General Electric Watches Watts with WiMax

By Nick Mokey March 29, 2010

The wonders of the so-called “smart grid” have been touted by everyone from President Obama to Google, but one of the biggest remaining barriers remains connectivity. How do you pump data from thousands of individual power meters across a country back to a central utility for analysis?

General Electric will do it with WiMax. The company’s new smart grid in Michigan will be the nation’s first to use WiMax for connectivity. GE teamed with both American Electric Power Company and Consumers Energy for the effort.

“This pilot helps Consumers Energy evaluate the immediate benefits of smart metering, while providing the company with a powerful platform to adopt additional smart grid technologies to further increase energy efficiency, improve reliability, empower consumers with information and more-easily integrate cleaner energy sources,” said Bob Gilligan, vice president of GE Energy Services’ digital energy department, in a statement.

Besides giving utilities a better overall picture of their infrastructure and helping them respond to outages and emergencies more quickly, smart grids can help consumers by offering variable pricing for electricity. Making it cheaper, for instance, to run the clothes dryer at night rather than during the day.

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Outdoors

The best portable power stations

EcoFlow DELTA 2 on table at campsite for quick charging.

Affordable and efficient portable power is a necessity these days, keeping our electronic devices operational while on the go. But there are literally dozens of options to choose from, making it abundantly difficult to decide which mobile charging solution is best for you. We've sorted through countless portable power options and came up with six of the best portable power stations to keep your smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other gadgets functioning while living off the grid.
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Emerging Tech

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This content was produced in partnership with HD Hyundai.
Autonomous vehicle navigation technology is certainly nothing new and has been in the works for the better part of a decade at this point. But one of the most common forms we see and hear about is the type used to control steering in road-based vehicles. That's not the only place where technology can make a huge difference. Autonomous driving systems can offer incredible benefits to boats and marine vehicles, too, which is precisely why HD Hyundai has unveiled its Avikus AI technology -- for marine and watercraft vehicles.

More recently, HD Hyundai participated in the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, to demo its NeuBoat level 2 autonomous navigation system for recreational boats. The name mashes together the words "neuron" and "boat" and is quite fitting since the Avikus' A.I. navigation tech is a core component of the solution, it will handle self-recognition, real-time decisions, and controls when on the water. Of course, there are a lot of things happening behind the scenes with HD Hyundai's autonomous navigation solution, which we'll dive into below -- HD Hyundai will also be introducing more about the tech at CES 2023.

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."