Srinagar, May 08: Jammu and Kashmir was jolted by an earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale, causing panic among the people who rushed out of their workplaces and homes in fear.
The quake hit the region at around 2:28 pm on Monday.
According to reports, the tremors were felt in many parts of the country, including Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi, as well as in neighbouring country Pakistan.
The quake lasted for several seconds, and people reported feeling their buildings shake.
There have been no reports of any casualties or damage to property at the time of writing, but the quake has caused anxiety among the people, many of whom are still reeling from the devastating earthquake that hit the region in 2005.
The earthquake has once again highlighted the need for preparedness and awareness among people in earthquake-prone areas.
It is important for people to be aware of the steps they can take to minimize the impact of earthquakes and to be prepared for emergencies.
But this dust-up is actually more interesting than that, because it involves a notable change in the wider political landscape: The rise of the populist right means there are more Republicans saying positive things about traditionally left positions on issues like trade and corporate power.
Given that many of those populists have racial and social views that progressives find appalling, the question across Washington’s progressive organizations is: What’s the right way to think about working with them — or even just praising their break from GOP orthodoxy? So far, there’s little consensus on the question, and a high danger of vitriol in cases where it comes up, even when the cases don’t involve a lightning-rod like Carlson.
To rewind a bit: The 1,200-word essay that kicked off the fireworks, by writers Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein, spent little time on the ousted Fox host’s incendiary racial and cultural statements, but instead lingered on his professed disdain for mainstream American elites. “Carlson’s insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority,” they wrote, noting his evolution from libertarian to “rejecting many of the free-market doctrines he’d previously espoused.
Among other things, the piece cited his skepticism about free trade, his monologues against monopolistic Big Tech firms, and a viral segment about potential job losses from self-driving cars. It also noted that he attacked establishmentarian GOP leaders over their support for the Ukraine war.
It’s safe to say that the immediate social media reaction did not give the pair points for originality.
“Disgraceful and stupid,” tweeted Prospect alum Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo. “Genuinely revolting,” added Zachary Carter, the journalist and John Maynard Keynes biographer. “The whitewashing of Tucker Carlson has begun,” said The Bulwark’s Will Saletan.
Much of the blowback focused, appropriately, on the actual column, with a chorus of critics arguing quite convincingly that Harris and Goldstein had been snookered — that Carlson was a phony populist, part of a long American tradition of demagogues like George Wallace pretending to fight economic elites when they really want to just pick on some out-group of fellow citizens.
Fair enough. But at least some of the criticism moved beyond engaging on the argument’s merits (or lack thereof) and instead cast doubt on the motivations of the authors themselves, suggesting something more sinister might be afoot.
“How did these writers, who are either too dumb to notice Carlson’s virulently racist, sexist & anti-labor politics, or whose own politics are so vile that they don’t care, ever get hired by the Prospect in the first place?,” tweeted writer Kathleen Geier.
A day later, amid the incoming flak, Prospect editor David Dayen issued a statement of his own, saying the piece had missed the mark. “It is my job as editor to make sure that whatever journalism or opinion we publish upholds our mission,” he wrote. “I don’t think we quite got there with this story.”
The magazine left the original essay in place on its site, but soon published a scathing rebuttal by two other Prospect writers. The act of distancing, naturally, invited a whole new barrage of incoming criticism from people who accused Dayen of cowering before the online rage.
“They should have gotten a raise,” Ruy Teixeira, the longtime progressive Washington think-tank figure, told me this week, referring to Harris and Goldstein. “Instead they brought the hammer down. They got denounced by their own editor, denounced by their own comrades on their staff … for what I actually thought was a pretty good article, the kind of article that wasn’t completely predictable and made you think.”
Harris declined comment; Goldstein did not respond to a message. Dayen, too, declined to be quoted, except to say that the writers weren’t reprimanded for the story, that their status at the magazine is unchanged and they’ll keep writing about whatever interests them — including on places where the right and left overlap. The magazine has in fact done a fair amount of that with no particular blowback, including putting Donald Trump’s trade chief, Robert Lighthizer, on its cover for a largely laudatory feature in 2019.
Teixeira, of course, is no stranger to making this sort of allegation about intellectual narrowness in the progressive ecosystem. Last year, he left the Center for American Progress and took a perch at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, saying that his politics hadn’t changed (he still refers to himself as a social democrat) but that he couldn’t stand the narrow focus on identity that he said permeated his former world.
If you missed that saga, you can be forgiven. There’s a whole library’s worth of stories about the alienation of mostly older left-wing figures from post-collegiates in think tanks or advocacy groups, a divide that often involves disagreements over campus-style identity debates. (In one example, the Democratic Socialists of America canceled a speech by the celebrated left-wing academic Adolph Reed because some in the organization were upset that he’d argued that the left must emphasize class over race.)
But that kind of incident feels different than what was going on last week.
In fact, for progressives, the debates like the fracas over the Carlson column could, perversely, be seen as a side-effect of good news. Instead of a furious argument over internal dissent against political tactics, it was a furious argument over (alleged) new external support for policy positions.
Even for folks who don’t buy the idea that the market-skeptical bits of Carlson’s schtick were at all genuine, it’s a situation that’s presenting itself more frequently as elements of the GOP move beyond Reaganite positions and instead talk up things like opposition to monopolies, support for living family wages or protectionist treatment of embattled stateside manufacturing.
The challenge is that the rising GOP populists whose views on economic issues might appeal to progressives also often have social views that are way more extreme than the average Chamber of Commerce lifer. Sometimes, in fact, those social views may even be their motivator for their hostility to businesses. Witness the fulminations about “woke capitalism.”
One example of those complications popped up in POLITICO Magazine’s recent profile of antitrust advocate Matt Stoller. Stoller drew sharp criticism for his seeming warmth toward Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who fist-pumped insurrectionists and led Senate efforts to overturn the 2020 election — but has also lobbed grenades at monopolies. The stance has made Stoller a controversial figure on the left, even as his push for a crusade against monopoly has been embraced by the Biden administration.
When we spoke this week, Stoller said it boils down to what politics is for.
“They think politics is fundamentally a moral endeavor,” he said when I asked him about people who disdain the idea of treating someone like Hawley as an acceptable partner. “They’re not shy about letting me know what they think. … But I think that we have a lot more in common than a lot of people who are interested in politics assume. I have a different view of what politics is. For me, when I look at politics, I think about political economy as, like, the driving factor, and corporate power as the driving factor.”
In a way, it’s an argument on the left that goes back to the popular front period of the 1930s, or further (in the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks argued about making common cause with Islamic fighters from Central Asia, whose embrace of religion was distinctly non-Marxist).
Michael Kazin, the historian of American populism, says there’s a long history of fuzziness about what constitutes left and right, which complicates the question of just who you’ll deem acceptable. Prominent opposition to big business in the Great Depression, he says, also included the likes of the antisemitic radio priest Charles Coughlin and the segregationist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long.
Kazin, whose newest book is a history of the Democratic Party, says he’s sure Carlson is no fellow traveler — and also thinks coming up with a standard for how people like Hawley should be embraced or rejected might also be a little premature given the political realities: “Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”
David Duhalde, chair for the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, told me that one way to slice it is a function of where you sit. A Senator like Bernie Sanders working with the libertarian Utah Republican Mike Lee to curb presidential war powers? With 100 voters in the Senate, he doesn’t have much choice. A think tanker or essayist trying to be clever? Not so much. “I’m more sympathetic to what the pols are trying to do than to media figures trying to find nuance where there isn’t any,” he says.
And for at least some people closer to the grassroots, the tendency to police against associating with ideological undesirables is a sign of a bigger sickness in elite circles. Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer and longtime fixture of the far-left Chapo Trap House podcast, once wrote about giving a talk about the importance of union organizing before an audience of tech workers. During the question and answer session afterwards, a woman approached the mic to ask what they should do if someone from the alt-right wanted to join their union.
If that happens, Frost replied, it means you’ve won.
“It was kind of a dead silence,” she told me this week, a sign that she’d said something deeply troubling.
Frost, unsurprisingly, was dismissive of both sides of the Carlson contretemps — “right wing populism is largely a cynical brand of lip service from a bunch of professional hucksters” — but says she finds the one tic in the debates about potential left-right overlap disappointingly familiar.
“They’re more invested in who’s on their side than what’s going on,” she said of the people who take umbrage at the idea that left politics might someday lure people with dubious records. “There’s this fear of contamination from the right, which betrays that these people are scared of the general population.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Ten policemen, one civilian killed in blast carried out by Maoists in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada, reported news agency PTI quoting officials.
Maoists planted an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) that detonated on a vehicle transporting District Reserve Guard (DRG) personnel near Aranpur in Dantewada district.
The incident took place under Aranpur police station when a team of the state police’s District Reserve Guard (DRG) was returning after an anti-Maoists operation, a senior official said.
10 DRG (District Reserve Guard) personnel and one driver killed in IED attack by Maoists in Dantewada, tweets Chhattisgarh CM
दंतेवाड़ा के थाना अरनपुर क्षेत्र अंतर्गत माओवादी कैडर की उपस्थिति की सूचना पर नक्सल विरोधी अभियान के लिए पहुंचे डीआरजी बल पर आईईडी विस्फोट से हमारे 10 डीआरजी जवान एवं एक चालक के शहीद होने का समाचार बेहद दुखद है।
हम सब प्रदेशवासी उन्हें अपनी श्रद्धांजलि अर्पित करते हैं। उनके…
Union home minister Amit Shah speaks with Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel over the Maoists attack that claimed the lives of 10 DRG (District Reserve Guard) personnel and one driver, in Dantewada.
The decision, climate experts and advocates said, felt “like a dam breaking” after years of legal delays to the growing wave of climate lawsuits facing major oil companies.
Without weighing in on the merits of the cases, the supreme court on Monday rebuffed an appeal by major oil companies that want to face the litigation in federal courts, rather than in state courts, which are seen as more favorable to plaintiffs.
ExxonMobil Corp, Suncor Energy Inc and Chevron Corp had asked for the change of venue in lawsuits by the state of Rhode Island and municipalities in Colorado, Maryland, California and Hawaii.
Six years have passed since the first climate cases were filed in the US, and courts have not yet heard the merits of the cases as fossil fuel companies have succeeded in delaying them. In March, the Biden administration had argued that the cases belonged in state court, marking a reversal of the position taken by the Trump administration when the supreme court last considered the issue.
The Rhode Island attorney general, Peter Neronha, said his state was now finally preparing for trial after “nearly half a decade of delay tactics” by the industry. A joint statement from the California cities of Santa Cruz, San Mateo and Richmond and Marin county said the oil companies knew the dangers of fossil fuels but “deceived and failed to warn consumers about it even as they carried on pocketing trillions of dollars in profits”.
The cases have been compared to tobacco lawsuits in the 1990s that resulted in a settlement of more than $200bn and changed how cigarettes are advertised and sold in the US.
“It was a really amazing feeling to see that the supreme court was ruling in a very logical way by continuing with the unanimous decisions that have been made in the previous courts to not [grant petitions for review] and to allow these cases to move forward,” said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the Science Hub for Climate Litigation.
“It removes this dam that industry has been building to prevent these cases from being heard on their merits,” she said. “We can finally have the real conversations about what the industry knew and what their actions were despite that knowledge.”
She hopes communities will have the chance to speak in court about the climate emergencies they are experiencing as a result of the industry’s actions.
As jurisdictional battles have dragged on, climate emergencies have added up.
The Suncor oil refinery in Commerce City, Colorado. Photograph: Ted Wood/The Guardian
The Colorado case was filed in 2018. In 2021, the state saw the Marshall fire, the most destructive wildfire in its history, which killed two people, destroyed nearly 1,000 homes and businesses, contaminated drinking water and amounted to billions in damages.
“There’s real impacts that are happening now, and that’s why it’s so important for these cases to have the opportunity to be heard, and have a chance for justice,” Merner said.
The cases allege fossil fuel companies exacerbated climate change by concealing and misrepresenting the dangers associated with burning fossil fuels. The lawsuits say the companies created a public and private nuisance and violated state consumer protection laws by producing and selling fossil fuels despite knowing the products would cause devastating climate emergencies, including melting ice caps, dramatic sea level rise, and extreme precipitation and drought. Local governments are seeking damages for the billions of dollars they have paid for climate mitigation and adaptation.
The oil companies have denied the allegations.
Financial accountability
“We were all pretty excited. It feels like justice might be possible,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said after reading the decision on Monday.
“There’s clearly trillions of dollars of damages in the US alone from climate change that has to be dealt with.”
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The plaintiffs aren’t suing the companies to put them out of business, but the cases could ultimately affect the industry’s bottom line.
If the lawsuits are successful, they could limit the fossil fuel industry’s ability to greenwash and lie to consumers, Merner said. Rulings against the companies could also reinforce banking industry concerns that fossil fuels are a risky investment.
In state court, fossil fuel companies will attempt to have the cases dismissed.
The Chevron attorney Theodore Boutrous said in a statement he was confident the cases would be dismissed, arguing that climate change requires a coordinated federal response, “not a disjointed patchwork” of actions from numerous state courts. “These wasteful lawsuits in state courts will do nothing to advance global climate solutions, nothing to reduce emissions and nothing to address climate-related impacts,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s any reason for that confidence yet,” said Korey Silverman-Roati, climate law fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, in response to Boutrous.
It’s unclear what will happen in state courts, but Silverman-Roati pointed to the Hawaii case, in which a state court denied the industry’s motion to dismiss.
If plaintiffs clear motions to dismiss, the cases move to discovery. The plaintiffs will use the process to try to gather more evidence of what the companies knew and when they knew it. Internal company documents will probably become public when the trials get under way.
Recent studies have shown that Exxon accurately predicted that its products would cause climate change.
Attribution science will play a key role in connecting local climate disasters to the industry’s responsibility. “Studies can explain how much hotter a heatwave is, or how much greater the intensity of a downpour is during a hurricane event due to climate change. And they can look to see where those emissions came from, and what percentage of those emissions tie into those direct climate impacts,” Merner said.
With each decision in favor of plaintiffs, the cases are snowballing and more local governments are filing new cases. “There’s a growing number of lawsuits. And I imagine after today, that will continue,” Merner said.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Babar Azam Closes In On Breaking T20I World Record: Pakistan all-format skipper Babar Azam is just two wins away from breaking another record in the shortest format of the game.
Babar will have the opportunity to etch his name as the captain with the most number of wins if his side trumps New Zealand in the fifth T20I at Pindi Cricket Stadium on monday (tomorrow).
Currently, Babar is the joint-holder of this record with Afghanistan’s Asghar Afghan (42) and is behind England’s Eoin Morgan (44) by two matches.
If the 28-year-old, who has captained the Green Shirts in 69 T20 Internationals, wins tomorrow’s match, he will be just one match away from breaking the record.
Under his captaincy, Pakistan reached the semifinals of two successive T20 World Cups — 2021 and 2022 — and finished as runner-ups in the latter.
During the second T20I against the Black Caps, Babar scored his third T20I century at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore.
Babar is close to breaking the record of Indian cricketer Rohit Sharma, who currently tops the International Cricket Council (ICC) list with four centuries.
He is the only Pakistan batter with more than one ton in the format. The hundred puts Babar close to the top of the list of batters with the most T20I tons.
During the match, Babar managed to score his half-century on merely 36 balls and then slammed 51 runs off the next 22 deliveries, including 36 runs off the last three overs.
Babar smashed James Neesham for two fours and a six in the last over, completing his 100 runs off the final ball of the innings.
JAMMU, Apr 19: In a big Breaking news, J&K Govt Employees posted in Ladakh for more than 2 Years to be repatriated soon, whereas as Employees with Health issues also to repatriated soon to Jammu and Kahsmir.
Swap the word “gasoline” for “electricity,” and this is a realistic description of what happens every day at electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States. The high-tech, high-speed highway fueling system that America is building to power its EVs and replace the gas station is riddled with glitches that are proving difficult to stamp out.
Individually, they are hiccups, but collectively, their consequences could be profound.
“It adds to the non-EV driver’s view of the world that EV charging is painful,” said Bill Ferro, a software expert and founder of EVSession, an EV charger analytics firm. “People feeling that it’s a risk to buy an EV because the fast-charging infrastructure stinks is going to slow down EV adoption.”
The problems are experienced by those who use fast chargers on the go and who aren’t driving Teslas. Studies and innumerable anecdotes describe the strange stumbles they encounter: a blank screen, a broken plug, a credit card payment that fails, sessions that abort without warning, electric current that flows fast this moment and slowly the next.
Behind the snafus are a daunting set of structural problems. They are tied to the peculiar way that EV chargers have evolved, and the fact that wires and batteries are way more complicated than what happens at the gas station.
“It’s a harder problem than pumping fuel from one reservoir into another,” Ferro said.
The problems are persisting even as billions of dollars pour into the charging sector from the federal and state governments, network operators and automakers.
Several recent studies of the charging system have found discouraging results.
Last year, researchers visited every public fast charger in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that almost 23 percent of them had “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors.” And in a survey of EV drivers, the auto consultancy J.D. Power found the public charging network “plagued with non-functioning stations.” One in five sessions failed to deliver a charge. Almost three-quarters of those failures involved a station that malfunctioned or was offline.
Realizing the urgency of a fix, a variety of public and private players are trying out solutions.
The Biden administration, for example, set standards for “uptime,” or the percentage of time a charger is operational. California is launching a major inquiry into how to improve the customer experience. Automaker Ford Motor Co. last year deployed its own squad of station auditors. The largest public network, Electrify America, is replacing a fifth of its stations with newer models.
But many of these actions work at the edges of a black hole.
No one can define what it means for an EV driver to have a satisfactory charging experience. No underlying data exists. As hundreds of thousands of Americans buy EVs and start traveling the highways, this lack of a yardstick means that no one is accountable. Without accountability, problems are likely to persist.
The concern for industry is that the swelling ranks of EV drivers will tell their friends that highway charging is a little buggy, a little annoying — just enough of a hindrance that those millions of friends hold off from going electric, while the planet steadily warms.
Government steps in
Difficulties with EV fueling aren’t encountered everywhere. But they’re common in areas where the government is spending the most money and has staked its claim on improving the charging experience.
Home charging generally goes off without a hitch. The same goes for other “slow,” or Level 2, chargers that are sprinkled at workplaces and in parking lots and fill the battery by sipping on electrons for hours.
The bugs are most common with fast chargers, known as direct-current fast chargers, or DCFC. These are the charging solution when a driver is on the go and needs to refill the battery in 15 or 30 minutes.
These super-outlets exist near highway stops, in urban cores and at suburban crossroads. Building a network of them is the top priority of the Biden administration as it spends $7.5 billion for EV-charging infrastructure that Congress approved in the bipartisan infrastructure law. The first funding round is intended to blanket the country with DCFC chargers at 50-mile intervals along major highways.
Besides just building the stations, the government’s goal has been to create high standards, including better customer satisfaction.
The Federal Highway Administration, which is administering the program, said it “intends to incentivize charging station operators to improve reliability not just for chargers purchased with [government] funds but for all charging stations in the country.”
The irony is that a reliable, national charging network with high customer satisfaction already exists. It’s called the Supercharger network, built and run by Tesla Inc.
Users and experts are in wide agreement that Tesla has generally solved the problems that dog other networks. Its drivers plug in, pay and charge with few fails. Superchargers were exclusively for Tesla drivers until last month, when Tesla started opening parts of the network to other EV models.
Tesla also pioneered and excels at other practices that competing networks struggle to match — and that gas stations can’t do at all.
For example, punch in a destination on the Tesla app or the dashboard screen, and you get a route of Superchargers to stop at, with reliable information on which plugs are working and whether or not they are currently occupied.
A prime reason for Tesla’s success, experts say, is that Tesla owns and controls the entire ecosystem and all of its data. It built the cars, runs the chargers and manages the payments. If something breaks at the station, it’s Tesla’s job to repair it. There’s zero doubt who’s responsible.
The reason other, non-Tesla networks are having such troubles is that the public charging system has a lot more actors. They include a panoply of automakers, charging network operators, route-finding tools and now the government.
None has stepped up to take Tesla’s level of responsibility, and it’s not clear anyone will.
“Who’s owning this experience for me?” said Matt Teske, the founder and CEO of Chargeway, a EV-network software platform, putting himself in the position of an EV driver. “The answer is no one.”
A product not for customers
One reason today’s charging stations don’t work very well is their strange evolution as a consumer product.
Like EVs themselves, charging stations first arrived on the roads not because customers sought them out, but because regulators required them.
In the early 2000s, the California Air Resources Board demanded that automakers sell EVs to participate in the state’s auto market. Charging stations followed a parallel path.
One of today’s leading networks, EVgo Inc., was born from a 2012 legal settlement between NRG Energy Inc. and the California Public Utility Commission to resolve the electricity-market power crisis of the early 2000s. Another, Electrify America, is an entity that automaker Volkswagen AG was forced to create in 2016 as a penalty for cheating on its diesel emissions.
Tasked with satisfying regulators — and not customers — these companies saved money with a particular set of solutions.
“It was treated like it was really simple,” Teske said.
The charging station wouldn’t work like a gas station, with an employee in a nearby kiosk. Instead, it would operate without human intervention, like an ATM or a vending machine, but one that sells high-voltage electricity instead of Cokes.
But, unlike the ATM or vending box, the charging station wouldn’t get the full customer treatment. It wouldn’t be located under an awning, or be particularly well-lit or observed by security cameras. Instead, the electric car would be treated more like, well, a car. Stations were sited out in the elements, in the middle or at the edges of a parking lots, far from watchful eyes and easy targets for vandals.
Finally, the early networks didn’t offer the option of paying by credit card, although Electrify America was required to. Charging networks preferred to avoid the fees and complexity of Visa or Mastercard. Rather, payments would go to the network directly through a membership card.
What goes wrong
In the early days, none of these decisions much mattered. Early EV buyers were true believers who shrugged off the inconvenience of a dark parking lot or a frustrating charging session.
But as EVs not called Tesla have started to sell in earnest, the cost-trimming decisions of yesteryear have contributed to today’s outbreak of snafus.
A charging station, it turns out, is vastly more complicated and breakable than a vending machine.
“If you’re looking for a checklist of what could go wrong,” Teske said, “it’s a long list.”
Inside the kiosk’s metal shell sit sophisticated power electronics. It sends dangerous levels of electric current through a heavy-duty cable and to a connector, which can be easily disabled with a wad of gum. The video screen — crucial for communicating information to the driver, like the prices and how long a charging session will last — can be defaced or broken. Any number of problems can befall a driver trying to tap, insert or swipe a payment card.
And then there’s the computer code.
“It’s all software, at the end of the day,” said Ken Tennyson, the director of quality and conformance at Electrify America, which has 800 or so stations around the United States.
The recipient of the cash from an ATM or the Snickers from a vending machine is a human hand. The recipient of the electrons from a charging session is an electric vehicle — or better put, an ever-changing, ever-widening array of electric vehicles, each of which communicates with the charging station with its own version of software.
While software protocols exist for the charging industry, “adherence to those standards is not perfect, and the standards themselves are not perfect,” Tennyson said.
Some of these software problems are the growing pains that come with any young and high-tech industry that hasn’t worked out the kinks. This one, however, is complicated by the sheer number of systems involved.
A satisfying charging session is an orchestra. The charging station, the network operator, the vehicle and the payments all work together seamlessly. But today, the orchestra is out of tune.
These disjunctions create problems that to the driver are inexplicable.
For example, the kilowatts delivered at any particular moment during a charging session — the rough equivalent of the amount of gasoline tumbling out of a pump — can fluctuate up and down without explanation. This is often due to faulty communication between the station’s electronics and the car’s, as they try to speak the same software language but fail.
All these handoffs also make it hard for networks to emulate Tesla’s navigational prowess. Tesla competitors, like General Motors Co.’s Bolt or Ford’s Lightning F-150, might be able to tell you that the next station is working and has room — or it might not. Software incompatibility makes things janky.
“It’s hard because people are bundling all the pieces together and there’s not one owner of the process,” said Ferro of EVSession.
A solution, of sorts
To improve reliability amid this confusion, industry and governments have turned to a measurement of dubious value.
That metric is uptime. Applied to machinery or systems, uptime is a simple measurement. It is the amount of time in a given period that a machine is operational, stated as a percentage.
Uptime is a binary. A machine is either up, or it’s down. A charging station is considered “up” if its operator pings it and gets a positive response. But that narrow definition can collapse with an experience as complex as charging.
Uptime “doesn’t measure whether the connector is broken, or there’s payment-processing issues, or the parking space is ICE’d,” said Loren McDonald, an independent EV-charging analyst. ICE refers to a EV-charging parking space being occupied by an internal-combustion engine vehicle, another bane of EV drivers.
The metric fails, McDonald added, because it doesn’t answer the key question: “Can I charge or not?”
“Uptime doesn’t capture that,” he said.
Nonetheless, uptime has become the foundation on which federal and state governments are measuring performance as they dole out billions of public dollars.
For example, the Biden administration decreed last year that charging stations receiving federal money from the bipartisan infrastructure law must achieve better than 97 percent uptime.
It’s not alone in that target range. Colorado, New York and Vermont have adopted a 97 percent standard for their charger funding, while the state of Maine has adopted a lower 95 percent. Some electric utilities, like Louisville Gas & Electric in Kentucky and Consolidated Edison in New York, have aimed for as high as 99 percent.
Narrow as it is, the federal standard is at least a start. “It’s really helpful to have that federal guidance out there,” said Jesse Way, a clean transportation policy advisor at Nescaum, a nonprofit association of air-quality agencies in the Northeast.
Whether a 97 percent uptime is rigorous or not depends on whom you ask.
Tennyson of Electrify America considers it quite rigorous because it leaves a charging station with little room for error. A breakdown requires repairs that can consume days. In a year, he said, “You don’t have a tolerance for more than two or three failures.”
The reverse is argued by McDonald, the EV analyst. He points out that 97 percent uptime means three percent downtime. In the course of a year, that’s downtime of 11 days.
“Which is a really low bar if you ask me,” he said. “Could you imagine Amazon Web Services” — Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud product for businesses — “being down 11 days a year?”
A data void
One reason the Biden administration may have seized the narrow solution of uptime to solve the broad problems of EV-charger reliability is that no other options exist.
“The uptime calculation does not address all categories of failure or ways that chargers may fail to provide a satisfying customer experience,” the Federal Highway Administration conceded in guidance it released to states earlier this year.
Why not do better? “Insufficient data are available,” FHWA said.
That lack of data is a key gap, experts say. No independent, third-party source of charging data exists in the U.S. today. If a charging network claims to achieve 97 percent uptime — and many do — there’s no way to check out the claim.
That’s a worry for states that are entrusted with spending millions of dollars of federal money to build charging networks. The feds require them to achieve 97 percent uptime. But Teske, of the company Chargeway, pointed out that states who are vetting the companies to build those networks are “taking the sellers at their word.”
Solutions may be coming, but they will take time.
As part of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Biden administration gained the authority to gather data from the charging stations it funds. States are required to start sending data along a year from now. That information will, FHWA says, become “a national database and analytics platform” with “a public-facing dashboard.”
A major structural solution may be in the works in California.
Last year, California lawmakers passed a bill that requires new record-keeping and reporting standards for charging stations that get state money. The rules, to be drafted by the California Energy Commission, are due by 2024. They could eventually be copied by the numerous of states that align themselves with California’s transportation emissions policies.
“It’s very complicated, we don’t have all the answers,” said Patty Monahan, a CEC commissioner, at a Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference earlier this year. “This is a huge inquiry.”
In the meantime, the gritted teeth of those using highway fast chargers are unlikely to relax anytime soon. The next wave of EV adoption will, in part, continue to be a story of inert plugs and frowning drivers, posted on Instagram for all to see.
“I see this is a problem for the next five years,” said Ferro, the EV charging expert. “Either Tesla will take over the entire charging network of the U.S., or everyone else will get their act together, or a little bit of both.”
A version of this report first ran in E&E News’ Energywire. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Tehran: The Iranian authorities will use cameras in public places to identify women who violate the country’s hijab law, state media reported, according to CNN.
Notably, under Iran’s Islamic Sharia law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures. Violators have faced public rebuke, fines or arrest.
Iranian women who don’t cover their hair risk being arrested. As part of the widespread protests, many have been disobeying the mandatory dress code, following the death of a young woman while she was being held for allegedly breaking hijab laws.
Yet, authorities don’t appear to be changing their stance on the matter.
“Kn an innovative measure and in order to prevent tension and conflicts in implementing the hijab law, Iranian police will use smart cameras in public places to identify people who break the norms,” the state-aligned Tasnim news agency quoted police as saying, CNN reported.
After the women have been identified, they would be sent warning messages which detail the specific time and place they had “violated” the law, reported CNN.
“In the context of preserving values, protecting family privacy and maintaining the mental health and peace of mind of the community, any kind of individual or collective behaviour against the law, will not be tolerated,” CNN reported quoting Tasnim.
Earlier this month, a viral video showed a man throwing yoghurt on two women for not wearing their hijab.
The video shows a male staff member removing the suspect from the store. The two women were arrested after being issued an arrest warrant for failing to wear the hijab in public, according to Mizan News Agency. Iranian officials said the incident is under investigation, and the male suspect has been arrested for a disturbance of order, reported CNN.
Later, both women were arrested for violating Iran’s dress code.
Describing the veil as “one of the civilizational foundations of the Iranian nation” and “one of the practical principles of the Islamic Republic,” an Interior Ministry statement said there would be no “retreat or tolerance” on the issue.
It urged citizens to confront unveiled women. Such directives have in past decades emboldened hardliners to attack women without impunity.
In September 2022, Iranians took to the streets nationwide in protest for several months against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, and political and social issues across the country, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police.
Women have burned their headscarves and cut their hair, with some schoolgirls removing them in classrooms.
Those arrested for participating in anti-government demonstrations have faced various forms of abuse and torture, including electric shocks, controlled drowning, rape and mock executions.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
The government Jammu and Kashmir on Friday ordered transfer and positing of 31 police officers in the interest of administration with immediate effect.
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