start with a few sort of broad, call them philosophical, questions.Johanna BozuwaPerfect.David RobertsAs you know, progressives have been under quite a bit of fire lately, not only from their typical opponents on the right and in the fossil fuel industry, but from a lot of sort of centrists and even a lot of sort of allies in the climate movement. For — I think the general idea is they are too attached to stopping fossil fuels and not yet supportive enough of building out renewable energy. And the mechanisms that they rely on to slow and stop fossil fuels are also slowing and stopping renewable energy. And so I think the general critique is that they ought to swing around and be more pro-building and loosen these requirements, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure you've heard all this.Johanna BozuwaYes.David RobertsSo I guess I'd just start with this question. Is, do you think the progressive — and by the way, I meant to say this by way of a caveat, I'm going to be sort of using you as a spokesperson for progressivism, which I think we both realize is ridiculous.Johanna BozuwaRight, exactly.David RobertsProgressives are heterogeneous just like anybody else. There's no official progressive position. But as a crude, let's just say as a crude instrument here, we're going to ask you to speak for that perspective as you see it.Johanna BozuwaPerfect.David RobertsSo in your opinion, do you think progressives have taken it into their heart that things are moving too slowly and they desperately need to move faster?Johanna BozuwaMy answer to that question is that I think speed is progressive. You know, David, I don't need to tell this to you or any of the people that listen to this podcast or even progressives. We're dealing with the existential threat of the climate crisis and lives are on the line. And so I think that as progressives, we do need to take the speed question seriously. And I think what I would push back on is the fact that people have this myopic focus on permitting as the thing that's slowing everything down. And especially when I'm talking about permitting, NEPA permitting.David RobertsRight. We're going to definitely get to that.Johanna BozuwaYeah. And I just think that when it comes to this question of "Do progressives believe in speed?" I think that they actually very much do. And one of the things that I get frustrated with sometimes, when I hear these arguments like "Oh, progressives don't want to build anything," I think what progressives are interested in is building the right thing. And if we think about the United States and how our energy system rolls out today, we have a real issue that fossil fuels can expand at the same time as renewable energy is expanding. Like when it comes to fossil fuels, we can actually export that.We are now the biggest net exporter of LNG and crude oil. And I think that progressives are particularly aware that if we do the wrong thing on permitting then we're actually not only expanding renewable energy — and maybe poorly done renewable energy — but also the fossil fuel industry knows how to use these tools so much better than our renewable energy developers. And we are going to see just a massive expansion that we absolutely don't need right now. If we think the climate crisis matters.David RobertsWhat about the argument which goes like this: Fossil fuels are reaching sort of a structural peak and decline. Renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It's on the rise. So if you just, all things being equal, make it easier to build everything across the board, renewable energy will win that race and so it's worth doing.Johanna BozuwaI just don't think that argument is true, look at how much power the fossil fuel industry still has in making these decisions. Like if we look at who is behind the recent push for permitting reform: It was largely the oil and gas industry. There's definitely some more nuance that's there, but they have significant power to move things and move them faster than the clean energy world. It's a question of when you're rolling back some of these bedrock environmental laws that the pie — it's not that the part of renewable energy in the pie is getting bigger. It's that even if we are getting more renewable energy, the pie itself has expanded so that we're having fossil fuels and renewables expanding at the same time.And it's not fully pushing out the power of the fossil fuel industry.David RobertsWell, then, how about this? And this is the final philosophical question before we get down to some nuts and bolts. Do you agree that there are going to be trade-offs as we pursue speed? This is, of course, the big discussion right now is that if you really double down on speed, if you really pursue speed with everything you've got, there are inevitably going to be some trade-offs, some other progressive values that have to take a backseat. And that might be other environmental impacts. It might be impacts on communities. It might be, you know, name it. It might be that we have to loosen up a little bit on those other things.Do you think that there are those trade-offs?Johanna BozuwaI think that there are some trade-offs. You, I think, had my colleague, Thea Riofrancos, on the pod some time ago talking about lithium extraction, right? And the fact that if we are going to decarbonize our transportation sector, it is going to take extraction in order to accomplish that. Right. And there are substantial and significant impacts that has in terms of water contamination in some of the most drought-impacted parts of the United States, that is something that we need to be thinking about. And I think what my hesitation is when it comes to so much of this conversation is that we're talking about deregulation as the way to do speed instead of actually talking about planning and coordination.And from my perspective, it's the planning and coordination that allows us to think through the decisions we're making with a far better sense of what's happening instead of a "get government out of the way, we'll figure it out" project that — it didn't really do great things for the planet. Are we going to do that again and trying to fix it? That seems like a silly mistake to make.David RobertsYeah, that's a really important distinction. I'm glad we get that out up front. Because I hate when we go from, "Yes, there are trade-offs" to therefore "Let it rip, let everything go." As Thea said on the podcast, we can acknowledge those trade-offs and thoughtfully try to minimize them through planning.Johanna BozuwaExactly.David RobertsSo let's start with this. As you say, there's this sort of what we're calling the permitting debate, quote unquote. Permitting debate is actually a bunch of debates and they're all kind of getting squished together under this notion of permitting. But in fact, there's a lot of things going on here other than permitting. So maybe talk just a little bit about all the disparate things that are now sort of getting lumped together under that rubric.Johanna BozuwaExactly. So I think just to put a point on it, often when people are talking about permitting, they're talking about this unfocused conversation about cutting red tape. But really what it comes down to is where the fight is right now in particular on the national stage is around NEPA. So the National Environmental Policy Act, but wrapped up into all of their arguments are all these other pieces that actually are maybe more of the problem than particularly NEPA. So, you know, four of them, just to start us off, obviously we do have NEPA. That's part of the permitting process.We have local and state zoning permits, approvals, things like that. You know, going to Georgia County to make sure that you can put something through. Then you have third, these contracts or arrangements that are actually between private organizations. David, I know you had folks talking about internet connection queues — that often is part of the permitting debate, but it's actually about who gets to go onto the transmission that's being built.David RobertsLet me pause there because I want to make a point that I'm not sure everybody understands and I'm not even sure we made it in that pod. But the ISOs, the ...Johanna BozuwaIndependent service operators. I know I always mess it up. RTOs. ISOs.David RobertsYes, I know. ISOs and RTOs. I could never call that to mind. But anyway, the ones who are sort of running the transmission systems and running these queues are not public organizations. Those are not state organizations. They are private consortia of transmission organizations and utilities and things like that. So it's not something that the state can come in and just directly change. I just think that's worth sort of putting on the record.Johanna BozuwaI think that's a really important point and I think we'll probably dig into this further. But the idea that and I think you talked about this on the pod last time, but there are so many different kind of private actors that are operating within the RTOs and ISOs with not actually a huge amount of oversight, as it currently stands.David RobertsYes, or transparency.Johanna BozuwaOr transparency.David RobertsOr accountability, really.Johanna BozuwaYeah, exactly. And it turns out if we're looking at what's really miring the buildout of renewable energy, a solid amount of it is right there. Is in the interconnection queues. I think it was Southwest PowerPool — takes like eight years sometimes to get the developer to get their project through. And those are for projects that already have their offtaker and have all their permitting in place. So it just feels quite misguided for us to spend all of this time talking about permitting when we could be actually diagnosing the problem —David RobertsAnd you said there was a fourth.Johanna Bozuwa— and there's a fourth. The fourth one, I would say, is just operation and construction permits, like some of the pollution discharge stuff that is at some of these more local levels. And those four don't even include some of the other things that stop things, which is like access to capital, utility squabbles, supply chain slowdowns, these whole host of other issues that are just being swept under the rug because it's very alluring to say, guess what? I have the one quick fix to make sure that renewable energy gets built in the United States.David RobertsAnd local NIMBYism. I'd throw that in.Johanna BozuwaYeah, yeah, local NIMBYism, absolutely. Add it to the pile, exactly. So and NEPA's not going to do things about local NIMBYism in the same way that's the local and state zoning stuff.David RobertsYeah, I think people really want, for obvious reasons, they're frustrated by everything going so slowly and everybody wants there to be sort of like something to cut the Gordian knot, sort of one, as you said, one weird trick. And that's, I think, why people are grasping onto NEPA because it seems like that's one big thing we can argue about and change. But as you say, the reasons here are very disparate. But let's just take a second to talk about NEPA. I go back and forth on this, but is it, do you think the progressive position that NEPA is okay "as is" and doesn't need any changes?Like, do you think there are problems with NEPA and how it's administered?Johanna BozuwaOkay. My feeling on this is that the case about NEPA is overstated, especially as we describe so many other things, even outside of the permitting process that matters. But if we're going to talk about NEPA, I think overall the projects are going through pretty quickly. There was a new study, actually, this month by, I think, David Adelman that did a really comprehensive look at wind and solar NEPA reviews over the past ten years, and he found that less than 5% of Wind and solar projects required. The EIS, like the Environmental Impact Statement, which is the one that takes the most time usually, can be two and a half years or whatever, but they're going through with categorical exclusions or some of these faster ways to move wind and solar projects through, or just projects in general.And he found that there was very little litigation involved, which is often like the dog whistle, I feel like, of some of these folks who are calling for permitting.David RobertsYeah, I was surprised when I looked at that study. It's a relatively low percentage of those projects that get litigated after they're done.Johanna BozuwaRight, exactly. And I think if I were to make any improvements to NEPA, the thing I would do is bulk up the administrative state. Jamie Gibbs Pleune wrote a kind of corresponding piece of research to our permitting report where she investigated and talked about NEPA in particular with Roosevelt. But she was looking at another paper and found of 40,000 NEPA decisions that the US Forest Service looked at, the biggest causes of delays were actually from a lack of experienced staff, budget instability, and honestly, delays from the applicants themselves not getting their stuff in on time. So I just feel as if we're going to do anything to make NEPA better, give the BLM, give US Forest Service, give EPA far more funds, training, staff empowerment that's going to actually move these projects even faster through the pipeline when they're actually moving relatively quickly.And these places have experienced chronic understaffing and lack of empowerment. So there is work to be done there. I don't want to understate that, but I think that it's a reasonable thing for us to accomplish without rolling back and applying a very neoliberal frame to how we get this job done.David RobertsYeah, I would say it does seem like NEPA has sprawled a bit since it was passed. Originally, it was supposed to be major projects that came under NEPA review, and the court basically decided that all projects were under NEPA review. And so there's just thousands and thousands now that just have these little sort of not very long delays because they get these categorical exemptions. But there's just a lot of — it's very sprawling, it seems like, and unfocused. This is one of those areas where I feel like there are procedures of the administrative state that could work better and more effectively.But at this point, liberals, they've just been under assault for so long. And liberals just know if you open this can of worms, if you open it up to review, there's just a pool of piranhas that want to go in and strip it bare. And so they just don't open it for review. Like, there's so many things like this. Like, if we could have a good faith process of actually trying to do what NEPA is supposed to do better than NEPA does it, I feel like, yeah, there's stuff we could improve, but Joe Manchin doesn't want to improve it.Johanna BozuwaWe don't want Joe Manchin in charge of what NEPA looks like and what's the more muscular version that takes into consideration the real-life climate impacts. Because I don't know when you're talking there, David, a thing that comes up for me is the reality that we will have more things happening on the ground. Like, let's say you put transmission in, we have a wildfire crisis. Now all of a sudden, the stakes are higher when it comes to these things like environmental review that are very material that I think also aren't talked about as much as they should be. And so, yeah, I can imagine things being shifted and changed within NEPA so that it works better for the current context.But I think that, as you describe it, could be a real political problem for us to do that type of work right now. And we have other mechanisms that can move us much more quickly in the interim. Like, is this really the thing we want to be spending our time on as progressives? The answer is no.David RobertsAnd I also think if you look at the reforms that were sort of ended up getting jammed through, like of all the thoughtful things you could do to NEPA to make it work better, just a sort of — page limit, like a page limit on reviews: Seems like it's such a blunt instrument. It's such a crude way of approaching this.Johanna BozuwaOh, and I think it's going to get them into serious trouble. If you want a thing that is going to increase litigation, try adding an arbitrary deadline and page limit to something with no administrative capacity.David RobertsOkay. We could do a whole pod on NEPA, but I don't want to get too — our whole point is it's not the sole or even main impediment here. So at a slightly more granular level, let's talk about what you think is actually slowing down clean energy infrastructure build out. And there's a few categories your report covers starting with transmission, which is, I think, the big one.Johanna BozuwaYeah, totally. And I would agree with you. I mean, transmission planning is kind of in shambles in this country. It's not up to the job.David RobertsYeah, I don't think literally anybody on any side of anything would disagree with you about that.Johanna BozuwaExactly. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that multistate transmission buildouts are incredibly hard to do in a federalized system. We just have so many different actors that are vying to hold on to their particular part of the market, especially with our vertically integrated utilities that don't have much interest in allowing other utilities into their service territory. And in deregulated states, utilities are kind of out of the picture for deciding where new generation is being built. So there's not a lot of efficiencies that are built into that. So we just get this really haphazard development, if development at all, of our transmission system, which I think is just quite a failure.There are so many clear opportunities to do much more clear planning around this.David RobertsYes. And then what about big large-scale renewable energy projects like big solar, wind, geothermal, what is in practice, slowing down their build out?Johanna BozuwaYeah, so I think that when it comes to some of these larger scale projects around solar or wind, you're running again into projects that aren't thinking strategically about where they're being placed. So if we're looking at the amount of land that we're going to need with the energy transition right. Wind and solar take more space up than one natural gas plant. And I think that there's just like a clear lack of land use planning when it comes to these larger scale projects when we could be doing it far better. Right. And thinking about what are the areas that make sense and are going to limit the amount of impact on our landscape and on communities and actually deploy it in those areas.And I actually think there are answers to that question.David RobertsWell, we're not to answers yet. We're dwelling on problems.Johanna BozuwaOkay, all right —David RobertsSo how does that slow down? I mean, what does that manifest as? How does that slow down the build out?Johanna BozuwaYeah, well, the way that that manifests is that you're putting big renewable energy projects in tension with things like agriculture. You're putting big renewable projects in tension with our biodiversity goals. And so those are the things that are going to potentially mire the development and deployment of these larger scale projects — in addition to getting them attached to the transmission and making sure that it's colocated with the transmission we need.David RobertsYes, the aforementioned interconnection queue issue, which alone is like, "That's a lot of years," which as you say, that's a lot of years tacked on the end of all the other stuff they have to go through. Like once they have to go through all that other stuff, then they get in the interconnection queue and wait and wither, etc. And then another thing you take on here is a big piece of the clean energy buildout, which I think a lot of people don't really think about as much, maybe don't enjoy thinking about as much, which is the sort of minerals and metals aspect of it. A big part of IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, is an attempt to onshore supply chains so that China does not dominate them.But that means onshoring some mines and some minerals processing which are not necessarily environmentally friendly, not necessarily things people like having in their backyard. So what's slowing those things down?Johanna BozuwaI guess I would say there are two pieces that are happening. One is just that this is a pretty new area and there are so many price fluctuations that are happening. There's all of these big mining companies that are shifting ownership, trying to figure out financing. Right? So there's a lot that's happening there. And mining companies are not the best known for having perfect environmental impact statements or anything like that, that's going to get them mired right. And then you add in the fact that as we talked about earlier, a lot of where these lithium reserves are is also in extremely — like the likelihood for drought is a lot higher if you're looking, for instance, at the Salton Sea in California or, you know, over in Nevada, these are places that we actually have to be extremely careful about. And also it just takes a really long time to build a mine like this isn't something that happens the next day. Right. It's like 10 to 15 years in the future type thing. So it is a longer time frame that's going to be even longer if we aren't thinking, again, about who is impacted, how they are going to be impacted by the mining itself. What is that going to do to air quality, water quality, all of these different things?It's a really big part of the permitting discussion, or of the transition discussion in particular that is being discounted in the United States.David RobertsAnd one more bit on problems, before we transition to recommendations. I noticed that one thing you don't get into a lot in the report is the expression of those state and local level permitting issues. And a lot of those I think, are tied to environmental review. And a lot — like, for instance, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is just sort of like legendarily at this point, a tool for local NIMBYs to stop things happening. Like we just read a story that was bouncing around Twitter a few days ago about these wealthy people — I forget what county they were in — but they were suing because someone had moved a playground closer to their house.They didn't like the sound of the kids playing and so they sued. And part of it was that the city had not done a proper environmental review under CEQA of moving the playground. And you hear stories like that all the time. Do you think you said that NEPA is not as big a problem as people say? Do you think state level environmental review is a serious problem, a serious barrier, at least in some places?Johanna BozuwaI think it just really depends on the place. And I think that's part of why as we were writing a national paper, being able to dig into the detail and differentiations between all of these different places seemed like a big haul for a small paper. So yeah, I think that there are these pieces at the local level, the zoning things, right? People are historic preservation boards that are saying like, "No rooftop solar because we don't like the look of it." Yeah, that's some BS in my mind and I think we do need to figure out how to manage that.And I think what this comes into conversation with is a little bit of like, what is the community review process? What does that look like and how do we manage that?David RobertsContemplating the variety and number of those instruments at the state and local level is really overwhelming and really does make the problem feel so intractable because it's just like, as you say in a federalist system, it's like every bit of reform is not just one bit, it's 50 bits. Every bit is 50 fights.Johanna BozuwaTotally agree. And I think that's why we get stuck in these gridlocks sometimes. And also when we get to solutions, I think there are some examples that we can draw on and utilize our little multi tool of ideas of how to move this forward.David RobertsFinal thing before that, because I forgot about this bit, but actually it's worth making a note that it's actually easier for fossil fuel infrastructure to get NEPA permits than it is for clean energy projects. It's something you note in the paper. If anything, NEPA is easier on these pipelines and stuff. Even though Joe Manchin is complaining ceaselessly about it.Johanna BozuwaYes, and I mean, I think that's why in particular, people who have been fighting the fossil fuel industry for so long, look to this group of folks, more center left folks, that are saying "Repeal NEPA, let's do it, we want to build." They're saying, "Oh my gosh. What you're doing by saying that is saying that the West Virginian that I have been fighting alongside is going to be decimated by this pipeline that's being passed now." So there are really high stakes and in a lot of the permitting process that we saw at the federal level, it also implicated the Mountain Valley pipeline.Right. And that type of infrastructure getting a pass when it couldn't even get some of its permits at the state level to just go forth is a really, I think, scary potential because that locks us into decades of extraction.David RobertsYeah, I feel like that was not covered well when this whole thing happened. You know, the Mountain Valley Pipeline: It's not that it was like stuck unfairly in a bureaucratic tangle. It just sort of straightforwardly was polluting and so it couldn't get the permits, the permits were rejected. It wasn't like stuck in some queue or something. It was just straightforwardly a polluting project that could not qualify under US law to go on. And it was just like jammed through. So I feel like the outrage of that didn't really penetrate partially because everybody's on this like "everything needs to go faster tip" and so they just kind of slotted it under there.But we don't want things that straightforwardly fail environmental review going forward do we?Johanna BozuwaExactly, like, I would like, that the Cuyahoga River does not catch on fire again. And that's the reason we have environmental review and NEPA. And also I would like it to be able to stop more fossil fuel infrastructure.David RobertsYeah, I know. And this is the other thing too, as though we're supposed to have some sort of content neutral opinions about permitting as such. I'm just like, "Well, I want more good stuff and less bad stuff. Can I have that opinion?"Johanna BozuwaExactly. That's so crucial too, where there are ways for us to stop permitting new fossil fuel infrastructure and permit the hell out of good renewable energy projects. That's a political possibility that Biden actually had signed up for and now is stepping back on.David RobertsYeah, I mean, it's politically tough, but let's be positive here. You have a lot of recommendations in here, all of which are juicy, all of which could probably have a podcast of their own on them. There's no way we can cover them all. But you sort of have your principles and recommendations grouped under three headings. And the first one, which I think is the one that is most directly germane to the speed question, is enabling more coordination and planning. And I think this is a huge thing. This is one of my soapboxes I get on all the time.I really want the climate movement to take this up is that we've had decades and decades of for lack of a better term, neoliberalism and this sort of instinctive free market stuff. And it's not like any major developed economy actually stops planning. What happens when you claim you're not planning and you claim you're being a free market is you just move planning behind closed doors or bury it in the tax code where no one can see it or understand what's happening. And then that results in whoever has the most power and money winning the planning fights.So I'm done with my soapbox. Let's talk about restoring our ability to do public, transparent, cooperative planning. Let's talk about a few of the items under here. And first is just land use planning. What do you mean by that and what would it look like?Johanna BozuwaSo, land use planning, as we talked about earlier, it turns out that one fossil fuel plant is a lot smaller than the types of assets that we need to build. That's just a reality of what we're working with. And so that necessitates far more land use planning to think about how do we get the most out of the least amount of space that is going to do the best for keeping the lights on. And so there are examples of how we can do this type of land planning. And one example I want to bring up actually is in California.So there was the Desert Renewable Energy Plan that was basically where states and federal agencies came together and they were looking at the Mojave and Colorado desert area. It's like 22 million acres.David RobertsVery sunny.Johanna BozuwaYeah, very sunny, exactly. Very sunny, very good for some solar. And what they did is that they coordinated a plan for this entire region so that it was prescreened for issues. So they said, okay, we're going to look at the biodiversity impacts of things being put here. We're going to look at the cultural or tribal impacts, the environmental potential impacts. And so after they did that kind of, what's called often like a programmatic study, that meant that the developers that came in to build the stuff there don't have to go through some more involved environmental impact assessment or study because it's already done.And so that meant that because they had done all of that work ahead of time, projects are getting approved so much faster. They're getting approved in less than ten months. And have, I think it's been now this zone has been around for about ten years and I don't think there is one litigation case. So that is just such a good example of land use planning where it's like thinking ahead of what we need and how we're going to do it. And that still does allow for private developers to come in, even though I might even argue that we could do even more planning and fill in the gaps with some public transmission or public renewable energy.But we can get into that later.David RobertsAnd we did an example from California, so I think now we're constitutionally obliged to do one from Texas too.Johanna BozuwaAbsolutely. Well, exactly. Thank you for setting me up so neatly, David, for the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones of Texas, which was such a success. So this is a very similar situation where the legislature directed the PUC, the Public Utilities Commission to plan where new generation and transmission was going to be located, routed, all of this. And so by doing so, they allowed for this proliferation of wind in Texas, a place where you might not expect a massive amount of wind to be. And I was reading a study the other day that said that in the past ten years, the CREZ line, so the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone, represents 23% of all new high voltage lines in the US.David RobertsGood grief.Johanna BozuwaRight?David RobertsYeah. They're actually building I mean, I don't know if people know this, they're actually building transmission in Texas. I'll just talk about how transmission never gets built. They're building it there because —Johanna BozuwaThey had a plan.David RobertsThey planned in advance. Yes, they had zones where it got approved and so you didn't have to then go there and do the entire like a transmission developer didn't have to go somewhere and then do the entire thing. Right. Do the entire review, do the entire land use review and the environmental review. They didn't have to start over every time that stuff was done in advance.Okay, point made. There more land use coordination and planning. That's the states doing it. But you could imagine the feds getting into that somewhat. You have these jurisdictional issues and federalism issues that are a bit of a tangle, but it does seem like the feds at the very least could do some informational, advisory planning and assessment on a bigger level, don't you think?Johanna BozuwaOh, absolutely. Actually, we do have a lot of private land in this country. Absolutely. But there is a lot of land that is owned by the federal government. So they're actually implicating a lot of this already. And it makes far more sense for an actor that has that kind of meso level understanding of what we need to build to be involved in those processes and be doing kind of a national assessment of where should those zones be. Like CREZ that's going to have all of these benefits and is going to allow for the most kind of efficient way for us to be deploying renewable energy while also taking into consideration these biodiversity, tribal nation relations and all of these things.That's a good role for the federal government to actually play.David RobertsOkay, we're going to pass quickly by two of these since I've done pods on them. But as you say, one is the interconnection process, which is probably the biggest thing right now, slowing down renewable energy getting built. I did a whole pod on that with RMI's Chaz Teplin a few weeks ago.Johanna BozuwaA fantastic one.David RobertsReally encourage everybody to go listen to that. There's a lot of recommendations in there for how to improve the interconnection process, how to improve things in batches. To return to a theme here, a lot of that has to do with just more and better planning on the ISO's parts.Once again, like, think in advance a little bit and you can skip some of this case by case stuff, but I encourage people to go listen to that pod. Another one, which we've touched on slightly, which I also did a pod on, is just and I think this is so important is just the capacity of the agencies that are doing these reviews. These are at the state level and at the federal level. These agencies have been cut to the bone. They're all, all understaffed, desperately behind, and that, of course, makes things go slower. So all these people who are whinging about reviews, if they're not talking about bulking up agency capacity, I just have trouble taking them seriously because that is the lowest hanging fruit you could do.But I did a whole pod on that several weeks ago about government capacity and about some of the provisions in the IRA that are meant to bulk up capacity at these agencies. It's just a matter of money and hiring. So we're going to check that one off the list. Let's talk a little bit about this next recommendation, which is about more publicly owned energy and transmission. What do you mean by that? What would that look like?Johanna BozuwaYeah, so this is kind of trying to answer the question of building where private companies will not, right? Like, we do have this problem of not having the long-range solution in the mind's eye, right? And we have this system in which there isn't a lot of this coordination that's in the mind's eye of a developer, right? Like, they're focused on their development, whereas the state government, federal government, has a little bit more of like, "Okay, what are we trying to accomplish? We are trying to handle the climate crisis. And that means we need to move as quickly as possible to deploy as much renewable energy as possible.And it turns out we actually do have some capacity and to actually build this ourselves." And we've done this in the past, admittedly, in a much less dense energy system. But the New Deal is a really good example of this, where the U.S. either directly financed or built itself a massive amount of transmission and energy infrastructure, like the Rural Electrification Administration that FDR put in place. It electrified 80% of the United States land mass in ten years. And when we're talking about the climate crisis, I would like to go at that clip. So I think if there are ways for us where we have a standstill where things aren't getting built fast enough, where can the federal government, the state government come in with a little political muscle and do that building?And I think that there are additional kind of benefits to doing this too, which include the fact that if you're building public renewables, for instance, you're also probably going to value having higher and better-paid jobs. You are probably going to, in comparison to a private developer, probably thinking a little bit more about some of those community benefits. And I think that there's a real win there that actually kind of creates a baseline for the rest of the private industry in a good way too.David RobertsInstead of just nudging and incentivizing private developers to do these things, we could just do them.Johanna BozuwaWe could just do them and we can also show them the way a little bit too. Right. Like right now, right. We just have the Inflation Reduction Act. Fabulous. We love the climate investments. It's so great. And also it just largely relies on tax incentives, right. And in those it's like you get a little bit more if you use local steel and if you have high wage jobs, all these things. And we could also just do that, build some public renewables and make it happen ourselves. And also when you have, particularly from a job perspective, right, like a public renewables entity that's building these developments with high wage work, that means that the private developers are afraid that they're going to lose all of their workers.So then they have to raise their wages too, which is a good thing.David RobertsRace to the top, I think they call that.Johanna BozuwaI would love a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom in our renewable energy world.David RobertsYes. Okay, we got to keep moving here. There's a long list. The next one is something we covered, I think, on the Thea Riofrancos post, which is just we know we have to build a lot of stuff, but that's not a fixed quantity of stuff we have to build. Right. We can be more efficient with how we use materials. We can try to build in a less material intensive way. So, you know, what Theo was talking about is encourage more walking and biking and multimodal transportation rather than cars, cars, cars. Like that's a choice. And there are other choices we could make to build a clean, but the less material intensive version of clean.There's a lot of different ways we can guide things in that direction.Johanna BozuwaOh yeah, absolutely.David RobertsEveryone should go listen to that podcast, too. This pod is like an advertisement for all my other pods.Johanna BozuwaI love it, I love it. Yeah. And just to kind of emphasize, the more that we can invest in efficiency, the fewer transmission lines we might have to build, right? Like if we have a bunch of houses that aggressively go in on multi units. Like, we're having more people housed in multi units. We're creating urban density. We're making the houses that we already have more efficient. All of those things accumulate and make it so that we actually don't have to do the same level of massive deployment, which is a huge win. So we have to — I think it's like questioning some of the assumptions, too, of how much do we need to build.David RobertsRight. Maybe not all our private vehicles need to be the size of military tanks and weigh three tons. This segues perfectly into the next one, which I feel like is underappreciated, which is supporting distributed energy resources. Talk about why that's part of going faster here. How does that fit into this picture?Johanna BozuwaSo let's say we're able to add rooftop solar to a lot of the rooftops that are around and implement microgrids and put in storage. These are all, again, things that are going to be a lot easier probably to deploy because they're smaller. There's less of this zoning permitting etc. that has to happen when it comes to some of the bigger stuff, where you're going to maybe need environmental review. And so by making those investments in distributed energy resources, you're actually lightening the load again on transmission development.David RobertsRight. It's kind of a piece of the previous one, really.Johanna BozuwaTotally.David RobertsIt's about being less material intensive.Johanna BozuwaExactly. And I also think the added benefit of doing that, of course, is the fact that we live in unreliable times and it adds additional reliability potential by having things like microgrids deployed.David RobertsYes, many future pods on that particular subject are in the works, are cooking in the Volts oven. Let's go to the second big category here, and this is where I have a little bit of skepticism. So this category is "Enhance community participation and consent." So this is what I want to talk about: You say, let's bring communities in more and earlier. And of course, I think most people, at least most people in my world, when they hear "more community involvement," their palms start sweating. They envision these local zoning meetings with old people shouting at city officials.They envision nothing ever getting done, everything getting blocked, NIMBY's everywhere. You have this sentence where it says, "Strengthening community participation early in the process will likely move projects forward faster without as much community opposition." Do we know that to be true? I want that to be true. I like the idea of it. Do we know that?Johanna BozuwaGreat question. It's worth interrogating. I'm going to borrow a little bit from my colleague that we've already referenced today, Thea Riofrancos, that she often says which is "Sometimes going fast isn't actually fast." So, you know, if we streamline, right, or NEPA gets streamlined or many of these other permitting processes, you cut the red tape and therefore you are steamrolling communities affected by the infrastructure. You're potentially hardening them against the project. And when they feel mad or disenfranchised, chances are they're going to throw the book at you. They're going to throw the book to stop the project. We talked about these arbitrary dates set by some of the permitting system.You're actually putting yourself up for far more potential litigation and drawn out legal battles because you actually haven't done the work that's necessary to bring that group on side, nor do you have all of your ducks in a row. So I think that there is a justification for defraying conflict and making our odds better at doing that. I'm not saying that we're not going to run into problems and there isn't going to be this annoying mob of Karens that's going to show up every once in a while. But I do think that our odds do look better when we do involve community.David RobertsThere's a cynical point of view here which says communities are always going to have their Karens. There's always going to be somebody who objects, no matter how early, no matter how much you consult, there's always going to be somebody who doesn't want something near them. The only way in the end to overcome this problem is to take those instruments of delay out of their hands, including the litigation tool, including the environmental review tool, including the community review tool, and just get a little bit more Chinese about the whole thing. Just go do stuff, even if — bulldoze, basically.I know we want to resist that conclusion, but I wish we knew better. I wish we had better models of moving quickly.Johanna BozuwaSo I think actually, since you mentioned the Chinese, I'm going to mention the Danish. And I think that part of this is actually like — we have this problem, right, that we know that deploying renewable energy, deploying clean energy is just incredibly important for the climate crisis. But the benefits are diffuse where the potential negative is pretty concentrated when it comes to these things. And so I think one question we can ask or the permit reviewers or whatever it is, or how we're thinking about developing these projects, is getting in their shoes and asking, what is in it for me?We can pay people to have some of this stuff, right? So the Danish government in the 1990s was building out a bunch of wind. And so one of the ways that they incentivized this wind development was by incentivizing that part of it is owned by the local government to give them a revenue stream. And that actually helped to limit the controversy. And you'll see that in Denmark, people have kind of higher concepts or like the polling is better for wind. And I was talking with this professor, Nick Pevzner from University of Pennsylvania, who was discussing this really interesting particular instance in which in one of these towns where they were going to be around the offshore wind, they actually brought in landscape architects to design the offshore wind. So that it would be aesthetically pleasing.David RobertsThe Danes give a shi-, give a dang, about how things look like. What a thought.Johanna BozuwaHuge difference.David RobertsYes, I know. You look at what's the one waste incineration plant in the middle of the town that's like gorgeous. It's got a laser display, I think it's got a ski hill on it. All these kind of things. It seems like we don't care here in the US. How ugly things are. Witness any sort of midsize town or strip mall or the periphery of any city. Everything's just like plain and ugly. Like what if we made things look nice that might improve community —Johanna BozuwaWe deserve nice things. Communities deserve nice things.David RobertsWe can have nice things. And you talk about we should do what's called a "Cumulative impact analysis."Johanna BozuwaYes.David RobertsAgain, to me on first blush that sounds like oh, bigger and more analysis: Surely that's going to slow things down. So how do you see that working?Johanna BozuwaWell, again, this kind of takes us to our planning. Right. Like cumulative impact analysis which New Jersey and New York have put in place is this way to discern not just the impact of the project but the accumulated impact of that project and what's already come to date. And I think what you would find in cumulative impact in these places, is that actually it's doing some of what we were talking about before, which is trying to fight off the bad and build more of the good. So that's a way to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure but maybe see benefit around solar or something like that.These are actually tools that, yes, as you say, at first glance you might think, "Oh my gosh, more? Really?" But what it's doing is assuring some of that larger meso level discerning and also in a lot of ways these are environmental justice tools too. Right. The reason that they're doing that is because it has so consistently been the same community that has had to shoulder the coal plant, then the gas plant, then the pipeline, then another cement factory. Right. And so they're trying to say, "Okay wait, this is out of control. Let's think about where we're putting this and how that's going to burden people."David RobertsSo the last category here is "Empower a just transition." And I don't think we need to go piece by piece through here since these are very familiar asks from progressive climate people, which is just stop permitting new fossil fuel facilities. Protect the communities that are getting hurt by fossil fuel pollution and set emission reduction targets that will phase out fossil fuels. I think those are all pretty straightforward. I do think the point here, though the larger point you're making with this section is worth underlining because it seems obvious to me, but also frequently left out of this debate, which is if you want to get renewable energy built faster: One way you could do that is through statute and regulation forcing fossil fuel out. Like, nothing's going to speed up renewable energy more than forcing fossil fuels out. Right. It seems so obvious, but it's weirdly left out here.Johanna BozuwaVery weirdly left out. It's a bizarre kind of development that we've seen in the climate realm, right? The IRA, for instance, that is a bill that is great. It creates a lot of carrots, but basically no sticks. And the reality is we need sticks if we're actually going to do this, right, as we were talking about at the kind of outset of the show, we can't let just the entire pie keep on getting bigger and bigger. We actually need to get rid of the fossil fuels. That's the point of what we're doing here. They're the reason that we have the climate crisis.And so, the best way to get rid of them is to just regulate them out of existence, like eliminate them. And I also think there's a certain amount of private industry hates regulation, but they do love certainty. So what is more certain than a decarbonization mandate that says, like, well, you need to be done by this date? And that actually gets us to more of the displacement than when we just say "Build, build, build just hopefully build the right thing for us, please please."David RobertsYes, I think that's true on several micro levels and it's true on a macro level too. One thing that would help us go faster is if we could just clearly articulate our goals. But we're sort of just hampered by having to beg Joe Manchin for his vote. And to get Joe Manchin's vote, you have to pretend that the whole pie is going to get bigger, that everything's going to grow. That's explicitly the grounds upon which he voted yes on Iraq. He sets it outright. He's like, I voted yes because I thought it was going to grow renewable energy and fossil fuels.In some sense, politically, we can't just come out and say the goal is to get rid of fossil fuels. That's where we're headed. It would just help everybody, private developers, state and local governments, if we were just on the same friggin page. Instead of sort of like backing into this, we're just backing into everything we do. Trying to sort of like wink wink at one another. Like we know what we're doing, they don't know what we're doing. It's just a bunch of confusion.Johanna BozuwaRight? And I think that it's also a little bit laughable because they obviously know what we're trying to do, right? Like, we're not really hiding the bag. And I think that this speaks to the need for us to be like, this is a 20-year fight, we're not done with the fight the progressive left needs to keep — we can't just have IRA and think that we're done and can wipe our hands. I mean, even this conversation that has come up on permitting shows that people are hungry and need more. And the question is okay, how do we build the actual political power so that Manchin isn't the one that's in the driver's seat?David RobertsYes.Johanna BozuwaI think one kind of last thing on this kind of community consent piece or community engagement that makes me really nervous to tie us back to the permitting realm, right. Is that the people who are potentially going to be railroaded by infrastructure that they don't want is rural America. And if you are pissing off rural parts of the United States right now, that's a very short-sighted game to be playing, right. Because you are potentially taking these rural folk who have just been beaten back again and again, and you're turning them to the right, to a growing fascist right, and giving away a massive voting bloc that is going to be crucial for us to continue to win and win again and keep winning until we actually solve the climate crisis.So I think when it comes to this kind of larger political project that we're doing on from a progressive perspective, we have to be wary of this idea that this is — not a get it fixed quick scheme.David RobertsYes. We do not want to tick off these particular communities any more than they're ticked off. I think if you talk to Biden administration officials sort of behind the scenes, they will tell you that part of the design of IRA, part of the thinking behind it is we need to flood these areas of the country that were hollowed out by neoliberalism, hollowed out by globalism. We need to flood them with new economic activity and new development or else our democracy is screwed. But it is also the case that you can't just go stomping things down here and there, willy-nilly, without community consent.They need to have a feeling that they're involved in where and how this is done.Johanna BozuwaYeah, we're trying to bring them into the fight for a populist amazing future, and shoving this down their throats I just don't think is the most effective tactic. And if you look back to the New Deal, right, so much of it was workers. It was people that were in more of rural America. There were so many of these folks who were standing up and fighting. And if we're not setting ourselves up for that same kind of sea change, then I'm afraid we're not going to be able to win this thing.David RobertsOkay. We are just about out of time. So just to kind of review, this is just, I think the point of your report, point of all this is to say the question of speed is not the same as the question of permitting. Technically speaking, permitting is a relatively small piece of the puzzle here. There's lots of other things we could be doing to speed things up that have nothing technically to do with NEPA or even technically to do with permitting. And we've reviewed a lot of them here, and I would commend people to your report to get a fuller picture of them and to think about them.But let me finish, I guess with, this is all a vision. I love this vision, but politics are politics and we live in a fallen world, et cetera, et cetera. So toward the end of last session, there was this chance to have a permitting deal, and basically it was these sort of arbitrary caps on NEPA reviews, the length of NEPA reviews and the Mountain Valley pipeline in exchange for some pretty substantial transmission stuff, some pretty substantial stuff on transmission, federal transmission planning. The progressive movement rallied to kill that. They called it Manchin's dirty deal. They rallied, they killed it.And what ended up happening was the NEPA stuff squeezed through somewhere else. The Mountain Valley pipeline squeezed through somewhere else, and the transmission stuff died. Looking back on that, do you think that was the right political move for the progressive movement to fight that bill? And more broadly, do you think the progressive movement is prepared to sort of make the political trade-offs which are going to be necessary since a lot of this stuff that you list in your report is just going to be very difficult with today's current political distribution of power?Johanna BozuwaYeah, great question, and I think my answer is that the progressive movement still did the right thing. We needed to fight — or the progressive movement folks who were in those fights needed to fight off and make very clear the MVP is not something that we can have — this permitting that's going to expand. It was a big toad to swallow. And I think if we look at some of the transmission stuff, like, sure, it was fine. Was it the things that we were fully looking for? I think it was Hickenlooper's bill, big wires that was in some of those kind of final fights, right.With the Fiscal Responsibility Act, his bill included something like a 30% interregional transfer. The DOE says we need a 120% increase in interregional transfer. That's just not even at the scale that we need, and we'd be giving up so much for it. So, yeah, we didn't fully win that fight, but I think that from what I'm hearing, kind of at the congressional level, there is the potential for another bite at the apple on transmission. There is still some, as we said earlier, right, everyone agrees that transmission is a boondoggle right now and a hot mess. So I think that should be one of the things that we're thinking about as the progressive movement.How do we do that? Right? But I don't think I would go back in time and say "Eh, we should just accept Manchin's deal." I think that it was an important political flag to stamp in the ground that, no, we actually don't believe that we should be expanding fossil fuels and renewable energy at the same time because that's not what we need to do. Saying all that, I do think there are things that we can be doing right now to advance transmission. For instance, FERC is looking at some of these interconnection issues right now. Biden should not rest on his laurels until he gets someone approved and appointed to the FERC board.David RobertsHey, there's Joe Manchin again being a jerk.Johanna BozuwaI know, it's so true. But there are things and again, we've already talked on this pod about stuff that can be done at the state level, too. We still have some cards to play in our hand to accelerate and prove our case increasingly and build the case for more federal implementation, too.David RobertsJohanna, thanks so much for coming on. I feel like lately the progressive environmental left has appeared in mainstream media and social media more as a weird caricature viewed from a distance than been able to speak for itself. So I'm glad to be able to have you on so we can talk through a little bit about how progressives see this and the larger issues at play and their specific recommendations, all of which I think are great. So people should check out your report. And thanks for sharing your time with us.Johanna BozuwaThank you so much for having me today, David. It's lovely.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe
The Environmental Protection Agency's new proposed rules to significantly crack down on carbon emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, as published, promises to aggravate growing power grid reliability concerns, EPSA president and CEO Todd Snitchler suggests. "I think we need to be thinking a little more holistically and not siloed in the rules in order for us to make sure that we can achieve the outcomes that policymakers want us to achieve, while still ensuring system reliability. That has to be first and foremost," Snitchler says.More broadly on grid-reliability concerns, Snitchler rejects assertions by some that competitive markets and RTOs are particularly vulnerable to outages and reliability issues. "I know that there are a number of views about what the right model is," he says, but he notes there are increasing reliability concerns in monopoly-regulated states as well as the clean-energy transition ratchets up. "I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all and we should just copy a different market because it allows vertically integrated utilities to carry the day because, even in that example, they're not able to get done, I think, some of the things that maybe some advocates would say that they can."While there's little expectation the industry concerns will benefit anytime soon from a historically fractured Congress, Snitchler suggests lawmakers missed a key opportunity for bipartisan agreement during a recent debate over whether to include energy project permitting reforms in the Inflation Reduction Act. "There was a time when energy wasn't quite so partisan. I think we would do well to try to think about constituents first," the former Ohio lawmaker and utility regulator says. "If you need to have transmission, and we all agree that we're going to need to have natural gas pipelines in order to power the system, those should go together. And that's where I think room for compromise would exist. That would be a best-case scenario in Washington because both sides would have something to gain. And they would be able to take that home and say, look, I won. And it would, in the end, result in a more reliable, more efficient power system."Support the show
Commissioner Mark Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been a prominent advocate of the need to overhaul the competitive market design at the heart of the regional wholesale power markets that have evolved in the U.S. over the past 25 years ("It's time to reconsider single-clearing price mechanisms in U.S. energy markets", Energy Law Journal, May 2, 2023). The fossil fuel-fired "dispatchable" generation units that Christie sees as crucial to ensuring power grid reliability are retiring faster than passively fueled renewable energy resources can be brought on to replace them. In our discussion, Commissioner Christie makes clear that his top target for reform is capacity markets, not the security-constrained economic dispatch model employing locational marginal pricing, or LMP, in real-time and day-ahead spot markets. LMP is the central design element of all state and regional competitive wholesale power markets in the U.S."I think in the real-time energy markets, the real-time energy markets and the use of LMP has saved consumers money by getting economic dispatch, by getting the least-cost unit dispatched. So I think in the real-time energy markets, I think there has been consumer savings," Christie says. "There's many functions to RTOs and I think that the most important function of all, and the one I think where they've provided undisputed benefits, has been to provide a larger balancing authority," he says, adding: "Probably the biggest single benefit of RTOs has been that they've provided a regional system operator, which I think has been of tremendous benefit to reliability and also, I think, to cost savings because they can dispatch cheaper resources across a broader territory."But Christie, an ardent states rights advocate, does not see FERC's role as ensuring these consumer-friendly regional power markets are ultimately in place everywhere, which former FERC Chairman Pat Wood attempted to do 20 years ago. "How you regulate your utilities is really an individual state decision" to make, and not FERC's, he says, calling Wood's Standard Market Design "massive overreach and an invasion of basically state retail authority."Nevertheless, Christie says, "I don't think that, frankly, the real-time energy markets, which use LMP, what's called locational marginal pricing, are really the first place we ought to be concerned. I think the real concern and we ought to focus on first is in the capacity markets," Christie elaborated, asserting that capacity markets should be replaced with utility self-supply programs that incorporate integrated resource planning by state regulators. IRP is a central element of standard monopoly utility regulation."I think an IRP process – it gets you the best mix of a balanced holistic approach where you can balance all the different resources that you need and try to get them at the best cost to consumers, which is what the goal ought to be," Christie says. "Everything we do as regulators in the energy area has got to be about what's good for consumers. We have to look at what is going to get consumers reliable power at the least cost. And I think everything we do, we've got to be asking ourselves, is this the best thing for consumers?"Support the show
By now, you've probably heard that tons of new renewable energy projects are “stuck in the interconnection queues,” unable to connect to the grid and produce electricity until grid operators get around to approving them, which can take up to five years in some areas. And you might have heard that FERC recently implemented some reforms of the interconnection queue process in hopes of speeding it up.It all seems like a pretty big deal. But as I think about it, it occurs to me that I don't really know what an interconnection queue is or why they work the way they do. So I'm going to talk to an expert — Chaz Teplin, who works on carbon-free grids with RMI — to get the lowdown.We're going to talk through the basics of interconnection queues, why they're so slow, what RTOs and FERC are doing to reform them, and what remains to be done (namely some friggin' regional transmission planning). Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
Picture of the Week. Another Critical Unauthenticated SQLi Flaw Discovered in MOVEit Transfer Software. And as for MOVEit... What's a "Rug Pull" ?? "Avast, ye Matey" China's OpenKylin v1. TootRoot! Firefox 115. Did Russia Disconnect? Use some honey if you want to catch some flies. Cryptocurrency losses. International Consumer Data Transit. Apple's emergency update retraction. Syncthing Revisited. Closing the Loop. SpinRite's first RTM release. RTOS-32. Rowhammer Indelible Fingerprinting. Show Notes: https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-930-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit You can submit a question to Security Now! at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT bitwarden.com/twit GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT
This week's EYE ON NPI is going to Matter a lot to you if you're interested in integrating with the world of IoT devices and sensors that is converting on us, inside the home and out in the world...It's the Silicon Labs MG24 Series of development boards (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/s/silicon-laboratories/mg24-development-kit) - featuring the Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 series of chips (https://www.digikey.com/short/00892bvf), designed for use with Matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)) an open-source connectivity standard for smart home and Internet of Things devices from the Connectivity Standards Alliance (https://csa-iot.org/) formally the ZigBee Alliance. The EFR32MG24 chips (https://www.digikey.com/short/f8z8rbvn) are fully featured Cortex M33's with tons of peripherals, timers, and of course, a 2.4GHz radio that can be programmed to operate as a ZigBee device. That makes it perfect for use in designing low cost, low power, home automation devices that don't need the power and complexity of WiFi. These transports live on the lower 'levels' of the 7 Layer OSI Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) Each family of home devices comes with their own transport, and often they come up with their own custom application layer as well. This means that you can't use something made for Alexa with HomeKit unless the developer programmed both. It's caused fragmentation and utter frustration when someone buys a smart light bulb or HVAC controller just to find out that its walled off from the rest of their devices. The goal of Matter is to unify the upper layers (https://developers.home.google.com/matter/primer) so that devices can be discovered and controlled by any kind of hub: from a DIY Raspberry Pi to an official device from Apple, Google/Nest, Meta, or other - much like you can use your Windows desktop or Android phone to view a website designed on a Mac, and hosted on Linux. The biggest companies in this space, Amazon, Apple and Google, have already signed on to make sure that their products adhere to Matter's API (https://csa-iot.org/members/). You, the engineer tasked with creating the next new product line for your company, should be interested in whether or not this "Matters" to you. The good news is that joining an ecosystem means you can make a small device that competes in a 'big playground' of sensors, voice agents, automation tools, and gateways. (https://pages.silabs.com/rs/634-SLU-379/images/Matter_Certification_The_Value_it_Brings_to_IoT%20Devices.pdf) But need to play nicely with the others - not scream in kids' ears, errr... overwhelm the share spectrum resource. We also have to let every device have a turn at commands, and not interfere with their behavior. Thus, Matter certification! Silicon Labs has a white paper on Understanding The Path to Certifying Your Matter Devices (https://www.silabs.com/whitepapers/how-to-certify-matter-devices) Moreover you can get started immediately by picking up one or two of Silicon Labs' MG24 development kits (https://www.digikey.com/short/0rc3n5f7) for less than $40 and you can begin immediately with developing on the EFR32MG24 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/base-product/silicon-labs/336/EFR32MG24A010/629647) a well-documented, low-power friendly chip with built in 2.4 GHz radio. Inside is a Cortex M33 running at 78 MHz, with 1.0 to 1.5MB of flash and 128 to 256KB of SRAM (https://www.digikey.com/short/f8z8rbvn) so it's got plenty of room to handle multiple protocol stacks, security layers and any RTOS or Matter layers. SiLabs has been making radio-inclusive chips for many many years, so you know that there will be great support and documentation. We also have the beginnings of a CircuitPython port for this chip (https://circuitpython.org/board/sparkfun_thing_plus_matter_mgm240p/) although at the time of this writing there is not Matter support built in, it would still be very helpful for bringing up a development board and verifying hardware. Want to take Matter into your own hands? DigiKey has you covered here: the XG24-EK2703A Explorer Kit (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/silicon-labs/XG24-EK2703A/17051436) is a great starting point with USB, mikroBus-compatible GPIO headers, debug port, and Qwiic/QT port. (https://www.digikey.com/en/videos/s/silicon-labs/mg24-development-kit-datasheet-preview) For final integration, you can also pick up raw chips such as the Silicon Labs EFR32MG24A010F1536IM48 (https://www.digikey.com/short/07qww54q) or integrated modules (https://www.digikey.com/short/3n4rp9dt) that have passives and antenna wired up for quick usage. All are in stock for immediate shipment - order today and DigiKey will deliver to you Matter on a silver platter by tomorrow afternoon! Follow it up by watching the DigiKey + Silicon Labs webinar on Matter development and certification (https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/4241172/CE3FB2F9DB2D54D5A47A124701A93047) to get your product out the door ASAP.
In about half the country, power utilities have turned over administration of their electrical transmission systems to regional transmission organizations (RTOs), or what amounts to the same thing, independent system operators (ISOs). RTOs and ISOs oversee wholesale electricity markets and do regional transmission planning, which increases system efficiency and reduces costs for ratepayers.The power utilities in the 11 western US states are not joined together in an RTO. California has its own ISO, but it only covers that one state. In the rest of the region, utilities are islands — they each maintain their own reserves and do their own transmission planning within their own territories. It leads to enormous duplicated efforts and inefficiencies.For years, there has been discussion of creating a western RTO, to bring the western states together to share resources and coordinate transmission planning. Analysts have found that an RTO could save the region's ratepayers billions of dollars a year.Recently the discussion has begun to heat up again. A regionalization bill in California was tabled this year but promises to return next session. Governor Gavin Newsom expressed his support for the idea. Nonetheless, numerous sticky technical and political issues remain to be hashed out.To explore the promise and risks of a western RTO, I contacted Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. We discussed the political forces pushing for and against an RTO, the way the west's electrical system has changed since the last time this discussion came up, and incremental steps that can be taken in the direction of greater regional cooperation. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe
STM32 boards, soldering, decapping chips, RTOS development, lasers, multiple flippers and for what you ask? So I can be alerted about a device I already know is there. The Flipper Zero attracted the attention of news outlets and hackers alike as people have used it to gain access to restricted resources. Is the Flipper Zero that powerful that it needs to be banned? This is a journey of recursion and not taking “no” for an answer. Kailtyn Hendelman joins the PSW crew to discuss the Flipper Zero and using it to hack all the things. In the Security News: SSDs use AI/ML to prevent ransomware (And more buzzword bingo), zombie servers that just won't die, spectral chickens, side-channel attacks, malware-free cyberattacks!, your secret key should be a secret, hacking smart TVs with IR, getting papercuts, people still have AIX, ghosttokens, build back better SBOMs, Salsa for your software, Intel let Google hack things, and they found vulnerabilities, and flase positives on your drug test, & more! Flipper resources: * [Changing Boot Screen Image on ThinkPad's UEFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvqZRTMAlMA -Flipper Zero) * [A collection of Awesome resources for the Flipper Zero device.](https://github.com/djsime1/awesome-flipperzero) * [Flipper Zero Unleashed Firmware](https://github.com/DarkFlippers/unleashed-firmware) - This is what Paul is using currently. * [A maintained collective of different IR files for the Flipper!](https://github.com/UberGuidoZ/Flipper-IRDB) - Paul uses these as well. * [Alternative Infrared Remote for Flipperzero](https://github.com/Hong5489/ir_remote) Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Visit https://securityweekly.com/acm to sign up for a demo or buy our AI Hunter! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw782
In this episode of The Vivek Show, host Vivek Ramaswamy explores the paradox of carbon reduction advocates opposing nuclear energy and discusses the complexities of US energy policy with guest Neil Chatterjee, former Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). They delve into FERC's role in overseeing competitive wholesale power markets, the challenges faced by differing state policies on decarbonization, and the consequences of shutting down coal plants on communities. The conversation covers the role of public policy and market forces in shaping the energy landscape, touching on the controversial topic of carbon capture pipelines and the potential for fostering nuclear energy without subsidies. Throughout the episode, Ramaswamy and Chatterjee engage in a thought-provoking discussion on the future of US energy policy and the potential for reforming key regulatory agencies.--Donate here: https://t.co/PE1rfuVBmbFor more content follow me here:Twitter - @VivekGRamaswamyInstagram - @vivekgramaswamyFacebook - http://facebook.com/VivekGRamaswamyTruth Social - @VivekRamaswamyRumble - @VivekRamaswamy--Indranil "Neil" Chatterjee is a prominent American lawyer, political advisor, and former member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). He served twice as FERC Chairman, from August 10, 2017, to December 7, 2017, and October 24, 2018, to November 5, 2020. Prior to FERC, Chatterjee was an energy policy advisor to United States Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and held roles with the United States House Committee on Ways and Means, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. Throughout his career, he has been committed to shaping balanced energy policies that promote both energy production and environmental stewardship.--Time-codes:00:00:00 - Mystery of carbon reduction advocates not supporting nuclear energy00:01:19 - Possible anti-growth agenda in the US00:02:53 - Introduction of guest Neil Chatterjee00:08:21 - Structure of FERC for independent judgment00:09:37 - Constitutionality concerns over independent agencies00:11:59 - Oversight and nomination process reining in radical FERC agenda00:16:12 - FERC's role in competitive wholesale power markets00:17:58 - Implementation of a minimum offer price rule00:20:56 - Reversal of the minimum offer price rule after 2020 election00:34:36 - Vivek questions the need for a top-down energy transition00:36:19 - Neil's support for solar plus storage00:38:57 - Impact of shutting down coal plants on communities00:40:41 - Neil's opposition to burdensome EPA regulations00:43:50 - Vivek's skepticism on government-subsidized carbon capture pipelines00:44:53 - Biden administration's clean energy transition and transmission line challenges00:46:20 - Opposition to energy infrastructure built near homes00:52:06 - Bilateral contracting in energy markets00:53:07 - Roles of RTOs and ISOs in energy markets00:56:49 - Fostering nuclear energy without subsidies and private capital's role00:57:38 - Public Utility Commission's role in evaluating utility rates00:58:38 - Challenge of short-term thinking for long-term energy projects01:01:04 - Vivek's proposal for a new nuclear energy regulatory agency