Beta General LLC

(June 10, 2026)

EV’S ARE OUT, GRID POWER IS IN, FOR NOW, TO RECOUP GM's INVESTMENT IN BATTERIES.

General Motors Co. is pushing into stationary electricity storage through a partnership with startup Peak Energy Technologies, tapping into both a growing market fueled by demand from artificial intelligence and investor hype that recently boosted rival Ford Motor Co.’s shares.

GM and Peak Energy plan to develop batteries that can store energy on the grid during off-peak hours, the automaker told reporters June 9 at an event in San Francisco. GM is also taking steps to allow more of its EVs that are in customer hands today to store energy for the grid when plugged in at home, a move that could help utilities handle power needs from AI data centers.

Both GM and Ford have collectively spent tens of billions of dollars developing EVs only to find American consumers were slow to adopt them. Now, like Ford, GM is trying to make lemonade from lemons by pivoting toward the rising demand for power storage from AI data centers that are taxing the nation’s power grids.

GM’s announcement comes after Ford’s stock saw its biggest monthly gain in 17 years, a jump that gathered steam after a Wall Street analyst cast the automaker’s new energy-storage business as a potential beneficiary from the AI boom.

Ford is investing $2 billion into that business, including converting an EV battery factory to produce large energy cells using technology licensed from China’s CATL. U.S. demand for grid batteries is expected to double by 2030 to more than 100 gigawatt-hours, according to Bloomberg NEF.

GM’s investment in energy storage is smaller but has potential to grow. The carmaker’s GM Ventures arm is taking an equity stake in Peak Energy for an undisclosed sum. The two companies will work together on sodium-ion batteries, which work better for stationary storage cells than the lithium-ion technology used in many EVs. They can discharge faster, providing short, intense bursts of power. Their main raw material input — sodium — is abundant and cheap. The batteries also don’t need cobalt, much of which comes from mines accused of using child labor. And there’s less risk of fire.

Peak Energy is 3 years old and will report just $10 million in revenue this year before growing to $100 million in 2027, boosted by a $1.1 billion backlog, said Landon Mossburg, the company’s CEO. As the startup grows, GM and Peak could produce sodium-ion batteries at an existing GM facility or through a joint manufacturing plant, said Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery. The automaker has delayed construction of a battery plant in Indiana and could use that or another existing facility, he said.

GM is also partnering with Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company started by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, to repurpose old EV batteries for grid and commercial storage use. GM and its battery partner, LG Energy Solution of South Korea, said in March they would shift battery production at a Tennessee plant to make stationary storage for power grids and commercial use. GM and LG co-own the plant under their Ultium Cells joint venture. Ford CEO Jim Farley said last month that the automaker is seeing strong demand for its energy storage batteries that will go into production late next year.

GM is also pushing to get more power utilities to allow electricity to flow back and forth from its EVs to the grid. Vehicles sit idle 95% of the time and could be used as storage when they aren’t driving and charge at night during off-peak hours.

This so-called bidirectional charging will take time to grow. Customers have to pay about $5,000 for the hardware they would need in their garage. Some utilities offer incentives that cover much of that cost, but GM will still have to sell each individual owner on participating.

GM’s moves illustrate how automakers are trying to salvage big investments on EVs that proved to be a tough sell to Americans, even before Republicans removed a $7,500 tax credit for EV buyers.

GM had planned to install capacity to build as many as 1 million EVs in 2025 but only sold 170,000 in the U.S. last year. Although it trailed only Tesla Inc. in deliveries, the limited volume means GM’s EV business still loses money after bringing a dozen different EV models to the market. GM has announced plans to retool an electric pickup truck plant in suburban Detroit to make gasoline-powered SUVs like the Cadillac Escalade instead.

GM Teams With Peak Energy on Grid Batteries After Ford's Move - TT GM is pushing into stationary electricity storage through a partnership with startup Peak Energy Technologies, tapping into a growing market fueled by AI demand.

(June 10, 2026) Today, we have been told "climate change" is the cause of strong hurricanes. What the cause of "climate change" when Galveston was hit by the 1900 hurricane that killed 6000. The people of Galveston did not run in panic that we have to do something to stop climate change, they solved the real problem of the day, the city was built at sea level, that is in the wrong place when it comes to hurricanes, and decided to build a concrete barrier to save the city the next time, the famous Galveston Seawall, built with a curved surface facing the ocean to deflect the crashing waves during the storm surge.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1RHxvRhgqG/

After the 1900 hurricane killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people (no one knows the exact number because so many victims were never found) Galveston faced an impossible question: rebuild and risk everything again, or build something that had never been attempted at that scale in American history.

They chose to build.

On September 19, 1902, contractors signed the deal. Fifteen months to complete it. The first segment, 3.3 miles of curved concrete, 17 feet high, 16 feet thick at the base, was finished in 1904 at a cost of $1.6 million.

The curve wasn’t decorative. It was engineered to throw wave energy upward and away from the city.

When the 1909 hurricane hit, the wall held. When the 1915 hurricane hit with winds comparable to 1900, the death toll went from somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 to 8.

The wall worked. They kept building, extending it to 53rd Street, then 61st, then 99th. What started as a desperate response to catastrophe became one of the most successful disaster mitigation projects in American history.

Some cities are broken by disaster. Galveston decided to become stronger than the storm. ⚡🌊

(June 10, 2026) Natural gas is by far the cheapest fuel on the market. Gas well in the Texas Permian Basin are being shut in because the price has gone NEGATIVE, meaning the producers has to PAY to get rid of the gas. The problem is lack of dedicated interstate nature gas transmission pipelines.

Texas Gas Drillers Shut Out of Oil Price Rally Shut Off Wells - TT “We’re losing money hand over fist on gas,” Elevation CEO Steve Pruett said in an interview. “Gas is half our product, so it’s really maddening.”

(June 10, 2026) While a skunk is generally safe from predators because of its smell, nature has one last trick, great horned owls can't smell and will eat them regularly.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FRdvSF7AC/

A striped skunk walks through a meadow at two in the morning carrying the most effective chemical weapon in North American wildlife. Two glands under its tail can spray a sulfur compound called butyl mercaptan up to fifteen feet with accuracy, and the smell is detectable by a human nose from over a mile downwind.

The spray causes temporary blindness, nausea, and a burning sensation that does not wash off with soap or water. Every predator in the eastern forest knows what a skunk smells like and what happens if you get too close. Coyotes leave them alone unless starving. Foxes avoid them. Bobcats will kill one occasionally and spend the next hour rubbing their face in the dirt regretting it. The skunk walks through the night with the confidence of an animal that has solved the predation problem.

Then something drops out of the sky that cannot smell anything.

The great horned owl is the skunk's primary predator. Not occasional predator. Not opportunistic predator. Primary. Great horned owls eat skunks with enough regularity that wildlife biologists use skunk remains in pellets and nests as a reliable indicator of owl activity.

Taxidermists and nest surveyors can identify a great horned owl's nesting site before they see it because the tree stinks. The scent glands that keep every ground predator in the county at a safe distance do nothing to an animal attacking from thirty feet above at forty miles per hour with no functional sense of smell.

Most birds have limited olfactory capability compared to mammals. Great horned owls are on the extreme end of that spectrum. The olfactory region of their brain is small relative to their total brain volume, and their olfactory bulbs are reduced compared to bird species that do rely on smell, like turkey vultures.

The owl can detect enough scent to taste food, but the concentration of butyl mercaptan that would send a coyote gagging into the next drainage registers as background noise in the owl's nervous system. The skunk sprays. The owl does not care. The spray hits feathers that the owl will preen clean within hours. The skunk's entire defense, the product of millions of years of evolutionary pressure, is neutralized by an attacker that lacks the hardware to process it.

The mechanics of the kill compound the problem for the skunk. A skunk defends itself by turning its back, raising its tail, and spraying in a directed stream aimed backward and slightly downward. The defense is designed for ground-level threats approaching from behind or from the side. A fox circling a skunk gets sprayed in the face. A dog lunging at a skunk gets sprayed in the eyes. The spray's targeting geometry assumes the threat is on the ground.

A great horned owl attacks from above and behind in near-total silence. Owl flight feathers have serrated leading edges that break up turbulence and suppress the sound of air moving over the wing. A great horned owl in a hunting dive is functionally silent. The skunk does not hear it coming. The strike hits the back of the skull or the shoulders, and the talons, which can exert roughly 300 pounds per square inch of crushing force, kill or immobilize the skunk before it can orient its spray glands toward the threat. The attack comes from the one direction the skunk cannot aim, delivered by the one predator that would not be affected if it could.

A striped skunk can weigh up to nine pounds. A great horned owl averages three. The owl routinely kills prey that outweighs it by a factor of two or three, including rabbits, marmots, and house cats. Its talons are strong enough to sever the spinal cord of a skunk on contact, and when the prey is too heavy to carry whole, the owl feeds on it where it falls or dismembers it and carries pieces back to the nest. A three-pound bird killing a nine-pound mammal that is chemically armed with one of the most repulsive substances in the animal kingdom is not a fair fight. It is a design mismatch where one animal's primary defense is irrelevant to the only predator that hunts it consistently.

Source: National Park Service / Cornell Lab of Ornithology / Naturally Curious with Mary Holland / Center of the West.

(June 9, 2026)

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EECnkczN5/

(June 6, 2026) Up, Up, and Away!! Rocketing into the Trillion-Dollar Stratosphere. Some have wrongly believed it the future in Mars and the Moon and mining both. It all about mining the artificial intelligence gold rush, it about moving from Starlink to Hyper-Starlink and a million orbiting data centers powered by massive solar arrays.

Transmitting data by old fashion radio signal to and from space to everywhere on earth is a more efficient use of the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum than trying to send the solar power by massive microwave beams that would fry birds flying through them. There is more money to be made transmitting signals than another nutty failure of power transmission from space.

Of course, Space X is not going to build every satellite, other companies that want to make their profit building them will multiply, and wealth will be greatly increased. A trillion for Space X, a few trillion for the satellite data center manufacturers, some being traditional aerospace companies, and a few more trillion to the solar array and battery companies.

I see easily 10 trillion and climbing for this new industry in the United States. Economic growth does not always mean more environmental damage on earth. The data centers in orbit moderates the building of an all-terrestrial network.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EFjoWAnRV/

SpaceX will sell its shares for $135 apiece during its IPO, yielding a valuation of $1.77 trillion.

(June 6, 2026)

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Dgoag6pot/

President Trump is preparing one of the most direct federal boosts for coal in years.

The plan: nearly $700 million in support, pushed through the Defense Production Act, the 1950 law built for national-security emergencies.

This time, the target isn't tanks or medical supplies.

It's coal plants, coal logistics and export capacity.

According to the reported package, $425 million would go toward upgrades at 13 existing coal-fired power plants.

Another $185 million would be used to match private funding for coal facilities in Alaska, Maryland and West Virginia.

A further $75 million would support the long-debated West Gateway coal export terminal in Northern California.

The administration's argument is simple: America needs firm power for defense, industry and the growing electricity appetite of AI data centers.

Coal, in that view, isn't just an old fuel.

It's backup power with strategic value.

The move comes after Trump formally tied coal supply chains and baseload generation to national defense in an April 2026 determination.

That document said coal mining, terminals, stockpiles, rail and barge logistics, and power-plant life-extension work were essential industrial resources.

Critics will see the package as a taxpayer rescue for an industry pushed down by cheaper gas, renewables and environmental pressure.

And the numbers show why this is a fight against gravity.

Coal once supplied more than half of U.S. electricity.

Today, it's closer to 16%.

Still, Washington is signaling one thing clearly: coal may be smaller, but under this administration, it isn't finished.

-

(June 6, 2026) The increased domestic production since the 1980's has indeed prevented the oil "crisis" of the 1970's, which was always a phony claim. Because the production exist today, there NEVER was a shortage of oil in the United States. It was always because of the stupid government policies, regulations, and even laws that have gradually been remove over the last 40 years, beginning with President Ronald Reagan who was to the public an actor but was by education an economist. He understood the real economic engine of America, the ability of the individual to freely make personal decisions to create new businesses and industries. In the case of oil and gas, by leaving oil and gas companies to just carry out their main business, drilling for oil, refining oil, and selling its products on the open market, there was always plenty of domestic production to cover the nation's demands. In the process, create more jobs, distributing wealth the natural and proper way, through hard work. Everybody prospers in America.

The nations that follow the foolishness of the earthly socialist "paradise" only makes life more miserable for the majority, and spreads poverty, while the elite of control freaks enjoy their sanctuary lifestyle behind locked gates.

Remember the 1970s Oil Crisis? This Isn't That - TT Higher energy costs have a muted impact on employment now because states where oil production is concentrated can see job gains even as others record losses.

(May 30, 2026) Bezo's baby goes boom!

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explodes during engine firing test "Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”