Providence Technology Group

Peak Energy has selected Sacramento, California, as the location for what it describes as the US’ first manufacturing facility for grid-scale sodium-ion energy storage systems. The facility, measuring 183,000ft², is expected to produce up to 4GWh of battery systems annually, enough to power nearly four million homes. Peak Energy revealed its plans during an event attended by regional and state leaders. The company stated that it has more than 6GW-hours (GWh) of customer commitments for its grid storage systems. Keep Reading This Article at PowerTechnology

A bill to allow insurance companies to monitor California drivers’ behavior in exchange for potential discounts on their premiums would change the state’s longstanding insurance law, drawing opposition from the Insurance Department as well as consumer and privacy advocates. Assembly Bill 311 would let insurance companies use telematics — technology installed in vehicles that allows them to transmit information such as location, speed, braking force, swerving and more — when setting rates for drivers who choose to allow themselves to be tracked. Keep Reading This Article at CalMatters

California launched a new public dashboard Thursday to track job losses possibly tied to artificial intelligence, a tool Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office described as the first of its kind in the nation. The California AI-Unemployment Tracker was developed with the California Policy Lab at UCLA and the Employment Development Department, the state agency that handles unemployment benefits. Keep Reading This Article at MSN.com

California drivers are accusing some of the country’s biggest fuel retailers of using software powered by artificial intelligence to keep pump prices artificially high. A proposed class action filed Monday in federal court in Sacramento alleges that BP, Circle K, Marathon Petroleum, 7-Eleven, Walmart, Albertsons, EG America, Speedway and TravelCenters of America used Kalibrate’s AI-powered fuel-pricing tool to coordinate prices at the pump. Keep Reading This Article at Inc.

A year ago, California officials had to report under a new state law how they used automated systems to make important decisions about people’s lives. They said they never did — a startling answer for a number of reasons, sources told CalMatters at the time, including that there were several prominent examples to the contrary. Now, the state has issued a more expansive answer: It is currently using six automated systems to make consequential decisions about the lives of Californians. Keep Reading This Article at CalMatters

Rampant automation. Soaring unemployment. Extreme wealth concentration at the top. The prospect of that grim AI-driven future is reshaping the political debate across the country, as the technology advances quickly and policymakers struggle to catch up. In California — where homegrown AI is being rapidly deployed and many of its workforce impacts are appearing first — some lawmakers want to stymie the technology’s intrusion in the workforce to stave off mass layoffs and protect people from AI’s negative effects. They’re pushing proposals in the Legislature to block the technology from some sectors, including trucking and parts of health care. Keep Reading This Article at MSN.com

Caltrans is turning to some four-legged friends to help maintain the state’s sprawling highway system. To reduce the need for human inspectors to go into potentially dangerous confined spaces, the California Department of Transportation is instead sending in “Spot,” a headless, robotic dog produced by the technology company Boston Dynamics. Keep Reading This Article at MSN.com

Data center builders don’t tell the public how much water they use, according to a new report — and the industry is encroaching into water-stressed and vulnerable communities. The report, by the think tank Next10 and researchers at Santa Clara University, finds that planned data centers — the ganglia of artificial intelligence — are spreading to regions reliant on overtapped groundwater and strained surface water, with potentially major effects in the Central and Imperial Valleys. Keep Reading This Article at CalMatters

Last year, California lawmakers backed off on a plan to do something about surveillance pricing, the practice of using someone’s personal information to determine what they pay. This year — with voters across the country facing rising inflation and an affordability crisis — lawmakers in California and in other states are cracking down. A proposed surveillance pricing ban cleared a key vote in the California Legislature Thursday. It would forbid retailers from altering prices based on information about shoppers like their age, gender, or location.   Keep Reading This Article at CalMatters  

Data centers may be coming to your neighborhood as side installations associated with new homes—and in exchange would offer subsidized electricity and Internet access along with backup batteries to homeowners. The company behind the plan has already begun pilot testing in preparation for a 100-home trial run this year. The “distributed data center solution” announced by the San Francisco startup SPAN would deploy thousands of XFRA nodes that contain liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs operating with minimal noise, according to a press release. By harnessing excess power capacity among US households, SPAN aims to quickly expand the available compute for AI workloads without the costs and delays associated with trying to build warehouse-size data centers. Keep Rea...[Read More]

In a remarkable encounter off the coast of Alaska, human scientists had what they describe as a “conversation” with a humpback whale named Twain. Dr. Brenda McCowan from the University of California Davis (UC Davis) and her team, known as Whale-SETI, have been studying how humpback whales communicate. They’re aiming to understand whale communication systems to help in the search for life beyond Earth. Keep Reading This Article at Earth.com