When wildfires roared to life around Los Angeles, Janell Gruss had to leave immediately. But as the manager of a stable with 25 horses and other animals, she knew it was going to be complicated.While some people just got in their cars and drove out of the danger zone, Gruss had to wrangle more than two dozen frightened horses, as embers swirled in 100-mile (160-kilometer) -an-hour winds.”The last horse we had to get out of the barn… it was pretty bad,” Gruss told AFP at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, where hundreds of animals have been brought this week.”It was very smoky. It was dark. I couldn’t see where I was,” she recalled. “Both the horse and I were tripping over things, branches, whatever was on the ground.”Gruss said coralling the animals was so challenging, she feared at one point she might not make it out alive.”I thought I might have been one of those casualties,” she said, as tears rolled down her face.”You hear about the person that goes in to get the last horse and doesn’t come out.”More than 150,000 people have been forced from their homes by the huge blazes tearing through the city in a tragedy that has killed at least 16 people and changed the face of Los Angeles forever.With so many people ordered to get out of the way of the advancing wildfires and needing to take their animals with them, capacity is strained. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Jennie Nevin, director of communications for the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. “The first night was very busy and chaotic. Lots of people coming from all over.”- ‘A whirlwind’ -Dozens of people milled around the barns Saturday at the equestrian center, where donkeys, pigs and ponies have also found shelter.Tarah Paige, a professional stuntwoman, had brought her three-year-old daughter to visit their pony Truffles and her miniature cow Cuddles — a TV star in her own right who has appeared on several programs.”It’s been a whirlwind,” said Paige, for whom the equestrian center has been an oasis in the midst of an unimaginable catastrophe.Nevin says there has been an outpouring of support and people offering their services to help care for the menagerie.”It really takes a village,” she said. “It takes the community.”Across the Los Angeles sprawl there are activists, veterinarians and volunteers working to rescue and care for animals made homeless in the tragedy, including some that were injured.The Pasadena Humane Society received about 400 animals from Altadena, where the flames have already consumed more than 14,000 acres (5,600 hectares). One of their patients is a five-day-old puppy that was found in the ruins of a building, its ears burned.Annie Harvilicz, founder of the Animal Wellness Center, says she has hardly slept a wink all week.As the fire spread through the upmarket Pacific Palisades, Harvilicz posted on Facebook that she was happy to take in animals.The post “exploded,” she said, and dogs, cats and even a rabbit began arriving. With flames still raging out of control, the calls for help have not stopped.But, she thinks, even when the firefighters have quelled the blaze, the slow-motion tragedy will roll on.”There’s gonna be more pets found, more pets injured, with smoke inhalation and burns that we’re gonna start to discover as some of the fire recedes,” she said.”This is just the beginning.”

With its focus on innovative products and cutting-edge technology, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has not historically paid much attention to energy companies.But there were signs of a shift at this year’s Las Vegas event, as the tech sector begins to confront its substantial energy needs, which are certain to grow as cloud computing and artificial intelligence advance.”If you’d asked me to do CES five years ago, I wouldn’t necessarily have seen the point,” said Sebastien Fiedorow, chief executive of the French start-up Aerleum, which manufactures synthetic fuel from carbon dioxide (C02).”But we are in a very different CES than five years ago,” he told AFP, adding that even if energy companies remain “on the fringes” of CES, “we’re here.”  “It’s a good first opportunity,” he added.Data centers accounted for 4.4 percent of US electricity needs in 2023, a figure that is likely to rise to 12 percent by 2028, according to the US Department of Energy.  Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, which organizes CES, said energy transition was intended to be “a big focus” of this year’s show. “It’s something we’ve talked about for awhile,” he added, stressing that the tech sector needs “innovative solutions” to ensure it has the power it requires moving forward. – ‘Not the most sexy’ -Among the companies pitching such innovation at CES, which wrapped up on Friday, was the Dutch firm LV Energy, which generates electricity from sound and vibrations. General director Satish Jawalapersad said the company’s presence at the show was noteworthy. “The fact that we’re here with the CES does say something, definitely,” he told AFP. But LV Energy didn’t mention artificial intelligence in its presentation, which he said likely suppressed interest, with AI being “the magic word,” at CES. “Maybe we’re not the most sexy… because we don’t say those words,” he told AFP.Other energy firms also acknowledged a struggle to break through. DataGreen, another French company, aims to build smaller, greener data centers that run on renewable power, saving tech companies money by reducing data storage costs. Cloud computing giants have so far shown no interest, said DataGreen’s head of AI, Julien Choukroun. “For now, they don’t see the point (in partnering with DataGreen) but we’re trying to convince them,” Choukroun said. The company won an innovation award at CES this year, its first appearance at the show, and Choukroun argued its services are essential. “We can’t continue to increase the hangar space (of data centers),” he said, stressing the land available to house sprawling storage sites “is not infinite.”He voiced confidence that once Big Tech realizes DataGreen offers cost savings, that will “be more persuasive than the ‘green'” aspect. – Changing mindsets -Jordan Huyghe, product manager at the French company Otrera, which designs small nuclear reactors, said a major change in the relationship between tech and the energy sector will require investment from giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Amazon is already the world’s largest purchaser of renewable energy.In September, Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation Energy to reopen the Three Mile Island power plant in the US state of Pennsylvania, the scene of a devastating nuclear meltdown in 1979.Energy from the plant will power Microsoft data centers. Solutions, Huyghe said, can come from companies big enough to fund them.”To move forward on projects like these, you need to raise money,” he said. While interest remains muted for smaller players, Jawalapersad of LV Energy said his company has “numerous leads” in the United States. Fiedorow of Aerleum said there was no doubt the tech sector’s focus on energy is growing. “We produce fuel and work on a technology that is pretty far removed from the focus of the Consumer Electronics Show,” he said. Aerleum’s presence in Las Vegas “shows that the mindset is changing.”