The state of South Australia has announced that it will create a network of thousands of solar-powered homes, using Tesla solar panels and Powerwall batteries, Reuters reports. Initial phases of the plan are already underway and will eventually expand to as many as 50,000 homes, creating the “world’s largest virtual power plant,” according to premier Jay Weatherill.
“Our energy plan means that we are leading the world in renewable energy and now we are making it easier for more homes to become self-sufficient,” Weatherill said. “We will use people’s homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefiting with significant savings in their energy bills.”
BREAKING: My Government has already delivered the world’s biggest battery. Now, we’re delivering the world’s largest Virtual Power Plant. #renewables #energy #solar #storage #future pic.twitter.com/0JPAMogPOV
— Jay Weatherill (@JayWeatherill) February 4, 2018
Installation of the 5kW solar panels and Tesla batteries has already begun on 1,100 public housing properties, with 24,000 more to follow. After that, the program will be opened up to as many as 50,000 South Australian homes over the next four years.
The panels and batteries are being supplied at no cost to homeowners, backed by a multi-million-dollar grant and a loan from a taxpayer renewable energy fund. The program will be financed through the sale of excess energy generated by the solar power grid.
South Australia is already the home of the world’s largest battery, the result of a challenge from Elon Musk and Tesla. After a state-wide blackout in 2016, South Africa has been looking to renewables as a way to address their persistent energy shortages.
Although Australia is a world leader in coal and gas production, deteriorating coal-fired plants have been closing, and factors such as an offshore drilling ban have raised questions about future energy security.
“At key moments, the virtual power plant could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant,” Tesla said in a statement. The company added that the virtual power plant would produce 250 megawatts of solar energy and have 650 megawatt hours of battery capacity.
The government has already set up a registration site for Australians who want to be part of the program. “Virtual power plants allow families to take control of their power bills, while providing greater security for the energy network,” said John Grimes of the Smart Energy Council.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.