There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.
Wind and solar farms require vast acreage and generate energy intermittently, so they work best as part of a diversified electrical grid that collectively provides power day and night. But as the AI gold rush gathered momentum, a surge of new project proposals has created years-long wait times to connect to the grid, prompting many developers to bypass it and build their own power supply.
Operating alone, a wind or solar farm can’t run a data center. Battery technologies still can’t store such large amounts of energy for the length of time required to provide steady, uninterrupted power for 24 hours per day, as data centers require. Small nuclear reactors have been touted as a means to meet data center demand, but the first new units remain a decade from commercial deployment, while the AI boom is here today.
Now, Draper said, gas companies approach IREN all the time, offering to quickly provide additional power generation.
Gas provides almost half of all power generation capacity in Texas, far more than any other source. But the amount of gas power in Texas has remained flat for 20 years, while wind and solar have grown sharply, according to records from the US Energy Information Administration. Facing a tidal wave of proposed AI projects, state lawmakers have taken steps to try to slow the expansion of renewable energy and position gas as the predominant supply for a new era of demand.
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Where this goes is anyone's guess. The lawsuit by the Democrat Attorneys General seems a bizarre claim to entitlement. Likewise, the GAO opinion ignores the law it claims to enforce, as the Trump administration has not refused to spend the funds, but is reexamining how those funds are used. In a sane world, the Democrat lawsuit would fail for lack of standing, as no one is entitled to federal funds. Even though no one was found to have requisite standing to challenge the 2020 election results in court, we're seeing a new legal philosophy in play under President Trump where anyone has standing to challenge any act by the administration.
Ultimately, I think the Supreme Court will have to rule on the legality of the Impoundment Control Act. This was enacted by a hostile Democrat Congress against the efforts of a Watergate-damaged Richard Nixon to stop spending on stupid stuff to bring inflation under control (some of this should sound familiar). It was one of at least two pieces of legislation intended to make the president into a servile butler rather than the Chief Executive. The other piece is the, in my opinion, facially unconstitutional War Powers Act. There is a large amount of evidence that, previous to the Impoundment Control Act, presidents treated Congressional appropriations as a ceiling that could not be exceeded, rather than a mandatory number to be achieved. The former makes sense if the president controls the executive branch; the latter only makes sense if the president's only function is to do as he's ordered. As we're seeing with the struggle in Congress to cut spending, the only way to control the budget is for presidents to have the right to refuse to spend.
The administration is on course to bring all "independent" agencies under the control of the White House.
It will push the envelope until the impoundment issue reaches the Supreme Court, and I think it will win.
A federal judge has stranded three ICE officers and their convicted-criminal deportees in Djibouti, Africa, after an order was handed down grounding their flight.
The eight illegal immigrants were on their way to South Sudan in late May when US District Judge Brian Murphy stepped in, claiming the Trump administration "unquestionably" violated a March decision on deportations. The flight then landed in Djibouti, a small nation on the Horn of Africa, with ICE agents being ill-equipped to deal with the "outrageous" conditions. //
The Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court to step in regarding this case, but so far, nothing has happened. As I've said before, regardless of what legal arguments exist, the longer this constant stream of lower-court decisions usurping executive power is allowed to continue without any new guardrails put in place, the less credibility the judiciary will enjoy. That's not a good thing for the country, and I sincerely hope this doesn't reach the point where court orders have to be ignored, because if that happens, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Global Greening From Higher CO2 Hits “Striking” New Heights | Chris Morrison, The Daily Skeptic
But the legacy media won’t tell you about it
Significant new evidence has emerged of widespread and significant increases in plant vegetation across the Earth due to the recent rise of the trace gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. //
The Spanish researchers do not quantify the amount of new vegetation but conclude that 38% of the world’s land surface shows significant vegetation change. It was found that 76% of the change total showed more greening and, interestingly, those areas with more plant life showed higher rates of additional growth. //
Far from being a politicised ‘pollutant’, CO2 is rightly known as the gas of life. A group of American scientists recently highlighted 2020 as an “historic landmark” since it registered as the greenest year in the satellite record from 2001 to 2020. //
The authors of a recent science paper, Charles Taylor and Wolfram Schlenker, recently found what they called a consistently large fertilisation effect of a 1 ppm increase in CO2, equating to a 0.4%, 0.6% and 1% higher yield for corn, soybean and wheat respectively.
https://t.co/f1xYhIwtQK
In a unanimous decision that restores sanity and reaffirms the true meaning of civil rights, the Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a misguided judicial doctrine that had, for decades, warped Title VII protections into a one-sided tool of “equity.”
Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services is not just a technical correction of legal doctrine, it is a resounding declaration that equality under the law still matters more than identity-based scorekeeping.
For years, some federal courts imposed what was known as the “background circumstances” test, a requirement that majority-group plaintiffs (read: white, male, heterosexual, or Christian employees) provide extra proof that their employer was the rare kind that discriminated against the majority. //
Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said plainly what constitutional conservatives have argued all along: “Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.” The law, she explained, “makes it unlawful to discriminate against any individual… because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” //
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, filed a separate concurring opinion that went even further, calling out the root cause: judge-made doctrines that create unequal burdens under the guise of helping the marginalized. “Such a rule is undoubtedly contrary to Title VII, and likely violates the Constitution,” Thomas wrote. “[T]here can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race.” //
Equality > Equity
This case is more than just a victory for a woman who was passed over and demoted in favor of candidates who checked more fashionable demographic boxes. It’s a victory over the growing trend of replacing equality with equity.
Equity, as practiced in far too many corporate HR departments and public institutions, demands unequal treatment to engineer equal outcomes. That’s not fairness, that’s retribution disguised as justice. In this case, it meant denying Marlean Ames the same legal protections everyone else enjoys, simply because of her orientation and perceived privilege.
The Ames decision, by contrast, restores the foundational principle that every American, regardless of background, deserves to be judged on the content of their character and qualifications, not on their demographic label.
GBenton
3 hours ago
I really don't see a peace deal happening here. Two many confounding factors. Too many incentives on both sides to continue. Trump should step away from this until they show signs they're serious.
Putin is evil but Zelensky is a fool. No need to make a terrible situation worse by diminishing US prestige further.
These people have fought for centuries. So long as they don't expand the aggression, it's in God's hands.
wish it were otherwise but Putin is a monster and Zelensky is a selfish goon.
Tom Cruise has broken an insane Guinness World Record, and it's because of one of the many crazy stunts he did for "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning," and we are all here for it.
During production of the final movie in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, the 62-year-old actor was awarded the Guinness World Records title, and it was for doing 16 burning parachute jumps, The Wrap reported. It all happened while filming the unbelievable plane sequence for M:I 8 that can be seen below.
The Sarcasticat @TheSarcasticist
·
"I made the decisions..."
Joe Biden's statement uses that phrasing twice. A lawyer wrote this, and that lawyer is taking care not to directly address whether Joe Biden personally signed anything.
Why? Because Joe didn't sign anything, and they all know it's going to come out.
Matt Viser @mviser
Former President Biden in wake of President Trump order for investigation: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
7:34 AM · Jun 5, 2025
With this latest video, we now know why the terrorist was shirtless in the aftermath. He caught himself on fire as he threw the Molotov cocktails at his innocent victims. //
Left-wing immigration lawyer Eric Lee revealed on social media that it was his outfit that filed the Habeas petition, claiming that deporting Soliman's family was retribution for his crimes. He also played on emotion, noting that all five children are minors. //
Not discussed in Lee's post is whether they have any right to be here in the first place. Someone's father committing a terror attack doesn't give his family magical immunity from being deported, just like anyone else who overstays a visa. This kind of weaponization of the legal system, making it impossible for elected officials to exercise even the most basic aspects of their statutory power, is going to destroy the judiciary. That this case enjoys another level of absurdity only makes it worse. //
With this latest video, we now know why the terrorist was shirtless in the aftermath. He caught himself on fire as he threw the Molotov cocktails at his innocent victims.
Like most well-known remote access tools, NetBird is built on WireGuard, making it fast and known for its security. However, unlike many other remote access tools, it has identity management built into its core. Therefore, when you self-host it, the first thing you set up is Zitadel, the default identity provider. But you can use any IDP that uses OpenID, including Keycloak and Authentik. The cloud-based version supports Google Workspace, Azure, Okta, and Auth0, but this feature is only available behind the Teams' subscription tier. //
Be careful here, though, as it seems the ability to approve peers is limited to the cloud-based version, so you could end up with new users that you don't want. That's possibly okay because new users don't have access to anything unless you've set up access control to allow ALL, which is bad security practice anyway. //
NetBird is a powerful, self-hosted access tool with numerous advanced access control policies that do more than enable NAT traversal for encrypted tunnels, making SSH access to remote web servers easy to set up. You could set up one peer on your home network as a routing peer, potentially on your router, and access internal resources on your network securely. It's also simple to set up site-to-site tunnels, without the complicated firewall configurations you'd typically need. //
You can still use the free cloud-based version for up to 5 users and 100 devices, although you'd lose access to Posture Checks (handy for segmentation) and a few other things.
“In everything you do, put God first, and He will direct you and crown your efforts with success” (Proverbs 3:6, TLB). This is the life verse of Don Campion, co-founder and president of Banyan Air Service, Inc. and his wife, Sueanne Campion, who have spent the last 15 years rebuilding the mission hospital compound in Egbe, Nigeria, where Don was raised in rural West Africa.
In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday upheld the claims of a woman who faced workplace discrimination because of her “majority group” identity—in this case, being a heterosexual.
The decision upholds the rights of majority group individuals to be free from “reverse discrimination,” a right considered protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered the opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a concurring opinion, in which Justice Neil Gorsuch joined.
The court struck down the “background circumstances” rule imposed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a rule that restricts protections for members of majority groups.
normally butters Ars Praefectus
18y
5,207
Control Group said:
Having never heard of Impulse before, I'd love an explainer of their engineering. What makes their system better at in-space maneuvering?
The previous answers are all good, but I'll add that there are historical reasons why liquid kick/deploy stages have seen little investment in the West until recently, whereas the Soviets developed stages like Fregat and Briz which are conceptually similar to Impulse's Mira.
The US invested heavily in upper stages like Centaur which solve the relatively difficult problem of a high-performance cryogenic stage capable of multiple in-flight restarts. Questionable plans to put Centaur inside the Space Shuttle payload bay were abandoned after the Challenger disaster and replaced with a couple of barely-adequate solid-propellant kick stages for payloads going beyond LEO.
The Europeans, meanwhile, took advantage of their near-equatorial launch site in French Guiana to develop launch vehicles optimized for GEO missions with upper stages inserting into GTO directly from the ascent burn, without requiring any restart. Ariane 5 literally doubled down on this concept of operations by specializing in dual-satellite GTO injection missions. In more modern times, Vega has a liquid kick stage, AVUM, but powered by a hypergolic engine of Soviet heritage which was until recently manufactured in Ukraine.
On the US-headquartered side, Rocket Lab's Electron requires a kick stage from their Photon product line for any orbital mission, once again largely to avoid the challenge of restarting cryogenic stages in microgravity. Firefly, in contrast, has developed a restartable second stage, and they are developing a line of orbital transfer stages based on lower-thrust electric propulsion.
So, Impulse Space just doesn't have much competition in this part of the world. Different approaches were taken to the design of expendable upper stages. But in a future with reusable upper stages that don't want to accelerate to higher energies than they need to, separate kick stages are increasingly compelling. Likewise, if military forces begin to see earth orbit as a more kinetic or dynamic combat theater, that would also encourage kick/transfer stage development, for better or worse. //
Chuckgineer Ars Centurion
10y
323
Subscriptor
Bruce Dunn said:
The Mira thrusters are undoubtably pressure fed. With hydrazine, pressure is provided by helium from composite overwrap pressure vessels through often trouble-prone valves. Impulse does not say how the Mira propellants are pressurized, but it is notable that they both have high vapor pressures at near ambient temperatures. I suspect that the propellants are self pressurized, eliminating the mass and complexity of helium pressurization. At 273 K, the vapor pressure of ethane is 2.4 MPa and that of nitrous oxide is 3.2 MPa.
Hi Bruce, the article above (Industry Update: Prevalance of Nitrous-Based In-Space Propellants) verifies your suspicion: "Nitrous and propylene are self-pressurizing and do not require pumps, pressurants or even propellant management devices."
https://www.dawnaerospace.com/latest-news/prevalence-of-nitrous-based-in-space-propellants
Combining radiocarbon dating and a new AI program called Enoch yields surprising results.
PicoRC is a line of adaptors that lets you use Pico ATX PSU in vintage computers.
The Trump administration’s filing, which seeks for the Supreme Court to enjoin Illston’s order, said it ‘interferes with the Executive Branch’s internal operations and unquestioned legal authority to plan and carry out RIFs, and does so on a government-wide scale.’
Corporate media often smear birth control skeptics for believing “misinformation” about the harms synthetic hormones can have on women’s bodies and minds. A flurry of nearly 300 lawsuits from females alleging that the popular “safe and effective” birth control shot Depo-Provera played a role in their development of brain and spine tumors, however, suggests women should question the effects of any drug sold to them — especially those designed to prevent pregnancy. //
It wasn’t until a landmark study published in the British Medical Journal in March 2024 found that women who took Depo-Provera had a 500 percent higher risk of developing a meningioma (a tumor that specifically forms and develops in the membranes around the brain and spinal cord) than women who did not get the shot that women across the world realized the connection.
A February 2025 study purported to confirm that the chemical compound that makes up Depo-Provera increases the risk of meningioma in women who take it.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose on Tuesday revealed his office found evidence of 30 noncitizens registered to vote in the state. The election chief also discovered that individuals from seven different states and Washington, D.C., may have illegally voted in multiple jurisdictions.
The anti-Trump operation escalated to a coordinated assault involving the highest levels of government, about which we still know nearly nothing. //
First came the long-awaited release of the “Trump-Russia binder,” a trove of intelligence documents that was supposed to have been released on Donald Trump’s last day at the White House in January 2021. The “binder” filled in crucial gaps about the Hillary Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks operation.
Among other things, it detailed how Christopher Steele knowingly lied to the FBI and how the Alfa Bank hoax — one of the most absurd allegations of secret Trump-Putin communications — was laundered through official channels. The binder was provided to The Federalist, which made it publicly available.
Then came an even more stunning release from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office: an internal FBI report confirming that Nellie Ohr — a Clinton-linked operative and the wife of senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr — had lied to Congress. The report also detailed her central role in fusing campaign-generated disinformation with federal law enforcement.
But the real shock wasn’t Ohr’s role. It was the revelation of what might be the FBI’s most corrupt mechanism yet: a black-hole filing system for anything that undermined the Trump-Russia collusion narrative or vindicated Trump and his allies.