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PG&E, Rewiring America and Google Launch First-of-its-Kind Virtual Power Plant to Help Lower Costs for All Customers

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Initiative aims to deliver hundreds of deeply discounted home energy upgrades and enroll over 20,000 existing energy devices installed in customers’ homes

OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) today announced SHARE (Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency), a first-of-its-kind Virtual Power Plant (VPP) designed to help communities benefit from rising electric demand, while improving affordability and reliability for all customers.

Together, PG&E, Rewiring America, Google, Carrier Global Corporation, Tesla, Sunrun, Renew Home, Demand Side Analytics, encoord and other partners will deploy the new VPP—a coordinated network of home batteries, smart devices, and battery-enabled heat pumps that reduce energy use during periods of high demand—in Bay Area communities.

The model is designed to create additional capacity, support reliability and help put downward pressure on rates while participating households save money through smarter energy management with next-generation home technology. SHARE is a first-of-its-kind VPP proof-of-concept that combines enrollment of existing home energy devices with regional deployment of privately funded new electrification technologies to address growing electric demand.

“This is about delivering power at the speed our economy demands—while improving affordability and reliability for the people we serve,” said Chelle Izzi, Chief Commercial Officer, PG&E. “SHARE shows how investing in customers can unlock grid capacity, support growth, and bring real benefits back to communities.”

A New Approach to Meeting Rising Demand
Electric demand is rising across the country as more businesses, vehicles, homes and buildings rely on electricity. PG&E continues to aggressively build and modernize the electric system to meet long-term growth, including needed transmission and distribution investments.

SHARE adds a complementary, near-term pathway: investing directly in homes located where energy demand is growing. This proof-of-concept VPP is designed to demonstrate how targeted investments in homes can help: 

Improve reliability and lower costs by making better use of everyday, flexible home energy resources alongside continued grid investmentExpand capacity during periods of high demandSupport new and growing energy users more quickly

PG&E is working with Tesla, Sunrun, and Renew Home to enroll nearly 21,000 existing flexible energy devices into the program. This will allow participating households to gain new ways to manage their energy costs and earn rewards for the smart features they already use, while shifting demand during peak periods helping make better use of existing infrastructure, benefiting customers across the region. The resource is expected to begin supporting the grid as early as fall 2026.

“Home energy devices hold enormous, untapped capacity that can meaningfully improve affordability and reliability for all Californians,” said Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun. “This initiative unlocks that potential while giving customers an opportunity to share in the economic benefits of helping improve their local grid.”

Carrier is the initiative’s launch partner for the new deployments, providing its battery-enabled heat pump solution, including the Carrier Performance™ Series Variable-Speed Heat Pump with EnerSync™, that automatically stores and shifts energy use to help lower costs for customers, maintain comfort, and support grid reliability during periods of peak demand.

“As energy demand grows, SHARE demonstrates how Carrier can help deliver distributed capacity with the firmness to scale as a fast and reliable grid resource,” said Hakan Yilmaz, President, Carrier Energy & Chief Sustainability Officer. “Carrier’s battery-enabled HVAC technology brings together our trusted comfort, market presence and dealer scale to help deliver homeowner value and reliable grid flexibility.”

Eligible customers in Santa Clara and Alameda counties will have the opportunity to receive:

New Carrier high-efficiency, battery-enabled heat pumpsLower monthly energy bills through smarter energy managementGreater comfort and improved home resilience

All told, these resources will be orchestrated into a distributed power plant by PG&E and Demand Side Analytics with the goal of unlocking additional capacity on the regional electric transmission system.

Designed to Protect Customers
SHARE reflects a shared commitment to responsible energy growth and is structured so that existing customers benefit from growing grid capacity needs. The program will be fully funded by Google to support customer incentives, technology deployment, and program delivery.

“As demand scales, our current electricity grid can bridge the gap—if we optimize it correctly,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, Global Head of Energy & Power at Google. “This program unlocks the potential of local distributed energy resources to strengthen grid capacity and resiliency while delivering meaningful benefits for local communities.”

Rewiring America will work directly with households to deploy and enroll energy-saving electric technologies into SHARE that can serve as flexible grid resources while improving the customer experience. They will also work closely with local installers to ensure projects meet high quality and performance standards.

“This initiative shows how households can be part of the energy solution,” said Ari Matusiak, Founder and CEO of Rewiring America. “By helping families upgrade their homes with efficient electric technologies, we can lower costs, improve comfort, and optimize California’s grid capacity at the same time.”

PG&E will lead planning, analysis, and validation to evaluate customer impacts, system performance and long-term benefits.

A Model for California—and Beyond
SHARE represents a new way for utilities, customers and technology partners to work together to help meet electricity growth reliably and affordably through smarter utilization of the grid. This location-based approach is designed to inform future solutions for transmission constraints, local capacity challenges and rising demand across the electric system.

Over time, the proof of concept could expand beyond residential customers to include commercial, industrial, and utility-scale applications—supporting economic growth, improving grid utilization and lowering emissions.

PG&E and Rewiring America will begin reaching out to eligible customers starting fall 2026. SHARE is expected to run through 2027, with initial findings from the program expected to be shared in late 2026 or early 2027.

To learn more and explore program eligibility, visit https://energyshare.rewiringamerica.org/

About PG&E
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE: PCG), is a combined natural gas and electric utility serving more than sixteen million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California. For more information, visit pge.compge.com/news, and pge.com/innovation.     

About Google
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Through products and platforms like Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Google Cloud, Chrome, and YouTube, Google plays a meaningful role in the daily lives of billions of people and has become one of the most widely-known companies in the world. Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

About Rewiring America 
Rewiring America puts American households at the center of an affordable, resilient, all-electric future. We partner with policymakers, industry leaders, manufacturers, workers, and communities to strengthen the electric grid, lower energy prices, and build Homegrown Energy solutions for all.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pge-rewiring-america-and-google-launch-first-of-its-kind-virtual-power-plant-to-help-lower-costs-for-all-customers-302868400.html

SOURCE Pacific Gas and Electric Company

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USI Launches AI Smart Camera Solution to Accelerate Smart Manufacturing

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NANTOU, Sept. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — USI today announced its next-generation AI Smart Camera solution, a comprehensive edge AI and vision platform that empowers manufacturers to accelerate digital transformation through AI-driven quality inspection, process automation, logistics optimization, and smart factory initiatives.

Moving beyond conventional camera hardware, USI’s AI Smart Camera integrates a high-performance, low-power edge computing platform, high-resolution imaging technology, and proprietary AI vision software to deliver real-time image analysis and actionable insights at the edge. Designed for modern manufacturing environments, the solution enables automated inspection, early defect detection, and faster, more consistent quality decisions. By reducing inspection costs, improving production efficiency, and enhancing product quality, it helps manufacturers accelerate their transition toward smarter and more autonomous production operations.

For manufacturers, the journey to AI-powered vision extends beyond object detection and defect identification. Success depends on turning AI from a proof-of-concept project into a production-ready solution that delivers consistent performance, scales efficiently, and seamlessly adapts to evolving manufacturing requirements.

USI addresses this challenge with an integrated AI Smart Camera platform that supports the complete AI development lifecycle—from data collection and dataset generation to model training and deployment. Its no-code/low-code AI model training platform further simplifies development, enabling customers to develop and deploy vision applications with greater efficiency and less dependence on specialized AI expertise.

Key features of USI AI Smart Camera include:

Real-Time Edge AI Processing: Performs image analysis and AI inference at the edge, enabling fast visual decisions and timely responses without relying solely on centralized computing.High-Quality Imaging for Industrial Inspection: Combines a high-resolution, low-lux-capable camera module with powerful Edge AI computing to support demanding inspection and machine vision applications.Faster AI Deployment: Integrates hardware, embedded software, and AI vision development tools into a production-ready platform, helping customers shorten development cycles and accelerate the transition from proof of concept to production.Flexible AI Vision Applications: Supports object detection, defect identification, OCR, key-part positioning and tracking, assembly verification, product classification, and operation behavior detection and analysis.Seamless Integration with Industrial Environments: Ruggedized design with industrial-grade interfaces, including Ethernet, Power over Ethernet (PoE), HDMI, and MicroSD, ensuring seamless compatibility with existing equipment, machine vision systems, and automation platforms.

By automating visual inspection and defect identification, the AI Smart Camera can reduce reliance on manual QA operations while improving inspection consistency. Its real-time visual intelligence can also provide actionable data to help manufacturers quickly identify process deviations, reduce defect rates, and lower production costs. The platform can further serve as an intelligent visual decision layer for automated production, providing real-time visual guidance and feedback to robotic systems. This enables manufacturers to move beyond inspection automation toward more responsive and autonomous production processes.

“Demand for AI-powered vision applications is growing rapidly across the manufacturing sector. Today’s manufacturers are seeking more than just camera hardware. They need complete, end-to-end solutions that can be deployed quickly and deliver measurable business value,” said Justin Chang, Director of the Vertical Mobility Solution Center at USI. “By combining advanced Edge AI capabilities with our integrated vision platform, we enable customers to accelerate the adoption of smart manufacturing, quality inspection, and industrial automation applications. Our solution helps bring AI from proof of concept to production faster and more efficiently.”

As a global ODM partner, USI combines expertise in product design, manufacturing, and Edge AI integration to deliver complete solutions tailored to customer requirements. The AI Smart Camera is already deployed within USI’s own manufacturing operations, providing a production-proven reference platform for industrial AI vision applications.

Building on this experience, USI can customize AI vision solutions around customers’ specific production environments and business requirements, helping shorten development time, reduce implementation risks, and accelerate their smart manufacturing journey.

 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/usi-launches-ai-smart-camera-solution-to-accelerate-smart-manufacturing-302871089.html

SOURCE USI

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Media’s future tense in AI-driven world

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BEIJING, Sept. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — This is an op-ed from China Daily.

Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik imagined a door that demands payment before opening — a fantasy then, but eerily prescient in today’s AI-driven world. While Elon Musk predicts AI will bring global abundance, for traditional media that abundance has already arrived — with devastating consequences.

The question is no longer whether AI changes media, but what role professional journalism can play when information is plentiful, yet truth, context and reality grow scarce.

Dick’s own life — overlooked, depressed and penniless — belied his extraordinary foresight. In The Man in the High Castle, he imagined alternate realities. Today, personalized algorithms, misinformation and AI-generated content make such alternate realities all too real.

Yet Dick’s vision also offers hope through an unexpected link with the ancient Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes). Both suggest reality is not fixed, but a pattern of ever-shifting possibilities. The I Ching asks not “What will happen?” but “What situation am I in, and how should I respond to its changing pattern?” That, arguably, is precisely the role media must adopt in the AI age: providing orientation, credibility and meaning when information itself has lost its scarcity and economic value.

Not all sci-fi is dystopian. Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics embodied faith that humans could impose rules on technology — yet today’s AI race is far more complex. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek imagined a moneyless, post-scarcity civilization; AI may be bringing that closer, just as Google’s free search and maps once upended the world.

So where does this leave traditional media? In a Dickian dystopia, media could become a modern-day I Ching — helping people navigate uncertainty, distinguish illusion from reality, and make informed choices when no single truth prevails. In a Roddenberry-esque future, media could guide humanity on how to live wisely with AI-driven abundance.

The practical challenge remains: financing itself in the first scenario and inspiring itself in the second. As Dick warned in The Man in the High Castle, humanity’s “destiny lies in the hands of a few men.” We can only hope some of them are traditional media editors.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/medias-future-tense-in-ai-driven-world-302871740.html

SOURCE China Daily

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New agentic AI platform sounds death knell for manual presentation tools

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Sembly AI launches Sembly 3.0 in biggest evolution since 2019

SYDNEY, Sept. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Sembly AI launches Sembly 3.0, an agentic AI platform that transforms an organisation’s documents, meetings, and CRM content into finished, fully branded presentations, proposals, case studies and reports in minutes in over 45 languages.

The launch marks the company’s biggest evolution since it was founded in 2019, repositioning Sembly as an “AI execution layer” for businesses. It turns everyday business knowledge into the finished materials companies use to sell, deliver and communicate.

Users simply need to specify their goal (eg, “Sell my services”) and the client’s website, then watch Sembly get to work: pulling information from business materials, deriving appropriate branding, researching the customer, and producing a bespoke on-brand pitch deck.

“Prompts make people think about how to talk to AI. But dialogue lets them focus on what they want to accomplish,” said Gil Makleff, CEO and co-founder of Sembly AI. “That makes creating business documents faster and more efficient, turning time saved into real business impact.”

“Manually creating presentations is a thing of the past,” said Artem Koren, Chief Product & Technology Officer and co-founder of Sembly AI. “Business materials are the substrate of decision-making: they are how companies communicate, persuade and decide. Sembly 3.0 changes how they are made entirely.”

“Your customers want to hear how you serve them in their specific world and their specific situation, and Sembly makes that possible for every customer,” Koren added. “With Sembly 3.0, your results are as good as how clearly you can state your goal. That’s all you’re limited by.”

Early users of Sembly 3.0 report saving two to three weeks of work on reports and presentations that traditionally pass through multiple hands before they are delivery-ready.

Heorhii Tulchyi, Chief Technology Officer at market research company, Bell & Holmes, is one of those early users of Sembly 3.0.

He said: “Sembly has fundamentally changed how I prepare presentations and client communications. It has saved my team and me weeks of work and dramatically accelerated how we turn ideas and information into polished deliverables. I haven’t seen anything else on the market quite like it.”

Sembly 3.0 is available from today at www.sembly.ai.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/new-agentic-ai-platform-sounds-death-knell-for-manual-presentation-tools-302870013.html

SOURCE Sembly AI

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