Coca-Cola offers voluntary layoffs to thousands of workers
Coca-Cola said it will make severance offers "in many countries internationally" and that the plan will cost between $350 million and $550 million. File Photo by Billie Jean Shaw/UPI

Aug. 28 (UPI) -- Coca-Cola said Friday it will offer voluntary layoffs to 4,000 employees and hinted that involuntary job cuts would follow.
The announcement is part of the company's plan to restructure its workforce

Coca-Cola said the voluntary layoffs are intended to mitigate involuntary layoffs.

The company said the voluntary layoffs will be offered at its U.S., Canadian and Puerto Rican operations.

"We have been on a multi-year journey to transform our organization," Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO James Quincey said in a statement. "The changes in our operating model will shift our marketing to drive more growth and put execution closer to customers and consumers while prioritizing a portfolio of strong brands and disciplined innovation framework.

"As we implement these changes, we're continuing to evolve our organization, which will include significant changes in the structure of our workforce."

Coca-Cola said it will make similar severance offers "in many countries internationally" and that the plan will cost between $350 million and $550 million.

The soft drink company, which has more than 80,000 employees worldwide, said it's creating nine new operating units. Coca-Cola said they will offer "more consistency in structure" and focus on eliminating repetition of resources.

Indigenous women's group says police too quick to label missing girls as runaways

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The president of an Indigenous women's group says Amber Alert policies across Canada should be reviewed in light of a recent case involving a missing teenager from Cape Breton.

RCMP in Nova Scotia issued a localized emergency alert a week after the 14-year-old girl went missing with a 47-year-old man she knew. That man was arraigned Monday on one count of child abduction.

Police have said they did not issue an Amber Alert because they thought the teenager left with him willingly. They now say new evidence indicates she had been abducted.

Lorraine Whitman, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, said Wednesday it's a relief the girl from We'koqma'q Mi'kmaq First Nation was found safe, but the case highlights a national problem.

She pointed to the report from the public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, which highlighted a pattern of police categorizing missing girls as runaways, slowing down investigations.

Whitman says the "runaway" stereotype puts underage girls in danger and criteria for alerts should be reviewed to prevent the same delays from affecting another minor.

"They may have ran away, but we have to look at it more in depth," she said in an interview. "We just can't take it as a case that they wanted to leave. We have to look into it because there are more underlying areas that we have to investigate as well."

The 2019 report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls cited testimony from families who "shared how stereotypes and victim blaming served to slow down or to impede investigations into their loved ones' disappearances or deaths."

"The assumptions tied to Indigenous women, girls ... by police as 'drunks,' 'runaways out partying,' or 'prostitutes unworthy of follow-up' characterized many interactions, and contributed to an even greater loss of trust in the police and in related agencies," the report said.

Whitman also took issue with the RCMP's statement that the girl left willingly from her foster home with the man she knew. She said a 14-year-old can't make that decision on her own, and suggested that if a non-Indigenous, wealthier child had been involved, the alert would have been sent right away.

"This is almost a week after this young girl has been missing, and in the woods," Whitman said. "Our lives are very important as well. She was a minor and the RCMP had a due diligence that they had to follow."

Video surveillance footage placed the 14-year-old and the man at a gas station in Catalone, N.S., on Aug. 13. Before she was found on Aug. 24, community members had been searching the area and pressuring police for more urgency in finding her and to issue an Amber Alert.

The We'koqma'q chief and council had offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts. Police issued a localized alert to residents east of the Mira River in Cape Breton a week after the girl ran away.

According to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Amber Alert programs are provincially operated and only the police can issue them. The criteria for issuing them vary, but the basic requirements include the disappearance of someone under the age of 18 who is suspected of being abducted.

RCMP Cpl. Lisa Croteau said Wednesday that information before the girl was found indicated she had not been abducted. New evidence, however, supports the child abduction charge, she said. Croteau said she could not go into specifics about the evidence because the case is before the courts.

But Croteau said police did not consider an Amber Alert necessary, because they did not believe the man was on the run with the child.

"From the onset of this investigation, we had strong evidence that they still were camping in the Cape Breton area and that they did not intend to leave the island," Croteau said.

She cited ongoing talks with the provincial government about the general protocols for sending public alerts to Nova Scotia residents, adding that it's not within the police's power to change them.

Those consultations follow criticism that a provincewide emergency alert was not sent on April 18-19, during the manhunt for a killer who claimed 22 lives in the province. Police were chasing a gunman who was dressed as a Mountie during parts of his rampage.

When asked if the Nova Scotia RCMP detachment would take a closer look at how it approaches cases involving missing Indigenous kids, Croteau said the force treats all missing person cases seriously regardless of race.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 26, 2020.

Holly McKenzie-Sutter, The Canadian Press

British Columbia
Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver covered up systemic abuse, silenced survivors for decades, lawsuit claims

Archdiocese hopes 'publicity' will help give survivors 'confidence to come forward; get the help they deserve'


Rhianna Schmunk · CBC News · Posted: Aug 28, 2020 3:00 AM PT | Last Updated: 10 hours ago

A candleholder is pictured inside the St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Vancouver on Thursday. A woman who attended the parish as a child has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Vancouver, claiming the district 'fostered a culture' of abuse and buried allegations of misconduct for decades. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)

A woman who claims she was assaulted as a child at a Catholic elementary school in Vancouver is suing the local archdiocese for perpetuating and covering up decades of alleged systemic abuse by priests, bishops and other members of its clergy, forcing survivors into silence in order to protect their own.

The proposed class-action lawsuit filed this week said the Archdiocese of Vancouver not only knew for years about allegations of systemic sexual, physical and psychological abuse, but "fostered a culture" of misconduct and actively buried complaints filed against the clergy.

"The Archdiocese was aware of the abuse and allowed the abuse to continue ... This was especially true in instances of sexual abuse," the claim reads.

The specific claims in the lawsuit have not been proven in court and the archdiocese has not filed a legal response. The Archdiocese of Vancouver has admitted clergymen at the institution were involved in sexual abuse.

The B.C. Supreme Court claim is believed to be the first class-action filed against the archdiocese since the district released its own report in November 2019, confirming widespread sexual abuse from its clergy dating back to the 1950s.

If the claim succeeds, the lead plaintiff's lawyer said, dozens of survivors could be entitled to compensation from the archdiocese.

THE FIFTH ESTATECatholic Archdiocese of Vancouver aware of 36 cases of clergy sex abuse since 1950s, CBC learns

"I suspect we're looking at least into the lower hundreds [for claimants], but hard to say for sure," said lawyer Angela Bespflug. "You're dealing with various parishes and then, obviously, parish-run schools ..."
History of abuse

The lead plaintiff, identified only by the initials K.S. in the court documents, said the priest in charge of St. Francis of Assisi School, Father Michael Conaghan, sexually assaulted her while she was a student at the school in the '80s. She was around 11 years old.

The alleged assault "included painful vaginal intercourse," according to the documents. She claimed the assault was followed by intimidation.

"Conaghan told the plaintiff not to tell anyone about the abuse, threatening to have her put into foster care if she did," the filing said.

St. Francis of Assisi Elementary School pictured in Vancouver on Thursday. The lead plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit, K.S., claims she was sexually assaulted by the head priest while she was a student. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)

As part of its own report into sexual abuse released in 2019, the archdiocese publicly named nine clergymen who were criminally convicted of sexual abuse or who had civil lawsuits related to abuse settled against them.

Conaghan was not among those nine clergymen.

He died at the age of 83 on Aug. 20 — four days before K.S.'s lawsuit was filed.

In a statement, the archdiocese confirmed K.S. reported her case to the office in early 2019. It said staff suggested she file a police report, encouraged her to seek counselling and checked on Conaghan's status within the ministry, "in order to protect other individuals."

By then, it said, Conaghan was "infirmed" and not active in the church. The archdiocese said Conaghan's latest order, or organization, "confirmed that there had been no complaints ever received about him, including the incidents ... reported in this court case."

"We cannot make any further comments about this case as it is now before the courts," a representative for the archdiocese wrote in an email. "But we hope the attendant publicity will help give any other victims/survivors the confidence to come forward and get the help they deserve."
Read the full statement from the Archdiocese of Vancouver at the bottom of this story
Archdiocese followed Vatican playbook: lawsuit

The claim alleges the Archdiocese of Vancouver followed marching orders from the Vatican for years on how to bury allegations of abuse within its parish.

According to the court documents, there was a firm "policy of silence and secrecy around sexual abuse claims," said to have been intended to shield members of the clergy from punishment.

St. Francis of Assisi Parish pictured in Vancouver on Thursday. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)

Children and adults who reported being abused by members of the clergy in Vancouver were, until the mid-'90s, "required to take oaths of secrecy when making complaints to the Archdiocese."

Concerned clergy members who tried to speak out about priests' behaviour were penalized, according to the claim, sometimes to the point of excommunication from the church.

Pope Francis abolished the church's decades-old policy of secrecy in December, making it acceptable — though not mandatory — to report claims of abuse to secular law enforcement officials. The Catholic Church has been rocked by abuse scandals for the better part of 20 years, since allegations of rampant misconduct were reported out of Boston in early 2002.

The Archdiocese of Vancouver said it commissioned its own 2019 report on clergy sexual abuse in order "to reach and help more victims/survivors, address past wrongs and to show more transparency."

Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver names 9 clergymen in sex abuse scandal

K.S. reported her assault on Jan. 19, 2019.

"She was finally in a place where, I think, she was tired of being silent," said Bespflug. "What she really wants to obtain justice not only for herself, but for all the individuals like her who have lived in silence for so long."

The office of the Archdiocese of Vancouver is pictured in Vancouver in 2019. The archdiocese said in November it was aware of 36 cases of abuse by its clergy dating back to the 1950s, including 26 involving children. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

The lawsuit asks for extensive general, special, aggravated and punitive damages against the archdiocese for "reprehensible ... systematic" negligence.

B.C. archbishop turned blind eye to sexual abuse by priest, judge says; diocese liable for $844K in damages

Certifying a class-action lawsuit can take anywhere from months to years. Given the impacts of the pandemic on legal proceedings, it could be an even longer road ahead.

K.S. left the St. Francis of Assisi school and parish around a year after the assault. She has never gone back to the Catholic church.

The lawsuit said she remains "terrified of priests and the power of the Archdiocese."

Full statement from the Archdiocese of Vancouver

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Rhianna Schmunk is a staff writer for CBC News. She is based in Vancouver with a focus on justice and the courts. You can reach her on Twitter @rhiannaschmunk or by email at rhianna.schmunk@cbc.ca.
@rhiannaschmunkr

No, Renewables Did Not Cause California’s Blackouts
California’s grid operator has called for building more clean power, not less

August 27th, 2020 by Guest Contributor
Originally published by Nexus Media.
By Jeremy Deaton

Record heat across California last weekend spurred Golden Staters to blast their air conditioners. The strain on the power grid was so great that California’s grid operator started rationing electricity. For the first time since the 2001 electricity crisis, it imposed rolling blackouts, shutting down power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses up and down the state.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, among others, was quick to blame renewables for the blackouts. Because wind and solar plants only turn out power when the sun shines and the breeze blows, they wrote, they leave the state vulnerable to shortages. Even the president took time from his busy schedule to tweet about it.

While that line of reasoning may sound sensible, wind and solar aren’t really the problem. In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday, the heads of California’s energy agencies exonerated clean power in the most unambiguous terms.

“Collectively, our organizations want to be clear about one factor that did not cause the rotating outage: California’s commitment to clean energy. Renewable energy did not cause the rotating outages,” they wrote. “Clean energy and reliable energy are not contradictory goals.”

It will take time to conduct a thorough autopsy of the blackouts. Some observers have said the shutoffs were actually unnecessary, that the state had enough power to make it through the heat wave. Gov. Newsom has called for an investigation into the matter.

As officials noted in their letter, California relies on out-of-state utilities to supply electricity when demand peaks. That can be a problem during a heat wave. When it’s hot in California, it’s usually also hot in neighboring states. When homes and businesses all across the West are cranking their air conditioners, there is less surplus power to sell to California.

The remedy, California Independent System Operator CEO Steve Berberich told reporters, is “an overbuild of renewables and a fairly extensive deployment of batteries.” In other words, the state needs more clean power, not less.

While critics have said that recently shuttered gas and nuclear power plants were needed during the heat wave, it’s worth noting that gas and nuclear generators often struggle with high temperatures. Amid the scorcher last weekend, two California gas-fired power plants stopped supplying power, officials told reporters. The initial outage hit at the end of the day, just when gas plants start ramping up production, which suggests gas-fired power was at issue.

The irony of the attacks on California’s push for clean power is that, by moving to wind and solar, the state is trying to mitigate the threat that climate change poses to the grid. Last weekend’s heat wave toppled temperature records across the West, most notably in Death Valley, where the mercury hit 130 degrees F, the hottest temperature recorded on the planet in more than a century. The searing weather developed under a natural heat dome, which trapped hot air over the West. Recent decades have seen more and more of the most powerful heat domes.

“California is experiencing extraordinarily extreme and persistently hot weather conditions which, in turn, led to extremely high electricity use,” said Susan Tierney, a senior advisor at the Analysis Group and former assistant secretary of energy for policy. “The electric system, which is designed to produce power even under extreme conditions, can still feel the stress of simultaneous extreme events,” she added, referring to hot spells across the state.

As temperatures rise in California, air conditioning is growing in popularity. Between 1985 and 2015, roughly a third of coastal Southern California homes added air conditioners. The growth of air conditioning poses a formidable challenge for utilities, which are required to produce more electricity than their customers are likely to use to guard against unexpected swings in supply or demand. With rising temperatures fueling more heat waves, utilities might need to secure a bigger reserve of surplus power, California energy officials wrote in their letter. Hence the call for more renewables and more batteries.

Of course, hotter temperatures are also fueling more wildfires, like the hundreds burning around California right now. That further threatens the power supply as utilities may shut off electricity to prevent power lines from setting forests ablaze. One solution is more rooftop solar, which will allow homeowners to keep the lights on even when utilities cut the power. In California, new homes are required to have rooftop solar panels. Energy officials wrote that, going forward, the Public Utilities Commission will work to better integrate distributed energy, like rooftop solar, into the grid.

“I hope that this is a wake-up call to plan for tomorrow’s likely conditions, rather than yesterday’s,” Tierney said. “Sadly, but maybe helpfully, this is a preview of things to come.


Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a nonprofit climate change news service. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy.

California reveals that the transition to renewable energy Isn’t so simple 

By Alex Trembath & Zeke Hausfather | News | August 27th 2020
#1393 of 1394 articles from the Special Report:Race Against Climate Change

Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay. Pixabay License

This story was originally published by Slate and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

The recent “heat storm” in California has pushed grid operators to impose rolling blackouts for the first time since 2001. A combination of heavy air conditioning usage, the unplanned unavailability of some power plants, limited options for importing power from neighboring states, and insufficient solar and wind generation have led to an imbalance of electricity generation and consumption. As Stephen Berberich, president of the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, which oversees operation of the state’s electric grid, told Sammy Roth of the Los Angeles Times, “We thought there would be adequate power to supply the demand. … We were wrong.”

The blackouts are designed to affect customers for no more than an hour or two. Some may find that little more than mildly inconvenient. Others more prone to heat stress or in possession of medicines that require refrigeration might be more worried, with good reason. The aggregate reaction could prove substantial, especially if we face more rounds of shortages in the coming months and years. The last time this happened to us Californians, we altered long-held plans to partially deregulate electricity systems, recalled Gov. Gray Davis, and pushed Enron, one of the energy services providers found guilty of gaming electricity markets, into bankruptcy.


This time, what we’re seeing should give renewable energy advocates pause.

For years, renewable energy enthusiasts have insisted that most of the problems of the electric grid were caused by outdated and inflexible coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy technologies. A system built on solar panels and wind turbines, smart meters, electricity storage, and payments for flexible demand would lower costs and improve reliability for everyone. Some academic studies showed that renewables could easily supply 80 percent or more of an electric grid’s demands.

But with non-hydroelectric renewable technologies, mostly solar and wind, generating about 30 percent of California’s electricity today, we are witnessing the types of obstacles and problems that these new technologies introduce.

Solar power, of course, is well matched with high demand for air conditioning in the middle of the day. That advantage disappears when the sun goes down but the temperature doesn’t. Distributed and centralized electricity storage technologies can shift some power generation toward later in the day. But lithium-ion battery systems are usually designed for only a few hours of storage—enough to accommodate much of the daily swings in solar generation, but not the type of extreme surges in demand we’ve seen this week. Storage technologies that last a few days would help, but truly high-renewables systems will likely require seasonal storage technologies that can shift consumption from the hot months to the cool months. Beyond geographically constrained, pumped hydroelectric storage systems, those technologies are largely nonexistent.

Advocates emphasize that solar and wind complement each other; the wind usually blows while the sun doesn’t shine, and vice versa. And even if a renewable resource is less available in one part of the country, long-distance power lines can transmit electricity from other regions. These are features of a wind-and-solar-heavy system—until they’re bugs. In California this week, the heat pushed power demand to near record highs, solar generation plummeted in the evening, the winds slowed faster than expected, and the same thing happened in Nevada, Arizona, and other states we usually import electricity from. The result was predictable to anyone who hasn’t been heralding a seamless transition to renewable energy technologies.


Part of the problem here is how much solar generation drops as the sun goes down and how much flexible generation needs to fire up to compensate. The amount of solar power has increased substantially in California over the last decade. The required summer “ramp-up” of firm generation (generators like natural gas plants that can be turned on and kept on) between the middle of the day and the evening—when the sun sets and many people turn on lights and appliances—has more than doubled. California shifts from using a large amount of solar during the day to a large amount of natural gas and imports during the evening, and the size of this shift is growing. This puts stress on the rest of the electricity grid and increases the risk that disruptions in either in-state power generation or imports could lead to shortfalls. About two-thirds of the generation ramp-up comes from natural gas plants in California, while the remaining third comes from imports from neighboring states.

In this case, blackouts resulted from a combination of less available imports—neighboring states also had extreme demand associated with the heat wave—and a number of natural gas plants unexpectedly going offline. More gas plants or battery storage can be added in the short term to hedge against future energy use spikes, but having resources that sit idle for the vast majority of the time increases the overall cost of generating electricity.

California’s challenges are exacerbated by the declining availability of reliable, always-on nuclear capacity in the state. In 2012, Southern California Edison closed the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, or SONGS, taking 2,200 megawatts off the grid in one fell swoop.* The power once generated by SONGS was largely replaced by natural gas, causing a jump in carbon emissions and a squeeze in electric capacity reserve margins. A similar fate now awaits the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the last nuclear plant in the state. In 2016, Pacific Gas & Electric announced that it would not seek a license extension for Diablo Canyon.

Sometimes the features of a wind-and-solar system turn out to be bugs.


Replacing California’s nuclear power plants reveals the difference between modeling a renewable energy future and building one. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which pushed to close Diablo Canyon, argued at the time that the plant’s electricity would “be replaced with gains in energy efficiency, renewable power, and pollution-free energy technologies.” But an initial California Public Utility Commission replacement plan included substantial natural gas capacity. (The NRDC called the plan “deeply flawed.”) In 2018, the state Legislature passed a law directing the California Public Utilities Commission to ensure that no greenhouse-emissions increase results after Diablo Canyon shuts down in 2025. How this will all unfold in practice remains to be seen.

Solar, wind, and battery storage technologies have gotten significantly cheaper over the last decade. They are modular and have proven much easier to deploy and build than, say, new nuclear power plants, which have become expensive megaprojects (and are actually illegal to build in California until federal lawmakers create a long-term solution for storing nuclear spent fuel). And of course renewables do not emit air pollution or carbon dioxide. The reasons to support the deployment of solar and wind are myriad and valid.

And the challenges we describe above, which states like California and countries like Germany are increasingly grappling with, are at least partially surmountable. Future advances in long-duration electric storage capacity could allow grid operators to shift supply to meet demand. “Demand response” arrangements, or payments to customers who temporarily reduce their consumption, could help smooth imbalances. Continent-spanning transmission would help move electrons from where they’re more reliably generated to where they’re more reliably consumed.

But California’s experience also underscores a growing consensus among energy scholars: that variable renewable energy technologies are unlikely to meet the grid’s power demand by themselves. They will play an important role, but more firm generating sources, like next-generation nuclear reactors, natural gas plants with carbon capture technologies, enhanced geothermal, and others that can balance out variable renewables, will be required.

To be clear: Rising energy costs and the ongoing reliability crisis cannot be blamed entirely on California’s growing solar and wind sectors. But this month’s challenges surface the complexities and difficulties of energy transitions, and the imperative of maintaining a flexible and diverse supply of energy technologies. If this month’s blackouts continue, there is a risk California’s ratepayers will come to associate them with the state’s clean energy transition.

*Correction, Aug. 25, 2020: This article originally misstated that San Diego Gas & Electric closed the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. San Diego Gas & Electric is a minority owner of SONGS; the majority owner is Southern California Edison.

Distributed Energy Helped Fight California’s Grid Outages, But It Could Do Much More

Battery and demand response providers say policy and market reforms could turn emergency help into stable, consistent grid relief.
JEFF ST. JOHN AUGUST 28, 2020


California's growing behind-the-meter energy resource mix could play a bigger role in solving grid emergencies, advocates say.

During last week’s heat-wave-driven grid emergency in California, grid operator CAISO and the state’s utilities sent out desperate calls to demand response providers, behind-the-meter battery aggregators, electric-vehicle charging providers, microgrid operators and backup generator owners, seeking whatever help they could provide.

The call was answered. According to CAISO and the California Public Utilities Commission, consumer conservation and demand-side resources were critical in avoiding more rolling blackouts like those CAISO ordered the evenings of Friday, Aug. 14 and Saturday, Aug. 15.

“Conservation efforts are the only way we have gotten through these peaks,” CAISO President Steve Berberich said last week.

While the grid operator lacks visibility into how much load reduction came from those voluntary energy-saving decisions, it can measure the roughly 1,300 megawatts of residential and commercial-industrial demand response it secured during the crisis.


It also tallied hundreds of megawatts from out-of-market responses, according to a letter from CAISO and the CPUC laying out plans for a “postmortem” analysis of the emergency for Gov. Gavin Newsom and state leaders. Silicon Valley data centers provided about 100 megawatts by switching to backup power systems. Military microgrids, ships and backup generators delivered about 23.5 megawatts, and microgrids funded by state research grants provided another 1.2 megawatts per day.

Microgrids, solar-plus-storage systems, EV chargers, dispatchable energy loads and other distributed energy resources are going to play an increasingly important role in shaping California’s electricity supply-demand balance as it seeks to reach its goal of 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2045.

Beyond these backup systems, behind-the-meter batteries from providers including Stem, Sunrun, Enel X and Tesla shifted their typical operating schedules to maximize effectiveness through 9 p.m. to match the state’s “net peak,” or total grid demand minus wind and solar. Electric-vehicle charging operators like Tesla and Enel X also encouraged customers to avoid charging during peak hours.


Surya Panditi, CEO of Enel X North America, noted that the company’s demand response, behind-the-meter battery and EV charger assets were able to deliver about 150 megawatts per day during the crisis. “If...the right kind of economic construct [is in place], everyone benefits.”
Barriers to behind-the-meter participation

But this month’s crisis has also revealed a gap between the grid-balancing potential of demand-side resources and the policies needed to bring them to bear, industry participants say.

“We delivered about 50 megawatts of relief to the grid on Friday evening — but we could have deployed about 50 megawatts more if all the policies were in place,” said Ted Ko, Stem’s vice president of policy and regulatory affairs. “What’s ironic is that the [CPUC] and CAISO have been putting up all these barriers to us participating, and then they called us and said, ‘Hey, can you do this for us for free?’”

A 2019 paper from the California Solar & Storage Association lays out a long list of such barriers. One key issue is the rules meant to prevent “double-counting,” which refers to resource-gaming or distorting the market by getting paid twice from different programs for the same service.

This prohibition has been applied in illogical ways, Ko contends. For example, until recently, batteries receiving payments from the state's Self-Generation Incentive Program were barred from most demand-side resources programs — even though SGIP’s upfront installation incentives are distinct from grid-services payments.

The CPUC has made changes to allow SGIP systems to participate in certain distribution grid programs. But it hasn’t yet set standards for how “multiuse applications,” such as behind-the-meter resources earning incentives from other state programs, can participate in California’s key program for securing capacity to meet grid demand peaks, the Resource Adequacy (RA) program.

CAISO has criticized the CPUC for failing to secure enough RA to forestall last week’s grid emergencies, and reforming the program is high on both agencies’ agendas. While some SGIP-backed solar-storage aggregations in California qualify as RA, other utility projects seeking behind-the-meter capacity have barred participants from receiving SGIP or other installation incentives, the 2019 report states.
Slow progress on reforms to demand response


Thomas Folker, CEO of Leap, a company that helps renewables aggregators access markets, agreed that changes are needed to unlock more demand-side capacity in California. Last week, Leap provided between 50 and 60 megawatts of load reduction daily from the mix of Nest smart thermostats, EV chargers, water pumps and commercial-industrial load controls it bids into CAISO’s energy markets for aggregators.

Many of those resources are organized under the Demand Response Auction Mechanism (DRAM) pilot program, which allows aggregators to earn money in two ways: by entering into RA contracts with utilities and by bidding into CAISO’s day-ahead and real-time energy markets.

DRAM hasn't seen its budget expanded to allow broader participation by renewables aggregators over the past few years as the CPUC debates its next steps, limiting its growth. Meanwhile, traditional utility-run demand response initiatives such as the Capacity Bidding Program pay less than what’s available from DRAM, with payments disconnected from real-time energy market prices, he said.

CAISO allows distributed energy resources (DERs) to participate directly in its markets, but the Distributed Energy Resource Provider program hasn’t enlisted any aggregators yet. DER providers say that’s because CAISO sets deal-breaking requirements, including the need to be available at all times, which prevents alternative revenue-generating opportunities.

Even DRAM has its limitations, Folker said. For example, RA rules require resources to commit to at least four hours of continuous delivery. That’s meant to assure that CAISO can access a reliable, consistent peak reduction over time. But it also limits how “surgically” Leap can bid load-reduction potential into CAISO’s market during its net peak, when the sun sets, and the buffer between supply and demand dwindles the most.

Narrowing that minimum bid requirement to two hours, for example, could double batteries’ load-reduction potential, by halving the amount of time they’re required to draw upon their limited storage capacity. Capacity from homeowners turning off air conditioners or EV drivers delaying charging could also be boosted by shortening how long they’re asked to do it, he said. Since CAISO's rolling blackouts were forced during a two-hour window, this kind of focused increase in capacity could have made a significant difference.
Letting behind-the-meter assets charge up the grid

Behind-the-meter resources also can’t send energy back to the grid since demand response programs are built for load reduction, not energy export. Changing those rules could allow them to play a much more aggressive role, Ko said.

Stem sought emergency authorization from utilities to export from its batteries last week, but the company "couldn’t make that happen fast enough,” he said. “We don’t have the constructs in place to dispatch and get paid for DERs to help out in these emergency situations.”

Allowing behind-the-meter energy export would require reforms to CAISO’s Proxy Demand Resource and Reliability Demand Response Resource programs that organize much of the state’s utility demand response activity, he explained. CAISO, the CPUC and the California Energy Commission are planning a joint workshop to discuss the potential to provide RA credit to “hybrid” solar-storage behind-the-meter resources, a proceeding over which the energy-export issue is likely to loom large, he said.

There’s a lot of potential value being left on the table, Ko said. According to research from Stem, solar installer Sunrun and software startup Station A, the state’s latent solar-storage capacity could provide about 9 gigawatts of grid capacity under ideal conditions.

California’s nearly 20-year-old RA construct faces major changes to adapt to a future of increasing levels of intermittent clean energy. Key questions include how much to rely on out-of-state imports and how to enlist energy storage to replace a declining natural-gas power plant fleet.

But how to tap California's fast-growing behind-the-meter capacity will also be an important part of the solution, said Ben Kellison, WoodMac's director of grid research. One big question will be to determine “how much of the emergency capacity was called through market mechanisms versus how much just showed up out of a sense of societal obligation or goodwill” — and to determine whether policies need to change in order to pull some of the latter category into the former

AUSTRALIA

'Orwellian': Coalition accused of planning to open green bank to fossil fuel investments

Angus Taylor introduces bill to give Clean Energy Finance Corporation $1bn for ‘grid reliability fund’

Angus Taylor flanked by Scott Morrison at a Snowy 2.0 press conference. The CEFC’s definition of low-emissions technology would be expanded to include gas under a bill the minister has brought before parliament. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Adam Morton Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 28 Aug 2020

The Morrison government has been accused of planning to open up the taxpayer-owned green bank to fossil fuels investments through a change that explicitly defines gas-fired power as a “low-emissions technology”.

The energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, introduced legislation to parliament on Thursday that would give the Clean Energy Finance Corporation an additional $1bn funding for a “grid reliability fund”.

Taylor said the new fund would be used to encourage private investment in infrastructure needed to balance electricity generation from solar and windfarms – battery and pumped hydro storage, “dispatchable” power plants that can be ramped up as needed, transmission projects and technologies that stabilise the grid.


Methane released in gas production means Australia's emissions may be 10% higher than reported
Read more

It would also allow the CEFC to administer a long-promised underwriting program for new electricity generation announced before last year’s federal election. The government has released a shortlist of 12 projects being considered for support through the controversial program – six renewable energy, five gas and one coal.

Under Taylor’s proposed legislative changes, the CEFC’s definition of low-emissions technology would be expanded to include any projects that “support the achievement of low emission energy in Australia”. An explanatory memorandum says this could include “certain types of gas-fired electricity generation” but coal would not qualify.

The bill would exempt the grid reliability fund from a CEFC requirement that at least 50% of funding must go to renewable energy. The fund would also be freed of a rule that individual CEFC investments have to deliver a return for taxpayers, though it would need to overall.

Taylor told parliament: “To ensure we can continue to be a world leader, we must back more grid reliability investments, such as flexible gas generators or significant pumped hydro projects.”

The Australian Energy Market Operator last month found additional gas-fired power was an option, but not essential, for an electricity grid increasingly based on renewable energy, and gas prices would need to stay at lower levels than expected if it was to compete with pumped hydro, batteries and other alternatives.


Australia's chief scientist rejects experts' letter warning him not to back gas

Labor’s climate and energy spokesman, Mark Butler, said the opposition was yet to form a view on the proposal but criticised the government for previously trying to abolish the CEFC.

“Labor established the CEFC, we have consistently protected the integrity of the CEFC as a renewable energy financing body, and we will continue to do so,” he said.

The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said the proposal to define gas as low emissions was “Orwellian”.

“This is nothing more than a shameless attempt to bankroll gas corporations with public money meant for renewables,” he said. “The Greens are calling on Labor to join us in the fight against a gas-loving government that is hurtling us towards climate catastrophe.”

The CEFC was created in 2012 under a deal between Labor, the Greens and independents with a mandate to invest in renewable energy, low-emissions technology and energy-efficiency projects that would deliver a return.

Introducing the legislation to create it in 2012, the then climate change minister, Greg Combet, said gas may “technically be eligible for funding as a low-emissions technology” but was not expected to win backing as it had a track record in getting financed.

Gas is often described as having about half the emissions of coal but studies have suggested this could be more due to leakage of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. In addition to being burned to create electricity, gas is used as a feedstock in some manufacturing industries.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, this week told parliament that expanding gas supply was critical to Australia’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. His handpicked National Covid-19 Coordinating Commission has recommended the government underwrite new gas infrastructure.


Large-scale renewable energy investment in Australia falls to lowest level since 2017
Richie Mezian, the climate and energy program director at the Australia Institute, said the proposed amendments would transform the CEFC “from an explicitly profit-making investor of renewable energy projects for the Australia to a potentially loss-making underwriter of fossil fuel projects”.

He said investment in renewable energy was falling dramatically and the government should be doubling down on its mandate to support it. “How the government will justify its amendments that ensure CEFC is no longer obligated to fund at least 50% of its projects from renewable energy is beyond me,” he said.

Jonathan Moylan, a Greenpeace campaigner, accused the government of trying to give gas an unfair competitive advantage over batteries and renewable energy, despite them being cheaper. “Instead of making money from fossil fuels, the government is seriously considering handing them public money and not expecting anything in return,” he said.

Facebook says Apple censored an update that mentioned the 30% App Store commission for in-app purchases

Isobel Asher Hamilton

Apple CEO Tim Cook (left) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. AP; Francois Mori/AP

Facebook told Reuters that Apple has blocked an update to its iOS app containing a message about the 30% commission Apple takes on in-app purchases.
Facebook said Apple had blocked the update on the grounds it contained "irrelevant" information.
Facebook launched a new tool allowing users to buy tickets to virtual events in-app, and earlier this month asked Apple to waive its usual 30% commission. Apple declined.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Facebook's fight with Apple over the App Store's 30% commission on in-app purchases has reached new heights, after the social media giant accused the iPhone maker of censorship.

Facebook told Reuters on Thursday that Apple had blocked it from issuing an iOS app update that contained a message about the fee Apple charges.

The message was supposed to accompany a new Facebook tool that allows users to buy tickets for online events inside the app. Facebook said the update, which contained a "transparency notice" telling users that 30% of their payment goes to Apple, was rejected by Apple because it contained "irrelevant" information for users.

"Now more than ever, we should have the option to help people understand where money they intend for small businesses actually goes. Unfortunately Apple rejected our transparency notice around their 30% tax but we are still working to make that information available inside the app experience," Facebook said in a statement to Business Insider.

The message on Facebook's app would have looked like this. Facebook/Business Insider.

Apple declined to comment to Reuters, and was not immediately available to comment when contacted by Business Insider.



On August 14, Facebook said it had asked Apple to waive its usual 30% fee for the new tool so that all the money could be passed onto small business owners hosting paid events, but Apple declined.

Facebook isn't the only big company to lock horns with Apple over its in-app purchases levy. The tech giant is in a legal battle with "Fortnite" creator Epic Games after it removed "Fortnite" from the App Store for circumventing its payment system.

The 30% commission is also currently the subject of an antitrust investigation in the EU after music-streaming giant Spotify filed a complaint last year, claiming the fee allows Apple to artificially inflate prices while launching its own competing apps.

Tesla employee bribed with US$1 million helps FBI arrest Russian hackers

Hackers' scheme to hold Tesla's private data for ransom exposed by contact

by DAVID BOOTH | 14 HOURS AGO




The dashboard interior of the semi-autonomous 2018 Tesla Model 3

 Tuesday, April, 2018, at the Consumer Reports Auto Test Track in Colchester, Conn.


There are, it seems, people better than you and I. To wit—

According to Clearance Job, a recruiting agency out of Urbandale, Iowa that specializes in employees with American federal government security clearances, a Tesla employee turned down an offer of US$1 million to help some Russian hackers infiltrate the company’s computer system.

It all started mid-July when Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a 27-year-old citizen of Russia in the United States on a travel visa contacted a Russian-speaking foreign national – the name of the employee has not been divulged – working in Sparks, Nevada. Along the way, the employee was wined, dined and then provided with – shades of CSI – a burner phone for secret communications.


The plan, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, was to get the employee “to introduce malware – i.e., malicious software programs designed to damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system – into the company’s computer network” that would allow Kriuchkov and his co-conspirators access to the company’s system, letting them download data and threaten to make it public. In other words, a typical ransomware scam.

Instead, the employee went directly to Tesla, who subsequently alerted the FBI. Wearing a wire – are we sure this isn’t going to be made into a movie? – the employee was able to record their interactions with Kriuchkov, and on August 22, he was arrested as he attempted to flee from the Los Angeles airport. He was charged, according to the American DOJ, with “one count of conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer.”

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What’s possibly most interesting about this subterfuge is that despite all the hoopla about susceptibility of automobile companies to over-the-air hacking, this is yet another “denial of service” exploit that (would have) required hands-on intervention to succeed. Like the famous case of Jeep hacking by Charlie Miller and Chris Velasek, Kriuchkov needed a physical connection to the main computer before he could start spoofing the network.

I’m not enough of a computer geek to know whether that is comforting at all, but I can say it frightens the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of me to know the safety of our networks may depend on people being righteous enough to turn down a million-dollar bribe.

Effectiveness of cloth masks depends on type of covering

by American Institute of Physics


 

Schlieren images of coughs with varying degrees of face covering. Credit: Padmanabha Prasanna Simha, Indian Space Research Organisation

Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a mask while out in public has become the recommended practice. However, many still question the effectiveness of this.


To allay these doubts, Padmanabha Prasanna Simha, from the Indian Space Research Organisation, and Prasanna Simha Mohan Rao, from the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research, experimentally visualized the flow fields of coughs under various common mouth covering scenarios. They present their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.

"If a person can reduce the extent of how much they contaminate the environment by mitigating the spread, it's a far better situation for other healthy individuals who may enter places that have such contaminated areas," Simha said.

Density and temperature are intricately related, and coughs tend to be warmer than their surrounding area. Tapping into this connection, Simha and Rao utilized a technique called schlieren imaging, which visualizes changes in density, to capture pictures of voluntary coughs from five test subjects. By tracking the motion of a cough over successive images, the team estimated velocity and spread of the expelled droplets.

Unsurprisingly, they found N95 masks to be the most effective at reducing the horizontal spread of a cough. The N95 masks reduced a cough's initial velocity by up to a factor of 10 and limit its spread to between 0.1 and 0.25 meters.

An uncovered cough, in contrast, can travel up to 3 meters, but even a simple disposable mask can bring this all the way down to 0.5 meters.

"Even if a mask does not filter out all the particles, if we can prevent clouds of such particles from traveling very far, it's better than not doing anything," said Simha. "In situations where sophisticated masks are not available, any mask is better than no mask at all for the general public in slowing the spread of infection."

Some of the other comparisons, however, were striking.

For example, using an elbow to cover up a cough is typically considered a good alternative in a pinch, which is contradictory to what the pair found. Unless covered by a sleeve, a bare arm cannot form the proper seal against the nose necessary to obstruct airflow. A cough is then able to leak through any openings and propagate in many directions.

Simha and Rao hope their findings will put to rest the argument that regular cloth masks are ineffective, but they emphasize that masks must continue to be used in conjunction with social distancing.

"Adequate distancing is something that must not be ignored, since masks are not foolproof," Simha said.


Explore furtherYes, face mask protection helps slow the spread of COVID-19
More information: "Universal trends in human cough airflows at large distances," Physics of Fluids (2020). DOI: 10.1063/5.0021666
Journal information: Physics of Fluids


Provided by American Institute of Physics