Alphabet's Google on Thursday said its new Pixel phones will deliver improved voice and camera features while bringing back facial recognition for unlocking the device as it seeks to better compete with Apple and Samsung Electronics. From a report: The company's Pixel 7 and 7 Pro devices offer more affordable prices than the dominant duo of the mobile market, coming in at $599 and $899, respectively, and introduce the second generation of Google's in-house Tensor chip. The 6.7-inch Pro version has an additional zoom camera, better display and more memory than the 6.3-inch Pixel 7.

Google's Pixel phones every year serve as the showcase for the company's latest Android software and artificial intelligence-based services, such as the Google Assistant. They demonstrate how Google hopes device-making partners will best use its operating system. Google continues developing its own hardware, which has only ever sold in small numbers, in part as insurance against missteps by Samsung, the only credible Apple rival in the US. Google AI shows up in the upgraded language-processing capabilities of its latest software. The Recorder app for voice memos can now automatically label different speakers in transcriptions, and transcriptions are also being added to audio messages in the new Pixels' messaging app.

Apple is asking suppliers to move some AirPods and Beats headphone production to India for the first time, in a win for the South Asia nation as it attempts to rise in the global supply chain. Nikkei Asia Review reports: The move is part of Apple's gradual diversification from China, as it looks to lower the risk of supply chain disruptions stemming from the country's strict zero-COVID policy and tensions with the U.S. Apple has been talking with a number of its suppliers about increasing production in India, including of key acoustics devices, as early as next year, three people familiar with the matter told Nikkei Asia. In response, iPhone assembler Foxconn is preparing to make Beats headphones in the country, and hopes to eventually produce AirPods there as well, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Luxshare Precision Industry and its affiliates, which already produce AirPods in Vietnam and China, also plan to help Apple make the popular wireless earphones in India, sources said. However, Luxshare is focusing more on its Vietnamese AirPods operations for now and could be slower than its competitors in starting meaningful production of Apple products in India, one of the people said. Bringing AirPods and Beats production to India would enlarge Apple's production footprint in the country, following a recent announcement that the latest iPhone is already being made there. Apple started having some older iPhone models made in India in 2017 by a smaller supplier, Wistron, but only accelerated such production last year.

Fast-food French fries and onion rings are going high-tech, thanks to a company in Southern California. From a report: Miso Robotics in Pasadena has started rolling out its Flippy 2 robot, which automates the process of deep frying potatoes, onions and other foods. A big robotic arm like those in auto plants -- directed by cameras and artificial intelligence -- takes frozen French fries and other foods out of a freezer, dips them into hot oil, then deposits the ready-to-serve product into a tray.

Flippy 2 can cook several meals with different recipes simultaneously, reducing the need for catering staff and, says Miso, speed up order delivery at drive-through windows. "When an order comes in through the restaurant system, it automatically spits out the instructions to Flippy," Miso Chief Executive Mike Bell said in an interview. " ... It does it faster or more accurately, more reliably and happier than most humans do it," Bell added.

The Pixel 4 is officially hitting its end of life this month after three short years of service. We sometimes see these dead Google phones get one more wrap-up update before Google cuts the cord, but the Android October 2022 update is the end of the line here. From a report: The Pixel 4 was a big batch of Google experiments passed off as a consumer product, and we did not take kindly to it. It was the first (and only) Google phone to attempt to copy Apple's FaceID by using a grid of IR dots and extra hardware to scan the user's face. The system was much slower than the fingerprint reader on the Pixel 3, and it oddly worked on sleeping people for several months after launch.

The Pixel 4 was the first and only Google phone to integrate "Project Soli," a tiny Google radar chip that can detect motion. The laboratory versions of Soli promised that the technology could capture "sub millimeter motions of your fingers," but the commercial implementation in the Pixel 4 could only (sometimes) capture giant arm movements. Soli lives on in Google smart displays for sleep tracking, but the phone version is dead. Combine that with very high prices for the two device sizes ($800 and $900) and very small batteries (2800 mAh and 3700 mAh), and you have the makings of a very bad device.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A power station has been chosen to be the site of the UK's, and potentially the world's, first prototype commercial nuclear fusion reactor. Fusion is a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only carried out in experiments. The government had shortlisted five sites but has picked the West Burton A plant in Nottinghamshire. The plant should be operational by the early 2040s, a UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) spokesman has said. The government had pledged more than 220 million pounds for the STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) program, led by the UKAEA.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service said the project would replace the coal-fired power station site -- owned by French energy giant EDF -- which is set to be closed this year. Matt Sykes, managing director of EDF's Generation business, said: "We are absolutely delighted that the UKAEA has selected the West Burton site in Nottinghamshire to host the UK's first fusion reactor. "The area has been associated with energy generation for over 60 years. Developing such an exciting new project continues this tradition and has the potential to transform both the region and the UK's long-term energy supply." Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg announced the government's choice in a speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. "Over the decades we have established ourselves as pioneers in fusion science and as a country our capabilities to surmount these obstacles is unparalleled, and I am delighted to make an announcement of a vital step in that mission," he said. "The plant will be the first of its kind, built by 2040 and capable of putting energy on the grid, and in doing so will prove the commercial viability of fusion energy to the world."

united_notions writes: Back in February, Slashdot reported that Google would be phasing out free unlimited storage within Google Apps for Education. Google had a related blog post dressing it up in the exciting language of "empowering institutions" and so forth. Well, now universities all over are waking up to the consequences.

Universities in Korea are scrambling to reduce storage use, or migrating to competitors like Naver, while also collectively petitioning Google on the matter. California State University, Chico has a plan to shoe-horn its storage (and restrict its users) to limbo under Google's new limits. UC San Diego is coughing up for fees but apparently under a "favorable" deal, and still with some limits. The University of Cambridge will impose a 20GB per user limit in December 2022. And so on.

If you're at a university, what is your IT crowd telling you? Have they said anything? If not, you may want to ask.

Walgreens is turning to robots to ease workloads at drugstores as it grapples with a nationwide shortage of pharmacists and pharmacist technicians. From a report: The nation's second-largest pharmacy chain is setting up a network of automated, centralized drug-filling centers that could fill a city block. Rows of yellow robotic arms bend and rotate as they sort and bottle multicolored pills, sending them down conveyor belts. The company says the setup cuts pharmacist workloads by at least 25% and will save Walgreens more than $1 billion a year. The ultimate goal: give pharmacists more time to provide medical services such as vaccinations, patient outreach and prescribing of some medications. Those services are a relatively new and growing revenue stream for drugstores, which are increasingly able to bill insurers for some clinical services.

"This frees up the capacity of our most skilled professionals," said Rina Shah, a group vice president overseeing pharmacy strategy at Walgreens. "We looked at our system and said, 'Why are we filling prescriptions the way we did in 1995?'" Covid-19 increased the demands on pharmacies as they expanded into testing and vaccinations, putting pressure on staff and creating a shortfall of pharmacists that many chains have struggled to fill. Walgreens has reduced pharmacy hours at a third of its nearly 9,000 U.S. stores, and in some markets is offering signing bonuses of up to $75,000 to fill pharmacist jobs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: A collaboration of researchers from various institutes in the Netherlands broke the 30 percent barrier associated with solar cells. The achievement will help uptakeworldwide solar energy and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, an organizational press release said. [...] To do so, researchers in the Netherlands came together to create a four-terminal perovskite/silicon tandem device. A tandem device can better use solar spectrum since it uses a mix of silicon-based solar cells with perovskite-based solar cells. While the former works well with light in the visible and infrared spectrum, perovskites can use wavelength in the ultraviolet and visible light while being transparent to infrared light. In a four-terminal tandem device, the top and bottom cells can operate independently, allowing bifacial tandems to be used, further boosting the power output of the architecture.

The press release said that the researchers improved the efficiency of a semi-transparent perovskite cell with an area of 3x3 sq. mm up to 19.7 percent. Below this, a silicon solar cell, which was 20X 20 sq. mm wide, was placed. The tandem device also had a highly transparent back contact that allowed 93 percent of the near-infrared light to reach the bottom of the device. The silicon device was optimized using a host of features, and its efficiency improved to 10.4 percent. Together with the perovskite solar cell, the device delivered a combined energy conversion efficiency of 30.1 percent, making it the best efficiency achieved so far.

During Toyota's annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas last week, which was called "Playing to Win," CEO Akio Toyoda explained why the company isn't all-in on electric vehicles. CNBC reports: Toyoda last week simply stated what he would like his legacy to be: "I love cars." Despite criticism from some investors and environmental groups, Toyoda this past week doubled down on his strategy to continue investing in a range of electrified vehicles as opposed to competitors such as Volkswagen and General Motors, which have said they are going all-in on all-electric vehicles. The plans could arguably cement Toyoda's "I love cars" legacy or tarnish it, depending on how quickly drivers adopt electric vehicles. "For me, playing to win also means doing things differently. Doing things that others may question, but that we believe will put us in the winner's circle the longest," he said [...]. Toyoda, who described Toyota as a large department store, said the company's goal "remains the same, pleasing the widest possible range of customers with the widest possible range of powertrains." Those powertrains will include hybrids and plug-in hybrids like the Prius, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai and 15 all-electric battery models by 2025.

Toyoda reiterated that he does not believe all-electric vehicles will be adopted as quickly as policy regulators and competitors think, due to a variety of reasons. He cited lack of infrastructure, pricing and how customers' choices vary region to region as examples of possible roadblocks. He believes it will be "difficult" to fulfill recent regulations that call for banning traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035, like California and New York have said they will adopt. "Just like the free autonomous cars that we are all supposed to be driving by now, EVs are just going to take longer to become mainstream than media would like us to believe," Toyoda said in a recording of the remarks to dealers shown to reporters. "In the meantime, you have many options for customers." Toyoda also believes there will be "tremendous shortages" of lithium and battery grade nickel in the next five to 10 years, leading to production and supply chain problems.

Toyota's goal is carbon neutrality by 2050, and not just through all-electric vehicles. Some have questioned the environmental impact of EVs when factoring in raw material mining and overall vehicle production. Since the Prius launched in 1997, Toyota says it has sold more than 20 million electrified vehicles worldwide. The company says those sales have avoided 160 million tons of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent to the impact of 5.5 million all-electric battery vehicles. "Toyota can produce eight 40-mile plug-in hybrids for every one 320-mile battery electric vehicle and save up to eight times the carbon emitted into the atmosphere," according to prepared remarks for Toyoda provided to media. Toyoda also said the company has no plans to overhaul its franchised dealership network as it invests in electrified vehicles, like some competitors have announced.

"I know you are anxious about the future. I know you are worried about how this business will change. While I can't predict the future, I can promise you this: You, me, us, this business, this franchised model is not going anywhere. It's staying just as it is," he told dealers to resounding applause.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla has unveiled its latest version of its Dojo supercomputer and it's apparently so powerful that it tripped the power grid in Palo Alto. Dojo is Tesla's own custom supercomputer platform built from the ground up for AI machine learning and more specifically for video training using the video data coming from its fleet of vehicles. [...] Last year, at Tesla's AI Day, the company unveiled its Dojo supercomputer, but the company was still ramping up its effort at the time. It only had its first chip and training tiles, and it was still working on building a full Dojo cabinet and cluster or "Exapod." Now Tesla has unveiled the progress made with the Dojo program over the last year during its AI Day 2022 last night.

The company confirmed that it managed to go from a chip and tile to now a system tray and a full cabinet. Tesla claims it can replace 6 GPU boxes with a single Dojo tile, which the company claims costs less than one GPU box. There are 6 of those tiles per tray. Tesla says that a single tray is the equivalent of "3 to 4 fully-loaded supercomputer racks." The company is integrating its host interface directly on the system tray to create a big full host assembly. Tesla can fit two of these system trays with host assembly into a single Dojo cabinet. That's pretty much where Tesla is right now as the automaker is still developing and testing the infrastructure needed to put a few cabinets together to create the first "Dojo Exapod."

Bill Chang, Tesla's Principal System Engineer for Dojo, said: "We knew that we had to reexamine every aspect of the data center infrastructure in order to support our unprecedented cooling and power density." They had to develop their own high-powered cooling and power system to power the Dojo cabinets. Chang said that Tesla tripped their local electric grid's substation when testing the infrastructure earlier this year: "Earlier this year, we started load testing our power and cooling infrastructure and we were able to push it over 2 MW before we tripped our substation and got a call from the city." Tesla released the main specs of a Dojo Exapod: 1.1 EFLOP, 1.3 TB SRAM, and 13 TB high-bandwidth DRAM.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Thousands of people were left without power after a food delivery drone crashed into powerlines yesterday in what has been described as a "first" by Energex. Energex spokesman Danny Donald told ABC Radio Brisbane people in Browns Plains, south of Brisbane, and the immediate surrounds lost power yesterday after a drone carrying food hit the network about 2pm. Energex restored power for about 2,000 customers within 45 minutes, while 300 customers in the immediate vicinity of that drone were without power for three hours. "The meal was still hot inside the drone's delivery box when the crew got there," Mr Donald said. "While this is a different circumstance, it's no different to the previous generation flying kites," Mr Donald added. "Fifteen years ago, we asked people to be careful if they were giving their children kites for Christmas and where they were flying them. Now we're asking parents to be very careful with where their kids fly their drones."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a prototype of a humanoid robot that he said utilizes the company's AI software, as well as the sensors that power its advanced driver assist features. The Verge reports: The robot was showcased at Tesla's AI Day, and reps said it features the same technology used to enable the Full Self-Driving beta in Tesla's cars. According to Musk, it can do more than what has been shown, but "the first time it walked without a tether was tonight on stage." Musk said they're targeting a price of "probably less than $20,000." The back doors of the stage open to reveal a deconstructed Optimus that walked forward and did a "raise the roof" dance move. Musk would admit after the motion that they wanted to keep it safe and not make too many moves on stage and have it "fall flat on its face." "It'll be a fundamental transformation for civilization as we know it." said Musk.

Afterward, the company showed a few video clips of the robot doing other tasks like picking up boxes. Then Tesla's team brought out another prototype that has its body fully assembled but not fully functional. [...] Future applications could include cooking, gardening, or even "catgirl" sex partners, Musk has said, while also claiming that production could start as soon as next year. Musk says the robot is "the most important product development we're doing this year," predicting that it will have the potential to be "more significant than the vehicle business over time."

Musk first announced the "Tesla Bot" at last year's AI Day.

Elon Musk is widely expected to show off a new humanoid robot Friday at a Tesla artificial intelligence event. From a report: Mr. Musk first laid out the vision for the robot, called Optimus, little more than a year ago at Tesla's first-ever AI day. At the time, a dancer in a costume appeared onstage. This time, Mr. Musk has said he wants a prototype to be at the gathering that is scheduled to unfold from 5 p.m. local time in Palo Alto, Calif. Mr. Musk has painted a vision of Optimus as helping Tesla make cars more efficiently. He has also suggested the robot could serve broader functions and potentially alleviate labor shortages. "My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term," Mr. Musk said Aug. 4 at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting. "It will, I think, turn the whole notion of what's an economy on its head, at the point at which you have no shortage of labor," he added. When he first unveiled the Optimus concept, Mr. Musk said such a robot could have such an impact on the labor market it could make it necessary to provide a universal basic income, or a stipend to people without strings attached.

In a global first, wind and solar energy combined to generate more than 10 percent of the world's electricity in 2021 -- though coal-fired power plant generation and emissions jumped to new highs in the same period, too. The Register reports: The 2022 Power Transition Trends report by Bloomberg New Energy Fund (BNEF) found that power generation emissions in general leapt up in 2021 as the global economy rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of that new power generation came from renewable sources, with wind and solar accounting for three quarters of capacity added in 2021. When accounting for hydro, nuclear, and other zero-carbon power sources, that number rises to 85 percent of 2021's new capacity.

Those gains were spoiled by a resurgence in coal-fired power plants, use of which BNEF said was up by a record 8.5 percent between 2020 and 2021. BNEF cites rapidly rebounding energy demand (which rose 5.6 percent year-on-year in 2021), reduced hydro generation due to droughts, and high natural gas prices in Europe as primary drivers of the coal surge. [...] For the first time since 2013, BNEF said in the report (PDF), "coal-fired power plants were the top contributor to top-line power generation growth." The report said that coal accounted for the majority of additional generation in 2021 -- not to be confused with newly added generation, of which coal was a small component.

Still, coal continues to occupy the largest single share of global electricity generation at 27 percent, and it may continue to rise in 2022 "as European nations seek short-term solutions to compensate for droughts and extremely high gas prices," BNEF said. While European coal plants might be earning the blame, they aren't responsible for most of the coal generation, BNEF said. That honor belongs to three countries that account for 63 percent of burned coal: China, India, and the United States. China holds the crown for coal-fired power generation, accounting for 52 percent of total coal usage in the world. India accounts for 11 percent of coal, while the US burns approximately 9 percent. The US could see itself slip out of the top three, however, as BNEF said it's the only country in the top 10 coal burners to reduce its coal generation since the beginning of the decade.

Once unthinkable, mobile phones could go dark around Europe this winter if power cuts or energy rationing knocks out parts of the mobile networks across the region. Reuters reports: Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages. In France, the situation is made worse by several nuclear power plants shutting down for maintenance. Telecoms industry officials say they fear a severe winter will put Europe's telecoms infrastructure to the test, forcing companies and governments to try to mitigate the impact. Currently there are not enough back-up systems in many European countries to handle widespread power cuts, four telecoms executives said, raising the prospect of mobile phone outages.

European Union countries, including France, Sweden and Germany, are trying to ensure communications can continue even if power cuts end up exhausting back-up batteries installed on the thousands of cellular antennas spread across their territory. Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas. [...] Telecom gear makers Nokia and Ericsson are working with mobile operators to mitigate the impact of a power shortage. The European telecom operators must review their networks to reduce extra power usage and modernize their equipment by using more power efficient radio designs, the four telecom executives said. To save power, telecom companies are using software to optimize traffic flow, make towers "sleep" when not in use and switch off different spectrum bands. The telecom operators are also working with national governments to check if plans are in place to maintain critical services.

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has 33,000 mobile radio sites (towers) and its mobile emergency power systems can only support a small number of them at the same time, a company spokesperson said. Deutsche Telekom will use mobile emergency power systems which mainly rely on diesel in the event of prolonged power failures, it said. France has about 62,000 mobile towers, and the industry will not be able to equip all antennas with new batteries, the FFT's president Liza Bellulo said. Accustomed to uninterrupted power supply for decades, European countries usually do not have generators backing up power for longer durations.

A prototype all-electric passenger plane took off for the first time yesterday in a test flight that marks a significant milestone for carbon pollution-free aviation. The Verge reports: The nine-passenger commuter aircraft called Alice took off at 7:10AM yesterday from Washington state's Grant County International Airport. Alice is ahead of much of the pack when it comes to all-electric aircraft under development. It could become the "first all-new, all-electric commercial airplane" if the Federal Aviation Administration certifies it to carry passengers, The Seattle Times reports.

Alice's maker, Washington state-based company Eviation, is targeting commuter and cargo flights between 150 and 250 miles. That's like flying from New York City to Boston or from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Yesterday's test flight lasted just eight minutes, though, with the aircraft reaching an altitude of 3,500 feet. The purpose of the flight was to gather data to improve the design of the plane, which still has a long way to go before it can take off with passengers on board. Alice will eventually come in three configurations: a nine-passenger commuter plane, a six-passenger luxury plane, and an e-cargo version. The limited size has to do with battery capacity.

A droid named Cassie has set a Guinness World Record for the 100-meter dash by a bipedal robot, "an impressive demonstration of robotics and engineering," reports New Atlas. From the report: Cassie is the brainchild of Agility Robotics, a spin-off company from Oregon State University, and was introduced in 2017 as a type of developmental platform for robotics research. And Cassie has continued to come along in leaps and bounds since then, in 2021 demonstrating some impressive progress by completing a 5-km (3.1-mile) jog in just over 53 minutes. This achievement involved the use of machine learning algorithms to equip the robot with an ability to run, overcoming its unique biomechanics and knees that bend like an ostrich to remain upright. With this capability, Cassie joined a group of running bipedal robots that include the Atlas humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics and Mabel, billed as the world's fastest knee-equipped bipedal robot. But in optimizing Cassie for the 100-meter sprint, the researchers had to head back to the drawing board.

The team spent a week fast-tracking Cassie through a year's worth of simulated training designed to determine the most effective gait. But it wasn't simply a matter of speed. For the Guinness World Record to stand, Cassie had to start in a standing pose, and then return to that pose after crossing the finish line rather than simply tumble over. This meant Cassie had to use two neural networks, one for running fast and one for standing still, and gracefully transition between the two. Ultimately, Cassie completed the 100-meter sprint in 24.73 seconds, establishing a Guinness World Record for a bipedal robot. This is a great deal slower than the sub-10-second times run by the world's best sprinters, but the researchers believe progress will only accelerate from here. You can watch Cassie's record-setting dash here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Buhlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats. Stable Diffusion is an AI image synthesis model that typically generates images based on text descriptions (called "prompts"). The AI model learned this ability by studying millions of images pulled from the Internet. During the training process, the model makes statistical associations between images and related words, making a much smaller representation of key information about each image and storing them as "weights," which are mathematical values that represent what the AI image model knows, so to speak.

When Stable Diffusion analyzes and "compresses" images into weight form, they reside in what researchers call "latent space," which is a way of saying that they exist as a sort of fuzzy potential that can be realized into images once they're decoded. With Stable Diffusion 1.4, the weights file is roughly 4GB, but it represents knowledge about hundreds of millions of images. While most people use Stable Diffusion with text prompts, Buhlmann cut out the text encoder and instead forced his images through Stable Diffusion's image encoder process, which takes a low-precision 512x512 image and turns it into a higher-precision 64x64 latent space representation. At this point, the image exists at a much smaller data size than the original, but it can still be expanded (decoded) back into a 512x512 image with fairly good results.

While running tests, Buhlmann found that images compressed with Stable Diffusion looked subjectively better at higher compression ratios (smaller file size) than JPEG or WebP. In one example, he shows a photo of a candy shop that is compressed down to 5.68KB using JPEG, 5.71KB using WebP, and 4.98KB using Stable Diffusion. The Stable Diffusion image appears to have more resolved details and fewer obvious compression artifacts than those compressed in the other formats. Buhlmann's method currently comes with significant limitations, however: It's not good with faces or text, and in some cases, it can actually hallucinate detailed features in the decoded image that were not present in the source image. (You probably don't want your image compressor inventing details in an image that don't exist.) Also, decoding requires the 4GB Stable Diffusion weights file and extra decoding time. Buhlmann's code and technical details about his findings can be found on Google Colab and Towards AI.

Longtime Slashdot reader root_42 writes: Remember the clicking sounds of spinning hard disks? One "problem" with retro computing is that we replace those disks with compact flash, SD cards or even SSDs. Those do not make any noises that you can hear under usual circumstances, which is partly nice because the computer becomes quieter, but also irritating because sometimes you can't tell if the computer has crashed or is still working. This little device fixes that issue! It's called the HDD Clicker and it's a very unique little gadget. "An ATtiny and a few support components ride on a small PCB along with a piezoelectric speaker," describes Hackaday. "The dongle connects to the hard drive activity light, which triggers a series of clicks from the speaker that sound remarkably like a hard drive heading seeking tracks."

A demo of the device can be viewed at 7:09, with a full defragmentation at 13:11.

Germany's government plans to keep two of the country's three remaining nuclear power plants running until mid-April to help prevent a potential winter energy shortage, the economy and energy minister said Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: The announcement by Economy and Energy Minister Robert Habeck means the government has officially, albeit temporarily, reversed Germany's long-held plan to shut shut down its nuclear plants by the end of the year. Habeck said the decision to keep operating the two plants in southern Germany -- Isar 2 in Bavaria and Neckarwestheim north of Stuttgart -- into next year a "necessary" step to avoid potential power grid shortages in the region.

Officials still plan to close down Germany's third remaining nuclear plant, Emsland in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, at the end of the year as planned. Habeck said officials announced the decision Tuesday in light of stress test data from France's nuclear providers that indicated grid shortages could be more severe than expected this winter. Like other European countries, Germany is scrambling to ensure the lights stay on and homes stay warm this winter despite the reduction in natural gas flows from Russia amid the war in Ukraine. "The situation in France is not good and has developed much worse than was actually forecasted in the last few weeks," Habeck said. "As the minister responsible for energy security I have to say: Unless this development is reversed, we will leave Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim on the grid in the first quarter of 2023."