But for all its positives, there is one huge problem that still needs solving: how do we power it all? 

As of August of this year, ChatGPT had more than 200 million weekly active users, according to a report by Axios.  And it’s not just OpenAI; Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Meta, and many other players in tech have created their own AI models to better serve their customers and are investing heavily in AI strategies.

While people may generally be able to access these services for free, they’re not free in terms of the power they require. Research from Goldman Sachs indicates that a single ChatGPT query uses almost 10 times as much power as a Google search. 

Its research also revealed that by 2030, data center power demand will grow 160%. Relative to other energy demand categories, data centers will go from using 1-2% of total power to 3-4% by that same time, and by 2028, AI will represent 19% of the total power data center power demand.

Overall, the U.S. will see a 2.4% increase in energy demands every year through 2030, and will need to invest approximately $50 billion just to support its data centers. 

“Energy consumption in the United States has been pretty flat, really over the course of the last two decades,” Jason Carolan, chief innovation officer at Flexential, explained in a recent episode of ITOps Times’ podcast, Get With IT. “Part of that was that perhaps COVID sort of slowed things down. But now we’re at this point, whether it’s AI or whether it’s just electrification in general, that we’re really running out of capacity. In fact, there are states where projects of large scale, electrification builds, as well as data center builds, basically have stopped because there isn’t power capacity available.” 

To meet these growing demands, tech companies are turning to nuclear energy, and in the past month or so, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have all announced investments in nuclear energy plants. 

On September 20, Microsoft announced that it had signed a 20 year deal with Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1. This is a different reactor than the reactor (Unit 2) that caused the infamous Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, and this one had actually been restarted after the accident in 1985 and ran until 2019, when it shut down due to cost. 

Constellation and Microsoft say that the reactor should be back in operation by 2028 after improvements are made to the turbine, generator, main power transformer, and cooling and control systems. Constellation claims the reactor will generate around 835 megawatts of energy. 

“Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centers, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise,” said Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation.

Google and Amazon followed suit in October, both with news that they are investing in small modular reactors (SMR). SMRs generate less power than traditional reactors, typically around 100 to 300 megawatts compared to 1000 megawatts from a large-scale reactor, according to Carolan. Even though they generate less power, they also include more safety features, have a smaller footprint so that they can be installed in places where a large reactor couldn’t, and they cost less to build, according to the Office of Nuclear Energy.

“There’s been a lot of money and innovation put into small scale nuclear reactors over the course of the last four or five years, and there are several projects underway,” said Carolan. “There continues to be almost open-source-level innovation in the space because people are starting to share data points and share operational models.”

Google announced it had signed a deal with Kairo Power to purchase nuclear energy generated by their small modular reactors (SMR), revealing that Kairo’s first SMR should be online by 2030 and more SMRs will be deployed through 2025. Amazon also announced it partnering with energy companies in Washington and Virgina to develop SMRs there and invested in X-energy, which is a company developing SMR reactors and fuel.

“The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth. This agreement helps accelerate a new technology to meet energy needs cleanly and reliably, and unlock the full potential of AI for everyone,” Michael Terrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google, wrote in the announcement. 

Carolan did note that SMRs are still a relatively new technology, and many of the designs have not yet been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

“I think we’re going to be in a little bit of a power gap here, in the course of the next two to three years as we continue to scale up nuclear,” he explained. As it stands now, as of April 2024, the U.S. only had 54 operating nuclear power plants, and in 2023, just 18.6% of our total power generation came from nuclear power. 

The post Tech companies are turning to nuclear energy to meet growing power demands caused by AI appeared first on SD Times.

We may now be on the precipice of yet another transformative moment, this time with blockchain. If the hype is to be believed—or better, if we can cut through the hype to confidently uncover the technology’s core promise amidst the broader mania—blockchain could usher in a new decentralized digital era. And in no industry might blockchain be more disruptive than in the energy sector.

Last month, Euromoney heralded how the “energy market might beat banking onto blockchain.” One day earlier, MIT Technology Review listed the energy sector first among five industries blockchains could revolutionize. And EY, in a recent article, made its case for “why the energy sector must embrace blockchain now.”

The legacy systems that were used to manage a “simpler” grid defined by large power plants and centralized transmission will become increasingly inadequate. The rise of renewable energy—coupled with the proliferation of customer-sited technologies such as smart thermostats, electric vehicles, battery energy storage, rooftop solar, and more (i.e., distributed energy resources)—demand a new digital infrastructure. Relative to alternatives such as centralized IoT computing, blockchain’s qualities (e.g., decentralized, secure, immutable) make it particularly well suited to the needs of the fast-evolving electricity grid.

But not just any blockchain will do. The electricity grid is heavily regulated, fragmented across myriad physical and jurisdictional markets, has strict operational requirements for keeping the system up and running, and has challenging needs for the kind of near-real-time throughput required to manage billions of smart devices and transactions.

That’s where the work of the Energy Web Foundation (EWF) and its Affiliates comes in. EWF is building a new blockchain-based digital DNA tailored specifically for the energy sector. More than 50 Affiliates have joined EWF in this effort; they span the globe and range from some of the world’s largest utilities and energy companies to some of today’s most-innovative energy blockchain startups. The goal is to build and scale the underlying digital infrastructure on which others—utilities, energy companies, renewable energy developers, corporations, residential customers—can build and run applications.

For one example, the open-source EW blockchain features a unique version of governance and Proof of Authority consensus that allows for a) faster block times, b) leaner energy consumption, and importantly, c) a cohort of permissioned, known validators that provide the kind of transparency regulators will demand. Meanwhile, features such as a private transactions allow sensitive information to remain confidential on the chain while still providing needed verifiability to special parties like regulators. More than 30 companies are actively building and testing apps on Tobalaba, EWF’s test network.

Naturally, software and application developers have a central role to play in this unfolding story. In fact, that role is potentially so important that in April EWF launched EW Connect, a curated, online community for the energy blockchain ecosystem. Equal parts marketplace, collaboration platform, and center of excellence, Connect brings together EWF Affiliate energy companies with a pre-qualified network of blockchain software development vendors.

Many energy-sector incumbents generally understand the relevance of blockchain for their business and have a desire to dive deeper into the technology and even explore use cases and app development, but often lack the internal expertise and/or resource capacity. They essentially need blockchain-savvy developers for hire. For example, earlier this year Elia, Belgium’s transmission system operator, issued an RFI seeking blockchain expertise to help build a new demand response program.

EWF is eager to bring more software and app developers to this table. To date, public Ethereum has been one of the most popular platforms for blockchain developers. EWF’s blockchain (though customized and fully separate from traditional public Ethereum) is based on Ethereum, in order to make it accessible to most blockchain developers. But coding for Ethereum requires knowledge of Solidity, which still leaves out many software and app developers.

That’s why earlier this year, in partnership with Parity Technologies, EWF announced it was rolling out WebAssembly (Wasm) for the EW chain. Essentially overnight, this made writing smart contracts for the EW chain accessible to any coder versed in C, C++, Rust, and other common coding languages. This promises to unleash the full force of the global software development community on the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for the energy sector. It alleviates a critical bottleneck and hopefully opens the floodgates of innovation.

The story of the electricity grid’s evolution is an ensemble cast. There is no single lead actor or actress. Each corner of the ecosystem plays its part. But undoubtedly, software and application developers are arguably more central to the story than ever before. Through their expertise, we can write the future of energy—encoded line by line, smart contract by smart contract, block by block.

The post How software developers will write the future of energy through blockchain appeared first on SD Times.

“Passive Wi-Fi transmissions can be decoded on off-the-shelf smartphones and Wi-Fi chipsets over distances of 30 to 100 feet in various line-of-sight and through-the-wall scenarios,” according to the student researchers in an online paper.

This system aims to enable an Internet of Things environment, where users can have their devices and sensors communicate over Wi-Fi while using as little power as possible. The system is now being used by Jeeva Wireless, a provider of low-power communications solutions.

The researchers are expected to present the results of their work in March at the USENIX Symposium on SDN Research.

Open-source compliance e-book available
The Linux Foundation wants to help organizations use best practices for open-source code in products and services, so it is making one of its e-books available for free.

The 149-page e-book is written by Ibrahim Haddad, vice president of R&D and head of the Open Source Group at Samsung. He explores how organizations can use best practices in the open-source community, and teaches organizations how to participate in open-source communities in a legal and responsible way. Readers will also learn how to structure an open-source-management program, and how to set up an open-source compliance strategy.

The e-book can be downloaded here.

Rails highlights the latest features, updates
Ruby on Rails recently announced that jQuery is no longer a dependency of Rails, since Rails JavaScript helpers have been rewritten in a “new gem” called rails-ujs. Now helpers use Vanilla JavaScript, which makes jQuery no longer a dependency. Also, Ruby on Rails announced that the first release candidate for 5.0.1 has been released, with no issues found.

The new features in this first release candidate include Yarn support, where developers can “pass the –yarn option when you generate a new Rails app, and Rails will create the necessary config files and run Yarn install after bundle installs automatically,” according to a blog post by Rails developers Greg Molnar and Prathamesh Sonpatki.

The post A low-power Wi-Fi system for IoT, an open-source e-book for free, and Ruby on Rails updates—SD Times news digest: Dec. 9, 2016 appeared first on SD Times.