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The race is on to build a game-changing affordable EV.
This occasion passed with much less fanfare than you might’ve expected, but Tesla (formerly Tesla Motors) turned 20 this month. Back then, Tesla’s co-founder — no, not the guy you’re thinking of — Martin Eberhard called the very few green vehicles on the market around that time “punishment cars.” Abysmal little things. Seemingly designed by and for people who didn’t think you should be driving at all, and nothing with any real appeal beyond a vague notion of saving the planet.
One of Tesla’s greatest victories was making EVs sexy and fast and desirable. Particularly with the Model S, a flashy luxury car that competed directly against the best from Mercedes-Benz and BMW. And it worked, eventually; almost every automaker has spent the last few years racing to catch up using the same playbook.
But what the rising EV industry needs now — what the world needs even more — is more EVs at the bottom of the market. And this time, they won’t even be the punishment cars that Eberhard hated so much.
There remain two major barriers to wider EV adoption. The first is making charging more widely available and less terrible, both at home and in public; that’s changing quickly thanks to huge government investments and market forces. Just this week, seven major global automakers announced they’d team up to do what Tesla did years ago by building a vast charging network across North America. It’s going to take years to fully materialize, but it’s progress nonetheless.
The other barrier — the greater one — is cost. There are reasons EVs have been so expensive, of course. Every new technology follows that trajectory. Batteries are hard to source and build, the factories to make them barely exist at the scale automakers need to drive down costs, and the capital costs involved with this electric reinvention is hard for Wall Street to swallow. (Ask Ford about that one.)
Especially in recent decades, car companies have spent considerable energy focusing on the top of the market — the most expensive cars where they can drive the biggest profit margins. But right now, the market is speaking in the other direction when it comes to EVs.
Just this week, General Motors hit reverse on a plan to kill off the Chevrolet Bolt. GM would previously say the Bolt was old, based on outdated batteries, unable to charge as quickly as modern rivals, and reportedly rather unprofitable. But tell that to the nearly 20,000 Americans who bought a Bolt or its crossover version in the first quarter of this year alone, spurred by the fact that they could get a car that used no gasoline and had great daily range for a mid-$20,000 price tag — or less, if you knew how to score a deal.
Evidently, GM has finally seen the light and decided that killing off yet another beloved electrified car with a lot of potential and a huge following was a bad decision. Now, CEO Mary Barra says, the Bolt will return using GM’s all-new battery setup for more modern performance and the “great affordability” its current customers love.
It’s a smart business decision: The automaker even says 70 percent of people trading a car in for the Bolt are new to GM. That’s not something a car company should give up. So if GM can finally get the Bolt to profitability — and maybe it can since the new Bolt will be using the built-at-scale Ultium batteries it’s using for every EV moving forward — it could win a market that barely even exists right now. A future, hopefully sub-$30,000 Chevrolet Bolt is going to be a huge deal.
So too is the new Volvo EX30, a small electric crossover with 275 miles of range, an IKEA-tastic minimalist interior built largely with recycled materials, and a compelling $34,950 starting price. I spent some time with the EX30 at its debut in New York this week, and it’s one of the more compelling and interesting EVs I’ve seen in a while. Coming from a more premium brand like Volvo, this will be no “punishment car,” and people at the Scandinavian car company say the demand for it is already far greater than they expected. “We operate from Japan to Brazil to the U.S. and Sweden. Everyone wants this car,” a Volvo rep told me.
Finally, there’s the company that’s both the EV market leader and the industry wild card: Tesla. CEO Elon Musk has long alluded to some kind of $25,000-ish car, possibly called the Model 2 or Model C. This would be absolutely crucial to Tesla’s take-over-the-world sales goals, and it would address one of the biggest criticisms of the company as of late, which is that it’s not working on new products. Now, the usual skepticism around a Musk declaration is warranted here — he has also claimed before that Tesla could build such a car and make it “fully autonomous.” But if anyone selling cars in the U.S. can pull that off at scale right now, it’s Tesla. And I would not call such a car, or a revamped Bolt, or this Volvo a “punishment car.” Just an affordable one.
Note my qualification above about selling here. China’s automakers are already pulling this off. Thanks to years of massive government investment and a laser focus on batteries and software over ICE powertrains, its EVs are incredibly advanced now — enough to spook a lot of other automakers. They’re making inroads into European countries and stealing market share there. Why? Not just because they’re good, but because they’re cheap, too.
Political tensions and stiff tariffs keep Chinese-made EVs out of our market for now, but that feels destined to change; automakers are already finding ways around that. That screaming-deal Volvo EX30? It’s made in China, and it’s part of how Volvo, which is owned by a Chinese automaker, can achieve those low prices, even with the tariff. I expect we’ll see more of that in the coming years.
How do they get the prices down from their $54,000 average sticker? Production at scale, batteries made from cheaper materials like lithium-ion phosphate, simplifying interiors and other components like Volvo has done, and rethinking production techniques like Tesla has done and Toyota’s about to try. There might even be an unexpected benefit to all of this: those cheaper EVs starting to emerge on the horizon? They’re generally going to be smaller, too. If people are enticed to try these cars by their price tags — maybe even as a second or third car, as Volvo thinks will be the case — they may realize they’ve been buying a bit too big for their needs. From a safety, infrastructure, and resource perspective, EV weight needs to go down. Maybe smaller, cheaper cars will help with that, but I’m reluctant to be too optimistic about it.
Then again, even RJ Scaringe, the CEO of $75,000 EV truck maker Rivian, gets it. His company’s next planned EV is a smaller, more affordable vehicle. “We hope that the R2 platform helps pull a lot of customers across that jump where I want to spend $45,000 or $40,000 in a vehicle,” he told Heatmap in an interview published this week.
I’d go even deeper than that and say that the next automaker who can figure out a truly great $25,000 EV, and build it at enough scale to be profitable, is going to have a game-changing hit on its hands. At this point, it’s not a question of if, but when — and from whom.
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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.