#reliable energy

[outdoorovernights]

Best Camping Solar Panels to Buy in 2024: Top Picks for Reliable Off-Grid Power

Imagine you’re on a beautiful camping trip, miles away from the buzz of the city, the sky a canopy of stars. You’re settled in your tent, and the tranquility is broken only by the soft whoosh of the wind through leaves. Here, you pull out your trusty portable power station, a lifeline of modern conveniences amid the rustic charm of nature. Whether it’s charging your phone to capture the night…

[oakkayblog]

North America has more hydrocarbon fuel resources than any other global area.

IER Report Details North America’s Vast Energy Resources Even if “renewable energy” stays viable, it will require hydrocarbon power plants as backup because of intermittancy and fluctuations from wind and solar sources.

[greatamericanpower]

Great American Power: The Reliable Energy Supplier for all those special moments at home.

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[deoidesign]

Sketching

[mag200]

i am notttt concerned about archaeologists analyzing my gender based on my hip bones or whatever. i AM concerned about them finding me fuckable enough tho. hope this helps.

[csphire]

Dammon Smooches

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Since we're heading into winter...

The Supreme Court of Texas narrowly decided Friday that sovereign immunity, which largely shields government agencies from civil lawsuits, also protects the operator of the Texas electric grid.

The 5-4 opinion will likely free the nonprofit corporation from lawsuits filed by thousands of Texans for deaths, injuries and damages following the deadly 2021 winter storm, unless lawyers find another way forward.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the power supply for most of Texas, qualifies for immunity because it “provides an essential governmental service,” Chief Justice Nathan Hecht wrote in the majority opinion. State law intended for ERCOT to have the power of an “arm of the State government,” Hecht wrote. If anyone is going to hold ERCOT accountable for its actions, Hecht wrote, it should be state regulators or the Legislature, not the courts.

Freezing temperatures gripped the state during the 2021 winter storm, straining the power supply so much that ERCOT called for cutting power to millions of homes and businesses to prevent the grid’s collapse. More than 200 people died. Experts estimated afterward that financial losses totaled between $80 billion and $130 billion, including physical damage and missed economic opportunity.

Thousands of residents accused ERCOT, power companies and distribution companies of failing to prepare for the freezing weather.

Lawyers expect the high court’s decision will allow ERCOT to be dismissed from the litigation, although it does not shield other defendants.

Attorney Mia Lorick, who represents some of those plaintiffs, said she sees only a slim possibility that lawyers could keep claims against ERCOT alive by arguing that their cases have differences that somehow skirt the sovereign immunity finding.

Majed Nachawati, whose firm is representing other plaintiffs in the related cases said, “The Texas Supreme Court’s decision is disappointing to say the least. People lost their lives and the only recourse to the citizens of Texas is to be able to go through the judicial process, and the judicial system, to try to remedy or right the wrong that occurred in this case. And if you can’t count on our judiciary to protect its citizens, I think we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Justices Jeff Boyd and John Devine, along with two others, disagreed that ERCOT has sovereign immunity. Purely private entities are clearly not sovereign, and making them so undermines the public trust, they wrote. The justices argued that “no statute designates ERCOT as a part of the government” and that courts should not be barred from hearing claims against it.

The ruling sprang from two cases filed against ERCOT. San Antonio’s municipally owned utility, CPS Energy, alleged that ERCOT mishandled the soaring price of power during the 2021 winter storm. And private equity investors at Panda Power Funds alleged that 10 years earlier ERCOT issued reports that misled them about how much power the grid needed.

ERCOT spokespersons issued a statement saying that the organization was pleased with the decision. CPS Energy said in a statement that it was disappointed but thankful that four justices agreed with the utility as it sought relief for customers. The utility said the litigation still led to “critical discussions at the highest levels that are necessary to improve our power grid and energy market.”

[xitsensunmoon]

I know it's likely not even possible for them to go to amusement parks but I'm curious, how would vampire! Sun&moon react to being on a rollercoaster?

Moon would have time of his life

Sun would... Not.

[bunny--manders]

I don't think there's any age where you're too old for fandom but I DO think there's an age where you're too old for certain kinds of fandom discourse. It's pretty normal for teenagers to work out their own moral landscapes by getting very passionate about stories, but if that's still taking up a lot of your time and energy at 25, maybe it's time to turn that passion into some real-world good by volunteering at your local food bank or hassling your elected officials about important causes or picking up some trash at the park. It's not about some arbitrary age cutoff for caring about media, it's the fact that when you're a legal adult you can take the energy you have for making the world better and use it to actually make the world better instead of practicing ways you could theoretically make the world better in fictional scenarios.

[lucalicatteart]

-- Poorly Constructed Enchanted Tool --

A small tool carved from a fruit tree seed. Energy to power the enchantment has seemingly run-out long ago, and the method of recharging is unknown - but, based on the appearance, it's very likely that this was once used for detecting magic. Usually, looking through the glass center would highlight areas of higher magical energy concentration present in the viewer's environment, even if they were otherwise obscured to the naked eye. While this form of enchantment itself is highly advanced, the craftsmanship of the item is far less neat or complex than what might be typically seen in similar devices. It may have been made as part of training/practice, or as a hasty replacement for a previous tool that had broken.

[mars-ipan]

associating a character with a food that a lot of the fandom associates them with but for symbolism reasons instead of meme ones

[sdwolfpup]

Everything I want to share from my solarpunk AU is incredibly spoilery; this is about as un-spoilery as it gets right now.

“When we first approached your planet, it didn't seem real,” Jaime said quietly. “All that remarkable blue. Even with all that we'd seen, there was nothing else like it in the universe.” He turned his head to look at her. “Much like you.” She flushed and ducked her head, her hair falling forward in a curtain. “I'm just a person.” He turned to face her directly then, his fingertips brushing her cheek when he tucked her hair behind her ear. “You are not just anything.”

[daisychainsandbowties]

girls who can’t regulate their own body temperature at all i’m kissing you on the forehead

[party-pixie]

hey, thanks for the kind words. i'll admit that i kinda forgot for a while that daily demon spotlight was meant to be a blog for fun above all, and i got too obsessed with my perfectionism to where even the slightest criticism would make me panic and overcorrect everything

i really do appreciate what you said as it kinda just grounded me again and made me realize that i'm not some giant public figure, i'm just some teenage trans girl who likes to write, so thank you so much even if you didn't intend it to be that deep lmao 🙏

well im glad i could help 🥰 i've gotten the perfectionism bug with my own writing so i know how much it really sucks. i think it's also scary on the internet where people are increasingly becoming mean to people they don't know over even small things, so it prob feels like you're risking getting huge backlash over something that isn't all that difficult to fix. like, the demon spotlight is just a hobby blog covering figures that appear in a game series that in itself has questionable information and unclear sources, it's not an official compendium blog run by atlus yknow??? i get not wanting to spread misinformation or see it get spread ab mythological figures but for a hobby blog where it's not difficult to add to posts, i don't think it needs to be all that deep. don't be afraid to add an addendum to old posts if you ever come across new information or a correction, i think that kind of thing could be beneficial even if the original post had a lot of incorrect stuff in it

plus, with so many different retellings and translations of mythological stories i think people will consider different ones to be their "canon" to them. i mean like, i read ab two or three different takes just on ganesha's birth in a little section ab parvati in a book discussing a ton of different goddesses. and with language barriers and such, you're bound to run into inaccuracies tbh

i think it's a good preface for everyone involved to come into this understanding that it's easy to unknowingly run into wrong information ab figures, smt is full of inaccuracies in itself, the demon spotlight is just a hobby and isn't gonna get thesis-level work put into it, and the goal isn't to spread misinformation

as long as you keep doing your best in research and handling things as respectfully as you can, i don't think mistakes should be a huge deal. like, yea okay you fucked up a post cus you had bad sources, it's not the end of the world and i don't think you should feel like it's the end of the world or someone else should make you feel that way. just don't argue with people if they give you a correction. i mean, if someone's a total asshole about it that's not really something you can help, the best you can do is apologize and correct the original post. but there's no need to wallow in sorrow cus you got something wrong, it's really not the end of the world🥰👍

[jonathankai]

Say, we are best friends and-- Oh, shut your trap! We've been bestest of best friends since forever! Now shut up and listen. So, as my best friend, what would you say if I – purely hypothetically! – would come to you and say “hey, let’s both take female form and lie down together so we can determine how much times women can reach the peak of pleasure in a row, because I’ve heard from reliable sources that ladies are actually quite insatiable and can do it much more times than men and now I really want to know—“ Hey, where are you going?! You didn’t even let me finish! Let me finish at least once! Hahahaha! Aaaaand he’s running. Damn, I knew I should have started with courting gifts.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Maryland’s top utility regulator was watching the news one February morning when a headline blindsided him: Two suspects with neo-Nazi ties had been charged with plotting to take down Baltimore’s power grid.

Jason Stanek, the then-chair of the state’s Public Service Commission, said Maryland regulators were “caught flat-footed,” not hearing a word from law enforcement before the news broke — or in the months afterward. Federal prosecutors have alleged the defendants were driven by “racially motivated hatred” to try to cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in the state’s largest city, which has a predominantly Black population.

The FBI declined to comment on its communications with the Maryland commission. But Stanek’s experience is not uncommon.

A POLITICO analysis of federal data and interviews with a dozen security, extremism and electricity experts revealed that despite a record surge in attacks on the grid nationwide, communication gaps between law enforcement and state and federal regulators have left many officials largely in the dark about the extent of the threat. They have also hampered efforts to safeguard the power network.

Adding to the difficulties, no single agency keeps a complete record of all such incidents. But the attacks they know about have regulators and other power experts alarmed:

— Utilities reported 60 incidents they characterized as physical threats or attacks on major grid infrastructure, in addition to two cyberattacks, during the first three months of 2023 alone, according to mandatory disclosures they filed with the Department of Energy. That’s more than double the number from the same period last year. DOE has not yet released data past March.

— Nine of this year’s attacks led to power disruptions, the DOE records indicate.

— The U.S. is on pace to meet or exceed last year’s record of 164 major cyber and physical attacks.

— And additional analyses imply that the true number of incidents for both 2022 and 2023 is probably even higher. POLITICO’s analysis found several incidents that utilities had reported to homeland security officials but did not show up in DOE data.

According to a report on grid security compiled by a power industry cyber clearinghouse, obtained by POLITICO, a total of 1,665 security incidents involving the U.S. and Canadian power grids occurred last year. That count included 60 incidents that led to outages, 71% more than in 2021.

While that report does not break down how many of those incidents occurred in which country, the U.S. has a significantly larger grid, serving 145 million homes and businesses, with nearly seven times Canada’s power-generating capacity.

Law enforcement officials have blamed much of the rise in grid assaults on white nationalist and far-right extremists, who they say are using online forums to spread tactical advice on how to shut down the power supply.

Concerns about the attacks have continued in recent months, with incidents including a June indictment of an Idaho man accused of shooting two hydroelectric stations in the state.

But law enforcement officers investigating alleged plots against the grid don’t necessarily alert the Energy Department or other regulatory bodies.

“We have no idea” how many attacks on the grid are occurring, said Jon Wellinghoff, a former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates the U.S. electric grid. “It looks like they’re escalating if you look at the data. But if you don’t have enough data, you can’t discern patterns and proactively work to stop these things from happening.”

Wellinghoff was FERC’s chair when an unknown sniper attacked a Pacific Gas and Electric substation in San Jose, Calif., in 2013 — an incident regulators have described as a “wake-up call” on the electricity supply’s vulnerability to sabotage.

Last year’s record number of physical and cyber disruptions to the U.S. power system included several incidents that captured public attention, such as a December shooting attack against two North Carolina substations that left 45,000 people without power for four days. The state’s medical examiner has blamed the attack for the death of an 87-year-old woman who died after her oxygen machine failed, ruling it a homicide. Nobody has been charged.

“There is no doubt there’s been an uptick over the last three years in the amount of incidents and also the severity of the incidents,” said Manny Cancel, senior vice president at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nonprofit body in charge of setting reliability standards for the bulk power system. He is also CEO of its Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which gathers and analyzes data from power companies.

Cancel said NERC has “seen two pretty substantial increases” in incidents coinciding with the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

Grid attacks that led to power outages increased 71% from 2021 to 2022, totaling 55 incidents in 2022, according to a NERC briefing to utilities that POLITICO obtained. That increase was primarily due to a rise in gunfire assaults against critical infrastructure.

The largest outage reported from a physical attack early this year — which occurred in March in Clark County, Nev. — affected more than 11,000 people, according to DOE data.

But the state Public Utilities Commission was not aware of any outage due to an attack occurring that day, spokesperson Peter Kostes told POLITICO by email. That’s even though state regulations require utilities to contact the commission within four hours of a significant outage.

The state’s largest utility, NV Energy, said in a statement that it had reported the incident to local law enforcement “as soon as we learned about this incident ... so we can continue to increase our resilience against ongoing threats to the energy industry.” A spokesperson for the utility did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it had informed the commission.

Federal regulations also require utilities to report cyber or physical attacks to DOE, including physical attacks that cause “major interruptions or impacts” to operations.

They must also tell the department about disruptions from weather or other causes that meet certain criteria, such as those that cut off service to more than 50,000 customers for at least an hour, an uncontrolled loss of more than 200 megawatts of power, or a utility voluntarily shutting more than 100 megawatts, according to an Energy Department spokesperson. The spokesperson provided the information on the condition that they not be identified by name.

The Energy Department’s records don’t include at least seven reported physical assaults last year and this year that the Department of Homeland Security and the affected utilities said caused substantive economic damage or cut off power to thousands of customers. POLITICO found these incidents by cross-checking the department’s data against warnings issued by DHS and the FBI’s Office of the Private Sector.

DOE said the incidents may not meet its reporting thresholds.

Several of the incidents missing from DOE’s data involved clear physical attacks, based on other agencies’ descriptions. But the utilities involved said they did not report the incidents to the department because the attacks did not affect the kind of major equipment that could lead to widespread, regional power failures.

One of the incidents not found in DOE’s records cut off power to about 12,000 people for roughly two hours in Maysville, N.C., after a shooting damaged a substation in November, according to a DHS report. The FBI’s investigation into the incident is ongoing, according to the intelligence agency.

The utility affected by the incident, Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative, reported the incident to NERC’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, but didn’t report the attack to DOE because it was a “distribution-level” incident, said Melissa Glenn, a spokesperson for the utility. That means the outages caused by the damage would have been limited to local power customers and not lead to the wider blackouts federal regulators are most concerned with.

In another case unreported to the Energy Department, a substation owned by the East River Electric Cooperative serving the Keystone oil pipeline in South Dakota was attacked by gunfire late at night in July 2022, according to DHS. The incident caused more than $1 million in damage and forced the pipeline to reduce operations while repairs were underway.

East River co-op spokesperson Chris Studer said the utility reported the incident to local law enforcement, which brought in the FBI. East River also reported the incident to NERC and its E-ISAC, along with regional grid agencies, but said it did not report it to DOE because the attack did not affect the bulk power system.

Brian Harrell, a former assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at DHS, said in an email that utilities have too many competing agencies to report to, and suggested reporting be streamlined to NERC’s E-ISAC.

“This lack of consistency, by no fault of the utility, suggests that the numbers may not paint a complete picture,” he said.

Grid experts said these data gaps clearly indicate a lack of understanding about which agencies utilities need to report to and when.

Utilities may be using a “loophole” based on definitions of what constitutes “critical infrastructure,” said Jonathon Monken, a grid security expert with the consulting firm Converge Strategies. He was previously senior director of system resilience and strategic coordination for the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest power market.

There are “lots of ways” to work around DOE requirements, Monken added, but as he reads the regulation, utilities are required to report any operational disruptions caused by a physical attack.

“[I]t appears the information you collected shows that companies are still missing the boat when it comes to mandatory reporting,” he said. “Not good.”

One former FERC official who was granted anonymity to speak about a sensitive security issue said the commission also received no alerts from law enforcement officials about the planned and actual attacks that took place last year. That omission hinders agencies’ ability to respond to these kinds of events, the person said.

A spokesperson for FERC declined to comment on the commission’s communications with law enforcement.

But Cancel defended government agencies’ response to these incidents, and said federal investigators may have had specific intelligence reasons for keeping FERC and state utility agencies out of the loop.

“I’m not a lawyer or a law enforcement professional, but you had an active criminal investigation going on,” he said. “I don’t think they wanted to sort of blow the horn on that and compromise the integrity of the investigation.”

An FBI spokesperson offered no direct response to these criticisms in an email, but said the agency “views cybersecurity as a team sport.” The person commented on the condition that the remark be attributed to the bureau.

The FBI urged utility executives last month to attend security training hosted by intelligence agents in order to ensure they are up to speed on the threats posed by bad actors.

“We can’t do it without you,” Matthew Fodor, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said during an all-day FERC technical conference on Aug. 10. “The challenges that we have — and DOE can probably speak to this better than anybody — is limited resources.”

People attacking the electricity supply have thousands of potential targets, including power substations and smaller but critical pieces of utility infrastructure. The smaller pieces often go unprotected because federal standards do not require utilities to secure them.

Nearly half of the 4,493 attacks from 2020 to 2022 targeted substations, according to the NERC briefing from February, making them the most frequent targets for perpetrators over that period.

Details on how to carry out these kinds of attacks are available from extremist messaging boards and other online content, researchers and federal security officials say. These include maps of critical entry points to the grid, along with advice that extremists have gleaned from incidents like the assault in North Carolina.

Stanek, the Maryland electricity regulator, said he was “disappointed with the level of coordination and communication” that federal and state law enforcement displayed in handling the alleged plot in Baltimore. No trial date has been announced for the case, which is in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

Maryland’s Public Service Commission is in charge of ensuring that the state’s power system keeps the lights on. Regulators need to be kept informed of threats to the system so they can coordinate with other agencies in case an attack succeeds, Stanek said.

At the same time, he quipped, maybe he was better off in the dark after all.

“There’s a lot of colorful details in [the FBI report],” Stanek said. He paused, thinking. “And honestly, as a regulator, had I received these details in advance and shared the information with trusted sources within state government, I would have had sleepless nights.”

“So perhaps the feds did a favor by only sharing this information after everything was all said and done,” he added.