Latest news with #SeanGallagher
Sydney Morning Herald
01-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Not using AI at work yet? You're already falling behind
When future historians look back on this period of work in a hundred year's time, there are two simple letters that will dominate their recounting: A and I. The sudden rise of AI in the workplace, and its inevitable impact on every corner of our lives, will go down as one of the most axis-tilting shifts to the way that we work. Now, I'm not being overly dramatic here for no reason, the early advancements in AI are just the start of an exponential curve in front of us. For years, many people assumed that robots would come for lower paid jobs first, like factory workers or front-of-house staff, before gradually working their way up the wage chain. But the sudden arrival of generative AI (which can create content like reports and images) and agentic AI (where technology works autonomously on behalf of a user) has shown that no amount of higher education makes you immune from these trends. Increasing AI adoption can bring on two extreme reactions: fear and excitement. Both are valid responses as we better understand the potential and dangers of this new technology, but whether we like it or not, AI is already being used in most workplaces. Your colleagues and competitors are drafting emails, reviewing contracts, writing presentations, analysing data and using it to help with every task we used to think only other humans could do. Use of AI programs, like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, can have immediate and immense impact on your day-to-day work. However, the uptake is pretty uneven. A new Australian survey by Humanova found that mid-sized businesses with 50 to 99 employees are leading the charge when it comes to AI adoption. The report's author, Dr Sean Gallagher, says the reason for this is that just over a third of employees of firms this size are 'power users' who are currently using AI at least daily. If you're not one of them, there's a real and growing risk that you might become professionally obsolete as those around you transform their roles through AI.
The Age
01-05-2025
- Business
- The Age
Not using AI at work yet? You're already falling behind
When future historians look back on this period of work in a hundred year's time, there are two simple letters that will dominate their recounting: A and I. The sudden rise of AI in the workplace, and its inevitable impact on every corner of our lives, will go down as one of the most axis-tilting shifts to the way that we work. Now, I'm not being overly dramatic here for no reason, the early advancements in AI are just the start of an exponential curve in front of us. For years, many people assumed that robots would come for lower paid jobs first, like factory workers or front-of-house staff, before gradually working their way up the wage chain. But the sudden arrival of generative AI (which can create content like reports and images) and agentic AI (where technology works autonomously on behalf of a user) has shown that no amount of higher education makes you immune from these trends. Increasing AI adoption can bring on two extreme reactions: fear and excitement. Both are valid responses as we better understand the potential and dangers of this new technology, but whether we like it or not, AI is already being used in most workplaces. Your colleagues and competitors are drafting emails, reviewing contracts, writing presentations, analysing data and using it to help with every task we used to think only other humans could do. Use of AI programs, like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, can have immediate and immense impact on your day-to-day work. However, the uptake is pretty uneven. A new Australian survey by Humanova found that mid-sized businesses with 50 to 99 employees are leading the charge when it comes to AI adoption. The report's author, Dr Sean Gallagher, says the reason for this is that just over a third of employees of firms this size are 'power users' who are currently using AI at least daily. If you're not one of them, there's a real and growing risk that you might become professionally obsolete as those around you transform their roles through AI.
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
As Trump targets clean energy, will utilities embrace DERs and VPPs?
This story was originally published on Utility Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Utility Dive newsletter. Amid stiff headwinds for utility-scale renewables and gas, electricity system experts say utilities, industrial companies and other heavy power consumers may find some relief in a cheaper, faster and increasingly scalable solution: distributed generation and flexible loads, known as distributed energy resources, or DERs, that can be batched into virtual power plants or multi-megawatt demand response programs and deployed faster than utility-scale assets. 'There is an awareness that, oftentimes, distributed solar and distributed storage can come online much more quickly than larger resources … and a recognition of the role [they] can play in providing energy and in some cases capacity resources,' said Sean Gallagher, senior vice president of policy for the Solar Energy Industries Association. Then again, nothing in the energy world is easy these days. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from most U.S. trading partners. The targeted countries included major suppliers of solar panels, batteries and high-voltage electrical components, such as Vietnam (46%) and China (145% or more). Trump later announced a 90-day reduction to 10% for most countries other than China. Distributed generation and storage assets may stand to benefit as developers look to sidestep bulk grid constraints, but they are not immune to supply chain challenges, particularly for larger projects, said Ravi Manghani, senior director of strategic sourcing at Anza Renewables, an energy data provider. Trump's 'Liberation Day' announcement was just the latest setback for the clean energy industry, which has been under siege since Jan. 20 despite providing 93% of new generating capacity in 2024. In a series of executive orders on his first day in office, Trump halted federal onshore and offshore wind permitting, withdrew all federal waters from offshore wind leasing, and declared an 'energy emergency' that appeared to favor thermal and other high capacity-factor generating resources over wind, solar and batteries. A subsequent federal funding freeze, later partially rescinded, threw previously-authorized support for clean energy projects into limbo. Meanwhile, anti-renewables bills are proliferating in Texas, Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states. With the fate of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits up in the air as the U.S. Congress looks to offset an estimated $4.2 trillion in tax cuts this year, the clean energy sector could be in for more pain. Fully repealing the IRA's technology-neutral Section 45Y investment and Section 48E production tax credits this year would reduce wind and solar deployments by about 50% over the next decade, The Brattle Group and ConservAmerica said in February. That sort of pullback could jeopardize U.S. industrial growth, which is a driving factor in an expected 50% increase in electricity demand by 2035, ConservAmerica said. With new gas turbine costs rising fast and production capacity tied up until 2030, according to NextEra CEO John Ketchum, it may not be feasible to make up the shortfall with new fossil generation. Because the U.S. already has tens of gigawatts of DERs that could be aggregated into VPPs within months, rather than years, some electricity system experts see smaller-scale resources as a potential stopgap should utility-scale renewables and storage development falter. 'DER' is a catch-all term for a broad range of generation resources, from residential solar arrays of a few kilowatts to grid-connected or behind-the-meter installations of 10 MW or more, and potentially flexible loads such as thermostats, water heaters and electric vehicles. The U.S. has well over 100 GW of DERs that technically could be aggregated into VPPs and traditional demand response programs, but over 80% of that capacity is not, Wood Mackenzie said last year. Still, the firm identified 1,459 VPP deployments operating across 321 monetized market, utility and energy retailer programs. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy pegged current U.S. VPP capacity at about 30 GW and said that figure could scale to 80 GW to 160 GW by 2030. Utilities and state policymakers increasingly see the value in VPPs and DER aggregations, according to a February report from the NC Clean Energy Technology Center and the Smart Electric Power Alliance that catalogued more than 100 policy actions last year in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Many of those actions aim to harness the United States' rapidly-growing distributed battery capacity or deploy sophisticated VPPs that use multiple categories of DERs, NCCETC Managing Director of Policy and Markets Autumn Proudlove said earlier this year. In a flipbook released last year, RMI called out particularly innovative, multi-resource VPPs like those run by Puget Sound Energy in Washington (smart thermostats, behavioral load shaping, electric vehicles, water heaters and interruptible loads), Portland General Electric in Oregon (batteries, water heaters, behavioral load shaping and interruptible loads) and National Grid in New England (smart thermostats, batteries and technology-agnostic demand response). Clean-energy groups are actively pushing supportive state policy and developing standardized templates for simpler, more efficient VPP programs, both key recommendations from last year's Wood Mackenzie report. 'There's a lot of enthusiasm around VPPs,' SEIA's Gallagher said. 'We are trying to templatize them so that they're not as bespoke [and] are more straightforward to explain to utilities and customers.' Though utility interest is 'uneven' across the country, with some embracing DERs and others more resistant, eye-catching recent load growth forecasts help make the case, Gallagher said. In January, SEIA released a roadmap for 10 million distributed energy storage installations and 700 GWh of total deployed storage capacity by 2030. Utilities, too, are showing more ambition on DERs with plans for bigger, more sophisticated distributed resource aggregations. In a February deal touted by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, R, Rocky Mountain Power and distributed energy solutions provider Torus said they would collaborate on a commercial-and-industrial VPP that could provide up to 70 MW of flexible, behind-the-meter capacity by the middle of 2026. 'It's no longer in question whether [this] is a path forward,' Torus CEO Nate Walkingshaw said in February. '[VPPs] can be seen at the same size, scale, quality and reliability as monolithic grid-tied architecture and are 100% viable today.' In a regulatory filing in August, Xcel Energy's Minnesota subsidiary proposed deploying and aggregating 440 MW of distributed solar and 400 MW of distributed storage to create what would likely be one of the United States' largest VPPs. 'Xcel Energy believes distributed capacity can complement our existing plans for additional utility-scale renewable and firm dispatchable generation … [with] benefits including continued reliability, economic growth and providing our customers more options to adopt clean energy technologies,' Xcel spokesperson Josiah Mayo said in an email. Meanwhile, utilities across the U.S. are working with developers to install larger-scale distributed energy resources with an eye to improving local and regional resilience. In California, San Diego Gas & Electric partnered with EES and Mitsubishi Power Americas joint venture Prevalon to deploy multiple community microgrids totaling 180 MWh, and the company is now pursuing 'half a dozen' similar opportunities right now, Prevalon President and CEO Tom Cornell said. 'We've seen a lot more utility inquiries in the past six to 12 months,' he said. The value proposition for distributed batteries and firm generation is especially strong in regions where the grid is less reliable due to infrastructure challenges or weather-related risk, such as western North Carolina — hit hard by two hurricanes in 2024 — and other swaths of vertically-integrated utility territories across the Southeast, where developable land is abundant, Cornell said. In those territories, a typical 10-MW, 40- to 60-MWh system might take 12 months to site and permit, with equipment procurement happening in parallel and construction and commissioning taking a matter of months afterward, according to Cornell. The Southeastern utilities 'move especially fast … they understand that they can move quicker on these than any other resource,' he said. Despite clear advantages over larger, less flexible, slower-to-deploy resources, DERs aren't immune from the economic and policy uncertainty roiling the electricity sector, experts say. California's NEM 3.0 net metering tariff, effective for residential solar and storage systems that entered the state's interconnection queue after April 14, 2023, dramatically reduced solar-only installations while boosting battery attachment rates. Until more independent system operators implement rules consistent with FERC Order 2222 and additional states enact policies that capture the full value of distributed generation and storage, the residential segment could see muted growth on a national level, Anza Renewables' Manghani said. State-level policy could also temper growth in the fast-growing community solar segment following a record-breaking 1.7-GW year in 2024, according to Wood Mackenzie data. Cumulative U.S. deployments reached 8.6 GW at the end of 2024, Wood Mackenzie said. But a closer look at the numbers shows disproportionate contributions from a handful of pro-solar states — with Illinois, New York and Maine accounting for 83% of total capacity deployments last year — and policy uncertainty in emerging state markets as more mature markets saturate. 'Emerging markets have been slow to ramp up and program size caps limit the potential for growth in these states to make up for declines in larger markets,' Wood Mackenzie research analyst and lead report author Caitlin Connelly said in February. The upshot is an uncertainty band — as much as 40% to the downside and 37% to the upside — around Wood Mackenzie's base case of 15 GW in cumulative deployments by 2029. Cost is another concern for smaller-scale energy resources, Manghani said. For example, while the cost gap between distributed and utility-scale storage continues to close amid fierce supplier competition, 'utility-scale projects still benefit from superior economies of scale, revenue generation market structures and financing advantages,' he said. And Manghani emphasized that, like their bulk counterparts, distributed generation and storage systems and components are at least somewhat exposed to supply chain challenges. 'Ultimately, price trends will depend on policy shifts, manufacturing capacity expansion and how quickly suppliers adjust to demand,' he said. Recommended Reading Trump administration orders a stop to Empire Wind construction
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Crews Make Significant Progress on Volusia County Brush Fire; Burn Ban Now in Effect
Firefighters have made significant progress overnight in battling a large brush fire near Ranchette and Holly roads, west of New Smyrna Beach. What was a 105-acre blaze with only 5% containment last night is now reported to be **more than 80% contained**, according to the latest updates from Volusia County Fire Rescue and the Florida Forest Service. Our crew got an up-close look at the firefighting efforts this morning, riding along with the Florida Forest Service as they worked to aggressively contain what is now a 270-plus acre fire. Heavy dozers could be seen tearing through thick brush to widen existing fire lines, a crucial tactic to prevent the flames from spreading further, especially near residential areas. 'They are widening the fire lines to stop the fire from progressing,' explained Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher with the Florida Forest Service. He added that after smaller plows create an initial line, 'we send in these heavy dozers to widen the line... wide enough so that the flame won't just lean across our line and start a fire on the other side.' The biggest concern for crews continues to be the fire burning behind homes in the area. While no evacuations are currently in place, Volusia County Fire Rescue units remain on standby to protect structures if needed. The intense heat of the fire has also impacted infrastructure, with FPL crews on scene assessing damage to power poles. **Burn Ban Now Active** As of **12:01 a.m. today, Wednesday, April 16th**, a county-wide outdoor burn ban is now in effect for the unincorporated areas of Volusia County, as well as Oak Hill, Lake Helen, and Pierson. This ban prohibits all outdoor burning unless specifically authorized by the Florida Forest Service. This includes burning yard waste, paper products, campfires, and cooking fires in open pits. Contained gas or charcoal grills are still permitted for cooking. Volusia County Fire Chief Joe King stated the ban is necessary due to severe drought conditions, with the county's Keetch-Byram Drought Index at a concerning 517. Violators of the burn ban could face fines up to $500 and/or jail time. Officials are urging all residents to be extremely cautious and to follow wildfire safety tips, including properly disposing of cigarettes, avoiding parking hot cars on dry grass, and ensuring equipment has working spark arresters. Crews will continue to work towards full containment of the brush fire today. Stay with WFTV Channel 9 Eyewitness News for the latest updates on this developing situation. Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A record year for solar in Illinois and nationwide: ‘Customers want it'
Illinois had a record year for solar growth in 2024 and can now draw enough energy from the sun to power 930,000 homes, according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie. Illinois added 2.5 gigawatts of solar capacity last year — nearly doubling the total amount in the state. Only the sun-kissed states of Texas, California and Florida did better. 'Illinois is rocking and a lot of the credit for that can really go to the Illinois legislature,' said Solar Energy Industries Association Senior Vice President of Policy Sean Gallagher, referring to the state's ambitious climate laws of 2016 and 2021. '(That's) really helped create the conditions in Illinois for the solar industry to grow and for customers to benefit,' he said. The solar surge extended to the nation as a whole, which installed a record 50 gigawatts of capacity, a 21% increase over 2023, according to the report, U.S. Solar Market Insight 2024 Year in Review, produced by the trade group and the global analytics company. Solar accounted for 66% of all new electricity generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in 2024, outpacing wind and natural gas. All solar segments set annual installation records except for residential solar, which had its worst year since 2021. Residential solar — a category dominated by rooftop solar — was affected by company bankruptcies, high interest rates and consumer hesitancy ahead of the 2024 election, the report said. Illinois was one of the few states to see an increase in the amount of residential solar added, due in part to a rush to install rooftop solar before a Jan. 1 change affecting how customers are credited for supplying solar energy to the grid. That change in bill credits could result in some customers seeing somewhat lower savings, although consumer advocates say solar remains a great deal. Illinois was third in the nation — after California and Florida — in the total amount of residential solar installed in the fourth quarter of 2024. The report noted potential problems for solar at a time when President Donald Trump is trying to roll back incentives and tax credits in former President Joe Biden's signature 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Starting on the first day of his presidency, Trump issued executive orders calling for a temporary freeze on many clean energy initiatives and voicing strong support for fossil fuels. His 'Unleashing American Energy' order expressed concerns about 'burdensome and ideologically motivated (energy) regulations' that have, in his view, raised customer energy costs. The costs of different types of energy are difficult to compare, but Lazard's 2024 Levelized Cost of Energy+ report found that electricity from onshore wind and utility-scale solar is now less expensive than electricity from natural gas. The solar industry report calculated that if conditions became less favorable for solar — with setbacks including reductions in federal tax credits — growth would slow, with a 25% decrease in total solar installations through 2035. Government tax incentives played a role in solar's 2024 performance, along with factors such as growing demand for electricity, Gallagher said. 'There's a lot of reasons solar is doing so well,' he said. 'One is customers want it: Everybody from residential customers that want to put solar on rooftops to big data companies and tech companies that want to buy clean energy to prove their sustainability bona fides.' At a time of high demand, solar can be added to the grid faster than other new electricity sources, he said. He estimated a large solar project can be developed and installed in roughly two years, compared with about five years for a new conventional power plant. The report notes that regions with a higher number of solar projects on federal lands, such as the Southwest, will likely experience project delays due to Trump's temporary freeze on federal permits. And the report acknowledges the uncertainty stemming from Trump's campaign to freeze federal funding for many clean energy projects. Still, the report says, the solar industry remains optimistic. 'You can't turn this industry off, ' Gallagher said. 'You can't turn the desire by customers for this kind of power off.' Gallagher pointed to a recent letter from 21 House Republicans to the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. According to Politco, the letter calls for the preservation of Biden's clean energy tax credits and says developing clean energy is critical to meeting Trump's goal of becoming 'energy dominant.' The letter also warns that if certain clean energy tax credits are cut, customers will quickly see higher utility bills. 'If you reduce supply and demand stays constant, what happens? Prices go up,' Gallagher said. _______
