Lifeboat Foundation

The Tesla big battery – the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery storage installation to date – was officially switched on in South Australia on Friday, a day after it had already demonstrated its value by injecting energy into the grid during the previous day’s afternoon peak.

South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, whose government has provided the subsidy for the battery to be built on the grid with the largest penetration of wind and solar anywhere in the world, described it as a “landmark moment”.

“This means that, for the first time, clean and affordable wind energy can be dispatched to the grid 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, whether the wind is blowing or not, improving system reliability,” Weatherill said.

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Most new companies fail. What does it take for young entrepreneurs around the world to thrive in a startup hub?

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Way back in 1811 and 1812, a series of over 1,000 earthquakes rocked the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis. One was so powerful that it caused the river to run backwards for a few hours. The infamous New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812 rang church bells in Boston, which is 1,200 miles from St. Louis. Today, scientists say that the 150-mile-long New Madrid Seismic Zone has a terrifying 40% chance to blast in the next few decades, impacting 7 states – Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi – with 715,000 buildings damaged and 2.6m people left without power.

Unlike California, which has been super-prepared since the last major earthquake hit hard enough to delay the World Series, the New Madrid fault area has been sitting blissfully by. In case the “40 percent” statistic didn’t bother you, this should: The New Madrid fault has an impact zone ten times as big as its more famous San Andreas cousin.

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Not good!

Workers took the Keystone oil pipeline offline on Thursday after it spilled 5,000 barrels of oil in rural South Dakota, officials said.

A TransCanada crew shut down the pipeline at 6 a.m. Thursday morning after detecting an oil leak along the line, the company said. The leak was detected along a stretch of the pipeline about 35 miles south of a pumping station in Marshall County, South Dakota.

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Lockheed Martin has been awarded an Air Force Research Laboratory contract to develop and produce high-energy fiber laser weapons for tactical fighter aircraft.

Citizens’ Assembly hears how Denmark became one of most efficient countries in world.

Building solar and wind farms has started to become a cheaper proposition than running aging coal and nuclear generators in parts of the U.S., according to financial adviser Lazard Ltd.

On Saturday, a record 24.6% of total electricity came from wind power sources in the 28 countries of the European Union. The majority of this wind electricity was generated offshore (91.3%) vs onshore (8.7%).

With Europe moving into the high wind production winter period, we expect a new season of records being broken. And with massive scale construction continuing for offshore wind farms, these records of 2017 will soon look quaint.

The amounts of electricity generated were enough to power 197 million European households or 68% of all industrial electricity needs. Europe has about 500 million total people, with a land mass very close to that of the USA.

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Physicists have proposed a way to test quantum gravity that, in principle, could be performed by a laser-based, table-top experiment using currently available technology. Although a theory of quantum gravity would overcome one of the biggest challenges in modern physics by unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, currently physicists have no way of testing any proposed theories of quantum gravity.

Now a team of seven physicists from various countries, S. Dey, A. Bhat, D. Momeni, M. Faizal, A. F. Ali, T. K. Dey, and A. Rehman, have come up with a novel way to experimentally test quantum gravity using a laser-based experiment. They have published a paper on their proposed test in a recent issue of Nuclear Physics B.

One reason why testing quantum gravity is so challenging is that its effects appear only at very high-energy scales and their corresponding tiny length scales. These extreme scales, which are very near the Planck scale, are roughly 15 orders of magnitude beyond those accessible by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), by far the world’s highest-energy experiment.

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