Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna brings news of a triumph for a Tesla power project in South Australia: about 900 residential rooftop solar panels, coupled with storage batteries, "all linked up to central control, to form what they are calling a 'Virtual Power Plant.'" Nothing virtual about it, distributed power plant would have been a better name. That project, designed to link 50,000 homes and their solar panels, is just 2% complete. About 1000 homes. That 2% complete project had enough juice and control to step in, detect the frequency drop, increase power from the batteries and save the day.
But does this have implications for the future? "The opportunity for Virtual Power Plants to reach a large scale will benefit all energy users through added competition to deliver services at reducing prices," says the executive general manager of emerging markets and services for the Australian Energy Market Operator (in the linked-to article above from Teslarati).

The original submission from 140Mandak262Jamuna argues this could be a game-changer for renewable energy: This is unprecedented. The electric utilities have been government-sanctioned monopolies for over a century, protected from competition... The battery bank will stabilize the grid so well, there will be no surge pricing for peaker power plants...

At present the Return-on-Investment comparison between solar/wind storage versus gas turbine power plants include the surge pricing benefit in favor of the gas power plants. It will be gone.

PC Magazine's "tech nerd" Whitson Gordon writes that "Once you start using a smart speaker to set reminders, play the news, or turn the lights on, it's hard to go back."

But if you want the convenience of voice control without the data-collecting tech giant behind the scenes, an open-source project called Mycroft is a great alternative. And you can run it right on a Raspberry Pi.

Mycroft is a free, open-source voice assistant designed to run on Linux-based devices... Mycroft has been around for quite a few years, but it's recently gained a bit more notoriety thanks to privacy concerns surrounding data collection at Amazon and Google. Unlike those assistants, Mycroft only collects data if you opt in during setup. And for the users who do opt in, Mycroft promises never to sell your data to advertisers or third parties -- instead, it only uses it to help developers improve the product. Mycroft even uses the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo as its search engine instead of Google when you ask for information.

Mycroft makes its own smart speaker called the Mark I, though it's currently sold out with a new Mark II (video here) on the way. However, since the project is open-source, you can install Mycroft on just about any Linux machine, including the Raspberry Pi (thanks to a pre-made build called Picroft). Using Mycroft on the Pi is free, but you can also subscribe to a $1.99-per-month plan to help support its development -- you'll even get a few goodies, like other voices that sound more lifelike than the default robotic voice.