The Verge: Elon Musk Now Has a Heavy Metal Tribute Band
What sort of music do you imagine Elon Musk listens to when he's looking over SpaceX rocket designs at home? Smooth jazz, perhaps? Some country, or show tunes? No. When Musk is hanging out in his secret lair with his secret robot butlers he turns to one genre: power metal.
Only power metal's ceaseless rhythms and symphonic splendor can match Musk's soaring ambition, and now, one band has had the courage to try to capture this spirit in musical form. Raptor Command are a self-described "heavy metal tribute to Elon Musk" and their first single is the no-nonsense "Elon: Champion for Humanity."
Bloomberg: Tesla Powerwalls for Home Energy Storage Are Hitting U.S. Market
A year after Elon Musk unveiled the Powerwall at Tesla Motors Inc.’s design studio near Los Angeles, the first wave of residential installations has started in the U.S. The 6.4-kilowatt-hour unit stores electricity from home solar systems and provides backup in the case of a conventional outage. Weighing 214 pounds and standing about 4 feet tall, it retails for around $3,000. But hookup by a trained electrician is required, as is something called a bidirectional inverter that converts direct-current electricity into the kind used by dishwashers and refrigerators. The costs add up quickly -- which has fueled skepticism about Musk’s dream of changing the way the world uses energy.
Climate Progress: Solar and Coal Just Passed Major Milestones -- In Opposite Directions
The energy mix in the U.S. is changing -- and two separate events this week point to how we’re getting more green energy and less of the dirty stuff.
To start, there are now more than a million solar installations across the United States, including panels on nearly 950,000 homes and small businesses. This is a big deal. Right now, U.S. solar is generating the amount of electricity used by the entire state of Pennsylvania. And that contribution is only growing: By the end of 2016, there will be twice as much solar as there was in 2014.
This week saw the announced retirement of coal-fired generators at two power plants in Illinois, which brings the tally of closed (or closing) coal generation to 100 gigawatts' worth since 2010, according to the Sierra Club, which has focused on limiting and now reducing coal use since 2002.
The Korea Herald: LG Chem Falls Prey to Email Phishing
South Korea’s leading chemical company LG Chem has fallen victim to an online scam that caused 24 billion won ($21.1 million) of financial damage to the company.
The fraud case started with an email last month that was sent to LG Chem from Aramco Products Trading Co.
The email claimed that the bank account for their bilateral business transaction had changed, and asked LG to send its payment to a different account. LG sent the money without suspecting any foul play.
Politico: Clinton Cleans Up Coal Comments
Hillary Clinton pledged to fight for coal miners Monday as she insisted that her comment weeks ago about putting coal miners out of business was taken out of context.
“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country because we’re gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton said in March during a Democratic town hall event hosted by CNN.