The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Categories
Hardware

How Tesla is Revolutionizing Solar Energy

Unless you live under a rock, the chances are that you’ve come across Tesla technology in your daily life. From their very successful car line consisting of some of the sleekest, fastest, most efficient electric cars on the market, or even their ventures in making renewable rocketry in SpaceX, Tesla is making a name for itself in revolutionizing technology for the next era. But one of their ventures has for the most part flied under the radar, despite its huge advantages. That’s right, I’m talking about Tesla Solar.

Formerly a separate entity under the title SolarCity, Tesla purchased the company and made it one of its premier subsidiaries of Tesla Energy in 2016. The mission of Tesla Energy is to bring the power of solar energy into control of the consumer, whether it be a residential or commercial premises. This is a more cost and space effective means of solar energy that doesn’t transform massive amount of space or forests into giant solar farms. This not only gives people control over their energy production and costs, but can also be beneficial to consumers through energy grid buyback, where the grid pays you for excess energy.

But enough about the company; lets talk about the technology behind it. Tesla Energy’s Solar Panels are thin and sleek, allowing them to seamlessly fit in to any roofing style or shape. None of the mounting hardware is visible, allowing the panels to blend into the roof almost as if they were never there. In fact, Tesla Energy takes it another step further, through their Solar Roof. This is a complete roofing unit that takes the technology of solar panels into interlocking shingles, allowing your entire roof to capture energy from solar rays and power your home. If you thought the slim, sleek design of their panels was impressive, Tesla Energy’s Solar Roof takes it to another level. While most would worry about these energy shingles getting damaged, Tesla prides itself with being much stronger than most other roof tile alternatives.

 

You might be thinking, “Capturing all of this energy is cool and all, but how does it all get stored?” Well, Tesla has that covered. Their own technology, Powerwall, seamlessly connects to your Solar inputs and hooks up to the electrical system in your home or business. Not only does this guarantee that you can use your own power you produce, but allows you to have uninterrupted power even when there’s a grid outage, leaving your life uninterrupted and those Christmas lights in your front yard up and running. According to Tesla, Powerwall can leave you with up to 7+ days of power during an outage. If you happen to own a Walmart or large retail store, the capabilities of Powerwall can be expanded into Tesla Energy’s commercial units, where micro-grids and Powerwalls can be built for your commercial needs.

The future of residential and off-the-grid living is here. Through Tesla Energy, people can independently and reliably power their homes and businesses completely grid free. While the costs may be expensive right now, increased competition in the sector can lead to a bigger market, which will lower costs as Tesla is able to push this out to more consumers. Even with Tesla being known widely as the electric car company, the company is making strides in the renewable energy sector which stemmed off of its work in revolutionizing the electric car battery. The future is bright for renewable energy, and the future is even brighter for Tesla.

For more information on Tesla Energy, visit their website, at https://www.tesla.com/energy

All images used in this blog were obtained from tesla.com, all rights reserved.

Categories
Software

Is AI journalism the future?

Artificial intelligence in news media is being used in many new ways, from speeding up research to accumulating and cross-referencing data and beyond.
You might be wondering: how AI does something as complex as writing the news?

AI writes the news by sifting through huge amounts of data, and finding the useful data by categorizing them. The AI tool then uses this data to train itself to imitate human writers. In addition to that it also helps human reporters avoid grunt work such-as tracking the score or updating a breaking news.
Automated Journalism is everywhere from Google News, to Facebook’s fake news checker, in addition to that there are AI tools used  by major publications: Narrative Science’s Quill: It puts together reports and stories just based off of raw data.  The kicker is that a study was done and most people couldn’t tell the difference between articles written by software or real journalists.

The news industry is predicting that 90% of the articles are going to be written by AI within the next 10-15 years. The industry is going through a huge push towards automated news generation because of the huge amounts of data we are amassing.

While some of us might be scared about machines taking over and influencing our minds, the reality couldn’t be far from it. These AI tools can only write fact-based articles which are much closer to a computer reading a bunch of facts to you than a qualitative article written by a real journalist. These tools don’t have the power to sway most people, and checks are being made to make sure these tools aren’t used to spread “fake news”.