The founders of 831 Stories believe that anyone can write romance, that great love stories should never end and that even the genre’s skeptics want a “happily ever after.”

What's old is new again Backward compatible: Many old Oblivion mods still work on Oblivion Remastered The modding community is already hard at work despite lack of "official" support. Kyle Orland – Apr 23, 2025 3:16 pm | 0 Thanks to a circa 2008 mod, I have a ton of armor and weapons from the jump in Oblivion Remastered Credit: Kyle Orland / Bethesda Thanks to a circa 2008 mod, I have a ton of armor and weapons from the jump in Oblivion Remastered Credit: Kyle Orland / Bethesda

BAR NONE AI secretly helped write California bar exam, sparking uproar A contractor used AI to create 23 out of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions. Benj Edwards – Apr 23, 2025 3:05 pm | 7 A computer-generated gavel hovers over a laptop. Credit: Getty Images A computer-generated gavel hovers over a laptop. Credit: Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times. The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician (a person skilled in administrating psychological tests), ACS Ventures, created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance. Another 48 questions came from a first-year law student exam, while Kaplan Exam Services developed the remaining 100 questions. The State Bar defended its practices, telling the LA Times that all questions underwent review by content validation panels and subject matter experts before the exam. "The ACS questions were developed with the assistance of AI and subsequently reviewed by content validation panels and a subject matter expert in advance of the exam," wrote State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson in a press release. According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. "The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. "I'm almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable." Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, called it "a staggering admission." She pointed out that the same company that drafted AI-generated questions also evaluated and approved them for use on the exam. State bar defends AI-assisted questions amid criticism Alex Chan, chair of the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners, noted that the California Supreme Court had urged the State Bar to explore "new technologies, such as artificial intelligence" to improve testing reliability and cost-effectiveness. However, the California Supreme Court told the LA Times that it "was unaware that AI had been used to draft any of the multiple-choice questions" until the State Bar's Monday press release. The AI disclosure follows other problems with the February exam. Test takers reported being kicked off online testing platforms, experiencing screen lag and error messages, and encountering typos and confusing questions. These issues prompted a federal lawsuit against Meazure Learning, the exam administrator, and calls for an audit of the State Bar. A unique test of dubious quality The State Bar of California switched from the National Conference of Bar Examiners' Multistate Bar Examination to its own hybrid in-person and remote testing model last year while facing a $22 million deficit. It contracted with Kaplan Exam Services for $8.25 million to create test questions. According to the LA Times, law professors Basick and Moran had previously raised concerns about the quality of the February exam questions, noting that the 50 practice questions released before the exam "still contain numerous errors" even after editing. Basick expressed additional concerns about the use of first-year law exam questions, arguing that an exam determining minimal competence to practice law requires a different standard than one assessing first-year law school learning. The State Bar plans to ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for February exam takers but has resisted returning to the National Conference of Bar Examiners exams for July, citing test security concerns with remote testing options. The Committee of Bar Examiners will meet on May 5 to discuss remedies, but Chan said the State Bar is unlikely to release all 200 exam questions or return to National Conference of Bar Examiners tests soon, as nearly half of California bar applicants want to keep the remote testing option. Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 7 Comments

LWM/NASA/LANDSAT/Alamy The Arctic is a land of riches – not just in its beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage, but in the kinds of commodities we value most: oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, gold and more. Yet those treasures are no good to us. As our special report on polar science reveals (see “Why vanishing sea ice at the poles is a crisis for the entire planet”), extracting the abundant resources of the Arctic for commercial gain is tricky. Trying to haul oil and gas from the region is an expensive business, even with the dubious tailwind of melting sea ice helping to clear new patches of ocean for drilling. As industry and transport gradually shift to electric and hydrogen power, oil demand will fall, making the expense ever harder to justify. It is a similar story for minerals, too. Greenland is a hotspot for in-demand materials, perhaps one reason why US President Donald Trump is aggressively pursuing its takeover. But even leaving aside Greenland’s lack of infrastructure – roads are hard to come by on this icy island – this is a risky place to invest. The landscape is changing fast as glaciers melt, revealing new, precarious coastlines that threaten landslides and tsunamis. For a hard-nosed business executive, there are easier, less hazardous places to mine Across the terrestrial Arctic, melting permafrost is destabilising existing roads, buildings and industrial sites. For a hard-nosed business executive, there are easier, less hazardous places to mine. Viewing the Arctic as a ticket to bountiful economic growth is a fool’s errand. Instead of seeing it as a region ripe for exploitation, we should treat it as a scientific wonder, while also respecting the people who live there. After all, as the fastest-changing region on Earth, it is at the vanguard of our climate future. And there is so much still to learn: how quickly might the ice disappear? How fast will sea levels rise? And what happens if and when the ice is gone? On a more positive note, researchers are pioneering ever more inventive ways to unlock these mysteries, from a new “drifting” laboratory to ultra-deep ice drills and state-of-the-art submarines. The Arctic is overflowing with opportunities for exploration and discovery. We just need to let go of the idea of monetising them. Topics:

A gene-edited grey wolf created by Colossal BiosciencesColossal Biosciences The creation of genetically modified grey wolves that are claimed to resemble extinct dire wolves has been criticised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Colossal Biosciences, a US company aiming to “de-extinct” several species with gene-editing technology, announced earlier this month that it had created three dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) by editing genes in grey wolf (Canis lupus) embryos. A statement put out by the IUCN expert group on canids – wolves…

Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review's readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist paralyzed people. Hear from MIT Technology Review editor at large David Rotman and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado as they explore the past, present, and future of BCIs. Related Coverage

Enterprise search centralizes access to a company's data, making information from multiple platforms searchable through one hub. Photo courtesy of Super.com 2025-04-23T19:17:08Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Super.com had its internal information scattered across several workspace platforms. The company built an artificial intelligence search tool to make a tool hub. This article is part of "Build IT: Connectivity," a series about tech powering better business. The tools meant to streamline work can leave businesses stuck in a maze of messages, documents, and dashboards.Super.com, a travel and finance platform on which customers can book hotels and earn cash and rewards, depends on various workspace platforms, including Slack, Confluence, and GitLab, to keep the business humming.Hussein Fazal, Super.com's CEO, told Business Insider that juggling systems often slowed down day-to-day tasks. Documents, datasets, and message exchanges were scattered across platforms, which made it difficult for teams to access what they needed when they needed it.During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company decided to permanently switch to remote work, which Fazal said added an extra challenge to information retrieval.As a result, Super.com needed a central system to access information from all of its platforms."It's hard to just pick up information, and it can sometimes even be hard to get information," he said.Super.com decided to build a hub that its employees could access from home. In 2022, the company teamed up with Glean, an AI startup in Palo Alto, California, to create a search platform that pulls information from across Super.com's software programs. Hussein Fazal is the chief executive officer at Super.com. Courtesy of Super.com A personalized search toolEnterprise search is software that allows users to look for information across various platforms and databases. Glean's platform uses ranking algorithms and generative artificial intelligence to make it easier for users to find what they're looking for."Glean will find the right information and produce an answer in natural language, à la ChatGPT, but with the information in the context of your enterprise," Tamar Yehoshua, the president of product and technology at Glean, told BI.She said that it's not as straightforward as putting all the information together into one big pot. Different employees have different access permissions, so each search needs to be customized for whoever is using it.Super.com integrated the company's most-used apps and tools, such as Slack, Confluence, GitLab, and Google Drive, into one hub. "It's personalized," she said. "It will find the information that is more relevant to you, as opposed to me, if we're in different roles and in different teams."Yehoshua said the setup process could be challenging since some companies struggle with managing who has access to which tools. This means that the software could give out confidential information to employees.To fix this, Glean built a data-governance layer into the search platform, which ensures rigorous access permissions. Fazal said Super.com had never had an issue with Glean's search tool giving people information they shouldn't be allowed to see.Yehoshua added that while everybody knows how to search Google, not everyone knows how to write a good AI prompt. Glean also launched a prompt library for Super.com, which she said helped educate people on how to use the tool.Fazal said he uses the platform multiple times a day. He added that an internal company survey found the search platform has saved employees an average of 20 minutes a day, which adds up to more than 1,500 hours saved each month across the team. The employee survey also found a 20% reduction in onboarding time for new hires.Next steps for AI agentsSince their first partnership, in 2022, Super.com and Glean have added features to the platform. A generative-AI tool embedded into the platform, for example, helps employees draft emails and prioritize tasks using real-time company data.For instance, if an employee asks, "What are the 10 most important things I should be working on right now?" the AI assistant will use information from Slack and Google Docs to give a customized answer to that employee.Looking ahead, Fazal hopes to incorporate AI agents into the platform. He said the next step after prompting AI to generate a task list would be getting an AI agent to go do those things. For instance, the AI assistant might suggest arranging a meeting as an important task. The agent would then draft emails and book a meeting room to help complete that task."We're excited to test it out and implement that once it's ready," he said.

McManus and Komori opened the Boise-based restaurant in 2020. Leslie Scott for BI 2025-04-23T19:04:57Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Kin is an Idaho prix fixe restaurant with a work culture rooted in collaboration and equality. The business, owned by Kris Komori and Remi McManus, offers salaries to all full-time staff. This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry. At Kin's prix fixe restaurant, the menu changes every five weeks, and it's always a group project.Having five or more staff members work together to brainstorm a tasting menu, divide up the cooking, and gather ingredients may seem like a recipe for disaster, but Kris Komori and Remi McManus, the co-owners of Kin, don't mind the challenge. Collaboration is integral to their restaurant, even if it requires some trial and error."We don't necessarily have general managers and things like that," McManus said. "We all work as an entity and as a unit."This mindset even extends to how Komori and McManus tackle payroll and prioritize pay equality. The owners offer all full-time staff a salary with benefits like paid time off and health insurance. This differs from the typical restaurant model in which some staff receive the minimum wage for tipped workers, while mainly relying on optional gratuities.In a rapidly changing industry known for burnout and top-down management, Kin's approach to work culture might be less common. But Komori, who's also Kin's head chef, said the Boise restaurant had always been an outlier."We're not trying to change an entire restaurant industry or even Boise itself, but we did know that we could create something a little bit different," Komori said.Their efforts have paid off. In 2023, Komori won a James Beard Award, and in 2024, Food & Wine listed the restaurant as one of the top 20 restaurants in the country.On separate calls, Komori and McManus spoke with Business Insider about how they foster employee well-being at Kin — and how other restaurants can adopt a better workplace culture, too.This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Some staff members take on different responsibilities in the restaurant, like graphic design and bookkeeping, based on their interests. Leslie Scott for BI Business Insider: Tell me a bit about Kin's work environment. How do you try to set yourself apart when it comes to employee well-being? Remi McManus: For years in the restaurant industry, there's been a big discrepancy in pay, especially from the front and back of the house. We try to develop equality through equal pay for all staff members. Our goals have been to develop more professionalism in the industry in Idaho and provide for our staff and our community more than we used to at my previous restaurant, State & Lemp.Kris Komori: Part of the core competency of the business is connecting to our guests and community, but it's mostly about connecting with our crew. It's still long hours and stressful at times, but if we can have people be excited to come to work instead of dreading it, it's just a happier place to be. Staff members often take inspiration from their own life experiences when brainstorming menu themes and dishes. Leslie Scott for BI How have you developed a sustainable business model that can account for having staff on salary?McManus: It's important for employees to take ownership of their duties. This means engaging them in different responsibilities that play to their strengths and discussing things they would like to see done in the restaurant. We have a graphic designer who is a service staff member and helps us to do social media posts and graphic design for menus. We've had a bartender who moved on to be our full-time bookkeeper. We have individuals who have experiences outside the restaurant that we can utilize to change the dynamic of what this space really is. While most people see us as a restaurant, we see ourselves more as a community engagement center with food and beverage as the vehicle.Komori: Since our tasting room is reservation-only, we know how many people are coming in and what their allergies or dietary restrictions are. Based on our capacity, we also know how much to order and prep. We can be efficient on the cost of goods and then put that into the payroll. McManus and Komori try to limit staff members to 45 hours a week to reduce burnout. Leslie Scott for BI Why do you think a community-focused work culture is a less common approach in most kitchens and restaurants?McManus: It's very expensive. Restaurants are fairly transient, and other owners don't potentially have the time or desire to invest as much into their employees. We're called Kin for many reasons, but one is because 100% of the staff that was with us at State & Lemp came over to Kin. It felt like we were a family creating a new establishment.Komori: One reason why a lot of places don't do it is because you have to also get a lot of buy-in from the team in terms of rotating schedules, knowing that everyone deserves the time off. Sometimes that requires stepping in. If someone's on vacation, then everyone's got to pull a little bit more, but then you yourself go on vacation and the other people do that for you.It's a compromise to staff saying you can have a career, sustainable finances, and days off in a restaurant. Because we have more people on staff, we can rotate schedules. As long as everyone has buy-in and supports each other, it works really well. The crew collaborates on each tasting menu from conceptualization to preparation. Leslie Scott for BI How does prioritizing collaboration and creativity help foster a more welcoming workplace?McManus: Any employee wants to feel like they're valued at work. Because we are a small staff, we're able to engage with them on a day-to-day basis. Whether it be collaboration on a dish or activities outside the workplace, developing these intimate relationships is baked into our ethos.When we come up with menu ideas, it's not necessarily just Kris or myself. Being able to rely on the individuals that have been here for years and also some of the new individuals for ideas is probably the best thing that we can do. People who have been doing something over and over and over again for years — they need new ideas. The collaboration process is probably one of the most effective things that we have in the restaurant right now.Komori: Everyone that comes in here wants to create. What's cool about our tasting room is that it starts with one dish, but over time, the staff is creating dozens of dishes, and they start to notice their own style. They're also learning how to plan, order at a cost, and write a prep schedule. It's really important because probably a quarter of the kitchen will want to have their own place, or at least become a chef with their own team. It's a lot to change the menu, but it's also fun. McManus and Komori started working together at State & Lemp before opening Kin. Leslie Scott for BI How can other chefs and owners adopt this workplace culture and sustain these practices?McManus: We accept gratuities, but we use them to fund the salaries. I believe, in some larger cities, there are restaurants that have gone away from optional gratuities and just added them to the bill or increased the pricing so they can have a similar pay structure.Komori: We're always wondering if the way that we're doing things is the best way to do it. You just have to be wanting to change. You ask your staff, "Hey, we want to try something to benefit the business and to benefit you. Are you willing to experiment with it?" And then you course-correct.We have good retention, and our guests are happy to support a place trying to healthily and sustainably support its crew. So we get loyalty from customers, which stabilizes the revenue and helps sustain the system. Kin's communal dining style expands on the restaurant's core concept of connection. Leslie Scott for BI How do you think restaurants can be more than just places to eat and places to work for guests and staff?McManus: It just comes down to culture. If you take the time and energy to learn more about the staff, have those conversations, communicate, and give ownership, then that shows in the staff members and that shows to the guests and community.Komori: Partly the reason we're named Kin is not only because we try to be like a loose-knit group of people that really align with each other, but also we want to have a feel like we're inviting people into our home. Because of that, we know a lot about our regulars. Sometimes we feel like a restaurant, but other times, we're more than a restaurant — we just happen to have our product be food and beverage. If we're going to work so hard, we want to feel good about it, and just cooking for someone over and over and over behind a wall, you lose that connection. Recommended video

History has been disappearing from government websites. First, it was Stonewall. The word “transgender” was removed from the National Park Service page commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, at which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role. The acronym LGBTQ was also changed to just “LGB.” Then, Harriet Tubman was erased from a page about the Underground Railroad, and the language changed to highlight “Black/white cooperation.” A page about Jackie Robinson’s Army service was taken down from the Pentagon’s website. (Both pages were later restored after public criticism.) A Washington Post investigation also found that at least half a dozen pages referencing the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated an Arkansas high school in the 1950s, previously said the students had “opened doors” for those seeking “equality and education.” Now, the pages say the students were just seeking “education.” The edits come amid the Trump administration’s push to end DEI and “restore truth and sanity” to American history, an effort causing alarm among historians like Yale professor David W. Blight. In an interview with Noel King on Today, Explained, Blight says the changes amount to a brazen attempt to rewrite our past — but that America is no stranger to revisionist history. The country has rewritten and re-saved and re-pushed its narrative of events so many times that it might as well look like the filename of a high schooler’s final project. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.Reporters will often say, “Donald Trump is unprecedented. The things that he does are unprecedented.” But I imagine you would tell me that the United States has tried to rewrite its own history, at certain points. Many times, yes. Give me some examples of the times we’ve tried to do this. During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. That’s what governments do during wartime. That organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic. Moving ahead from that to McCarthyism: Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America — and not without some reason in the ’30s and ’40s. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything. Let’s take the Civil War. In 1865 to 1870, there was an organization in the South called the Southern Historical Society. That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was.What was the story they were trying to sell? They told a story that we’ve come to know as the “Confederate Lost Cause.” Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield, they only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to “the leviathan of northern industrialization.” There’s some truth in that, but that’s not the full explanation. They also argued that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states’ rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their morays and folkways…Can I jump in and tell you something?Sure. I’m from central New York. I went to public school. That was what I learned. Wow. Why did I learn something that wasn’t true in public school? Because over time, in culture, schooling, politics, and rituals from the 1870s and ’80s well on into the 20th century — and still surviving in a textbook you were learning from in the 1990s, I am sorry to hear — was this idea that the United States divided had this all-out horrific war. But it had to put itself back together again. How do you put back together something so horrifically divided? You’re going to have to find mutuality. You’re going to have to find some kind of unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives they did develop in the 19th century — and there’s reality to this — is that you unify around the valor of soldiers. But if we admire valor without ever looking at the cause for which they fought, it’s of course limited. “Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.”Now, the typical and powerful belief was that everybody in that war fought for the cause they believed in. And if you fought for the cause you believed in with great valor, you fought for the right [reasons]. Everybody was equal in valor. The causes had to be muted, put aside. Well, you know, that’s a part of human relations as well: How do you keep a family together? Well, there’s some things you don’t talk about.But for nations and whole peoples and cultures, the danger in this is that the stories you take on, the stories that you develop that define the identity of your nation — the identity of your past and now your future — is going to leave somebody out. In fact, it may end up allowing you to reconcile on the backs of those who most suffered from the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, in America, that meant Black Americans. It meant their civil and political rights, which were created and then slowly but surely abandoned and then crushed in the Jim Crow system of the South. Now, the point of all of this is that the Confederate Lost Cause, which said the South fought for noble ends, they fought for their homes, they fought for their sovereignty, they fought for their integrity. … It eventually becomes, though, not a story of loss at all. It becomes, by the 1890s and into the 20th century, a victory narrative. This was an age of a lot of sentimental literature. Americans came to love stories of the Old South. Of course, it’s there in Gone With the Wind, still, maybe the most famous movie ever made. So the Lost Cause was both a political movement and it was a literary movement. But it was at its core a racial ideology, and it lasted a very long time. Let’s compare to what we’re seeing today. What you’re talking about with these popular books and Gone With the Wind, that seems to me more subtle than the president saying, “You delete that information about Jackie Robinson’s military service from the website.” Will what Trump is doing succeed because it is so unsubtle? That’s a very good question and my instinctive answer — and it’s partly my wishful answer — is that no he won’t. It is not subtle, you’re right: They’re wiping out websites. They are explicitly saying, “Professional history, whether it’s in our greatest museums or our greatest university, has been teaching us all the wrong ways. They’ve been dividing us.” This is the word they love to use: The history we write has been divisive, divisive, divisive. Well, no, it’s not. It’s simply informative. Sometimes it gets people riled up and sometimes it gets them arguing and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpists are doing is telling us that they know better — policy people at the Heritage Foundation or pseudo-historians who think that studying all this stuff about race, gender, all the ethnicities that make us up, all this pluralism, is just taking away from “American greatness.” They use that term a lot: “We’re no longer teaching our youth about American greatness.” Yes we are! We’re teaching our youth that our greatness is in the pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power. What will you know about World War I if you try to find nothing but greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if all you wanna know is about greatness? What will you actually know about Native American history if all you look for is greatness? It defies the intelligence of anyone with an education, and a whole lot of people who don’t have a lot of formal education. I’m not very optimistic right now about what’s going on, but I do have a certain faith that people just aren’t going to buy this.See More:

Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change. The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided a tiny fraction of overall electricity, showing moderate growth every year. With domestic natural gas running short, coastal states were preparing to build import terminals to bring gas from abroad. Americans were beginning to rethink their love of giant cars as the 7,000-pound Ford Excursion SUV entered its final year of production. In short, the US was preparing for a world with a rising demand for ever scarcer, more expensive fossil fuels, most of which would have to come from abroad. That was then. Today, the energy picture couldn’t be more different. In the mid-2000s, the fracking revolution took off, making the US the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. But clean energy began surging as well. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which created new incentives to deploy wind and solar power. Batteries became better and cheaper. Just about every carmaker now has an electric vehicle for sale. These weren’t just the product of steady advances but breakthroughs — new inventions, policies, and expanding economies of scale that aligned prices and performance to push energy technologies to unexpected heights. So what will come next? That’s the challenge for those charged with building tomorrow’s energy infrastructure. And right now, the world is especially uncertain about what’s to come, with overall energy demand experiencing major growth for the first time in decades, in part due to power-hungry data centers behind AI. The policy chaos from the Trump administration and looming threats of tariffs are making it even harder for the global energy sector to invest and build for the future.If you’re running a utility, building a factory, or designing power transmission routes, how do you even begin to plan? To think through this conundrum, I spoke to Erin Baker. She is a professor of engineering and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has studied technology and policy changes in the energy sector for decades, with an eye toward how to make big decisions under uncertain circumstances. I asked her about whether there are any other big step changes on the horizon for technologies that can help us contain climate change, and what we can do to stack the deck in their favor. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Can you define “breakthrough” or explain how it’s different from an incremental advance? A lot of really important innovation has been incremental. We’ve had amazing “breakthroughs” in a way with batteries, with wind energy, but it has happened over time. An example of a kind of a breakthrough was fracking, because that was a revolution, but for a long time, everybody ignored the importance of all the various technologies horizontal drilling, shale fracture fluid, subsurface mapping] developing in the background, or didn’t think it was going to happen. That one was a big step change when the price, performance, and shale gas field discoveries converged. Whereas with solar, it just kept getting cheaper consistently faster than we expected. One way you can define “breakthrough” is you can look at what everyone’s expecting and see when you do better than that. So breakthroughs are kind of surprises. So perhaps it’s better to think of a breakthrough not necessarily as an invention, but rather a point at which a technology becomes viable?Right. Then can you put the recent clean tech advances we’ve seen into context? Have we seen anything like this before? I think that we’ve always had a lot of technological change. I don’t think it’s just around clean energy. If there is some kind of incentive, then energy developers will be very clever at finding solutions. As we realize that renewable energy has a lot of benefits to it, the more we focused on it, the more we were like, “Whoa, this is 10 times better than anybody thought it was going to be.” With clean energy, a big part of the rationale is its environmental and climate benefits, rather than simply profit. There’s sort of a moral motivation baked in. Does that motivation matter? For many technologies, there are always true believers. Most people who get really excited about an invention are not just trying to make a profit. I think they’re almost always really into the technology itself. So with renewable energy, people have been excited for a very, very long time. That excitement tided people over for many years when those sources weren’t all that profitable. Solar took a long time for it to become great. The reason people focused on it was because of their vision that this has such potential for energy and the environment. So I think that the moral dimension does play a role.With a trade war kicking off, a lot of the raw materials and finished products in clean energy are likely to get more expensive. Is there a chance of backsliding in clean energy progress? I don’t think we’re going to lose the technology advances. [Development] can slow down. We saw that for offshore wind, with the COVID-induced inflation and higher interest rates slowing the industry down. We’re not losing any benefits of the technology though, and in fact it will probably induce new technological change. To me those kinds of things are temporary. Trade wars and stuff like that, they’re bad. They will slow things down, but they won’t stop innovation.There’s also competition against clean energy. You talked about fracking and how that was an unexpected breakthrough. I remember in the 1990s people were talking about peak oil, and then that discussion went away because we just kept finding more oil and more exploitable resources. It seems like those same price and performance pressures on clean tech to improve also apply on the fossil side, and there’s still a ton of money and innovation there.Are there any breakthroughs in fossil energy that could counteract progress in clean tech?That is a good point. Yeah, that peak oil thing used to drive me crazy. When it was a big thing, what I kept trying to explain to people that the industry will just innovate. The higher the price of oil gets, the more we’re going to figure out how to get oil out of the ground. There could be more innovations in fossil fuels, but where we are in the US, climate change is a very real problem and it’s hitting people today. It’s not going away. I think that the majority of focus on innovation is going to be things that can help us deal with climate change while living high-quality lives. Being at a university, I see that the young bright students are not dying to get into fossil fuels. Most of them want to build a world that’s going to be liveable for them, for their children. That gets back to what you were saying: Does it matter what the underlying reason is for innovating? And I guess when I think of it that way, it does matter. Young people want to make a better world. And so they are excited to go into clean energy, not into dirty energy.How do we start planning for another step change in clean energy? How do we prepare for stuff that we haven’t invented yet?Investing in science and engineering is obviously a good idea if we want to have more kinds of scientific breakthroughs. But yeah, given that we don’t know what the technology of tomorrow is going to look like, we really want to focus on flexibility and adaptability in the near term. Something that I think is important but not always very sexy or appealing is to streamline the grid interconnection process. Every time a new energy project wants to connect to the power grid they have to get into this interconnection queue. The grid operators have to do a study and see how it’s going to affect the rest of the grid. That process is really slow and inefficient; it can take years and years for things to get on the grid. Speeding that up is something that’s going to be useful broadly. You don’t need to predict if it’s going to be enhanced geothermal or if it’s going to be new versions of solar that will win out to get that queue working better. Similarly, we need to build new transmission where and when it’s needed. It would be independent of where we end up on the energy supply side. Some of these battery technologies are facilitating distributed resources like rooftop solar and microgrids. Thinking about just how to integrate them on the main power grid would be useful. What do you see as the government’s role in facilitating this?Certainly investing in science and engineering. A lot of it is also setting goals for specific technologies. It’s important because it coordinates the supply chain. That’s something that state or federal governments could do if they really have a vision. It doesn’t even cost very much money. A lot of it is reviewing and streamlining regulatory processes to make sure that regulation is doing what it should do. What about things like investing in companies or offering financing to startups? One thing that I think is really interesting is the idea of green bonds so that you can borrow money at a lower interest rate when what you’re doing is good for the environment. I don’t think that involves the government exactly picking companies; it just means you’re making this money available if you follow certain guidelines. Permitting risk is a kind of a bureaucratic risk, and the government could reduce that by understanding if there’s going to be a huge public pushback in building a certain area rather than every developer going out to do all their own individual work. One example is offshore wind in Europe. There, the state does a lot of work before the developers get there in understanding the specific sites. By the time they allocate the regions to build, they’ve done a lot of the work that takes a lot of the risk out of it, and then they put it up for bids to private companies. Mechanisms like that can be really useful.For energy project developers, how do you decide whether to use what you can get off the shelf now versus waiting a few years, maybe another decade, for something better?A friend of mine many years ago did some research on that, and basically she found that if things are improving at a pretty fast rate, it’s almost always worth it to go ahead and invest in what you have now because you’re going to get a lot of value out of it. Yes, it’s possible that 10 years from now, it’ll be something even better, but you’re already getting a lot of value from what you’re doing.I don’t see many developers waiting around for a better technology. I think we have a lot of good options.See More: