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With its plastic cover shorn off and its metal skeleton showing, the Tesla charger at the entrance of Crater Lake National Park looked a little like Johnny 5, the stark robot from the 1980s Short Circuit movies. Against my better judgment, I plugged in.
We’d driven the Model 3 up from Klamath Falls, Oregon, the closest Tesla supercharger to the national park. Because the drive to the lake covered more than 50 miles, I hoped to draw a little juice at the entrance gift shop to ensure we’d be okay for the day. The plug looked decrepit, but other users on the Plugshare charging website said it worked for them. I gave it a shot, though I got nothing but a yellow error signal.
No matter. I drove conservatively around the lake and kept to the speed limit on the drive back to Klamath Falls through a biblical swarm of midges. When we reached the supercharger with 15 miles of range to spare and opened the port, I audibly gasped. One of the metal prongs inside my Model 3 was bent all the way over to the side, making it impossible to charge the car. The end of my wife’s birthday vacation flashed before my eyes. Instead of enjoying two more days at Crater Lake and working our way down the California coast, we’d be marooned in southern Oregon, waiting for technicians from two towns away — all thanks to a busted charger I shouldn’t have used in the first place.
The Klamath Falls charging station was built into the parking lot of a Fred Meyer, the superstore chain of the Pacific Northwest. The two men closing its attached gas station at 10:45 p.m. said that, if I ran, I might make it to the one remaining unlocked door on the far end of the warehouse-sized shop before it closed for good at 11. Inside, I bought a pair of insulated needlenose pliers, plus a tall IPA for my troubles. I negotiated the bent prong back into place and watched the car accept blissful electrical salvation. (Don’t try this at home, and don’t mess with electricity.)
One year later, the reports from other travelers suggest the janky Crater Lake plug has been fixed, and my own near-catastrophe has transfigured from possible calamity to funny story. Still, it portends a major problem.
To travel in an EV is to have faith that the promised plug at the end of a drive will work. However, America’s charging infrastructure doesn’t inspire blind confidence. A flurry of trend stories, and surveys by the likes of J.D. Power, have found EV drivers who are perpetually annoyed with the hassle of difficult chargers or anxious about encountering broken ones. A 2022 survey by University of California, Berkeley, researchers of chargers around the San Francisco Bay Area found that only 72% of them were working properly at any given time. Another found that most drivers who use public chargers in California, the nation’s biggest EV market, had encountered a busted one.
There are plenty of reasons why these issues abound. Chargers are generally out in the open, vulnerable to vandalism or wear-and-tear, and typically without a human attendant on hand to help out if the technology fails. Tesla’s Superchargers see their share of out-of-order chargers, but at least the customer interface is near-seamless — the plug recognizes each car and auto-charges the driver’s credit card on file. Many others require several steps that are all prone to failure: Their touchscreens break, their software glitches, their credit card readers won’t cooperate, their supposed bluetooth connection won’t talk to your phone.
Some far-flung plugs require an instruction manual. Just before our trip to Crater Lake, we visited Lassen Volcanic National Park, where a couple of helpful EV plugs are waiting at the visitor’s center. But because there is spotty cell service in the mountains, using them requires a 10-step procedure that starts with going inside, hoping the guest wi-fi works, and downloading the third-party app that manages the chargers.
Fear of a busted charger is especially acute on a road trip far from home, and most crucial when venturing away from the highway and into hinterlands where chargers are sparse. On one winter’s journey through the interior of Utah, the point of failure wasn’t the plugs, but the plows — four chargers next to a restaurant in Escalante were too snowed in for me to reach them. Luckily, there were some others at a nearby lodge, where the receptionist lent me her old Subaru to get dinner across town.
Horror stories like these may dissuade people from ditching their dirty combustion engines and their nationwide network of ubiquitous gas stations. But when thinking about going EV, it’s important to be realistic about driving — something that’s discouraged by the way Americans shop for and imagine their cars.
My misadventures have come from pushing my little 240-mile EV and America’s charging infrastructure to their limits by reaching for destinations far from the freeway. Within populated areas, the consequences of janky chargers amount to inconvenience, not disaster. A 12-plug Tesla Supercharger with a broken stall means maybe waiting a second longer to charge. If things have really gone wrong, the next charging station isn’t 100 miles away.
There are enough plugs to keep you out of trouble in the city or the suburbs, where residents do 90% of their driving. The problem is the 10%. A two-car family with one EV has it easy, as they could use their electric for city errands and the gas or hybrid car to make long-distance travel more convenient. But many people, especially those with a single vehicle, need their car to do everything, including a national park road trip to the middle of nowhere.
For Americans to fully embrace the EV, chargers need to go everywhere. And they need to actually work when you arrive.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.