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The Ford Motor Company expects to pay roughly $19.5 billion in charges, primarily from its electric vehicle business. In a press release, the automaker said it would refocus on hybrids and “efficient gas engines,” ramp up manufacturing of batteries for a standalone business, and boost truck production. The battery business aims to churn out 20 gigawatts of capacity every year starting in 2027. But the charges the company faces stem from its decision to abandon multibillion-dollar investments the carmaker made in new assembly lines for electric vehicles, demand for which slowed last year and dipped at the end of this year after the Trump administration phased out federal tax credits in September. “This is a customer-driven shift to create a stronger, more resilient and more profitable Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a press release. “The operating reality has changed, and we are redeploying capital into higher-return growth opportunities: Ford Pro, our market-leading trucks and vans, hybrids and high margin opportunities like our new battery energy storage business.”
Ford isn’t the only one accelerating in reverse away from electric vehicles. Last week I told you about the deal the European Union struck between its center-right and far-right lawmakers to curb environmental regulations. Now the bloc has moved to scrap its 2035 target to ban sales of new combustion-engine vehicles. The move would have marked a dramatic sea change in the West’s transportation policy, all but eliminating sales of traditional gasoline-powered cars in favor of battery-propelled alternatives. It’s a sign of Brussels’ broader effort to pull back from green mandates that European President Ursula von der Leyen blames for the continent’s economic malaise.
An old copper mine in Arizona. John Moore/Getty Images
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
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Virginia’s outgoing Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed more energy bills than he signed last year, killing legislation designed to increase rooftop solar and energy storage, boost utility planning requirements, and make efficiency improvements more available to low-income residents. Now that Democrat Abigail Spanberger is coming in to replace Youngkin as the next governor, those bills are coming back, the Virginia Mercury reported. In a column, lawyer and environmentalist Ivy Main called on Democrats to dream bigger. “Data center development is so far outstripping supply side solutions that if legislators aren’t more aggressive this year, next year they will find themselves further behind than ever,” Main wrote. “As more bills are filed over the coming weeks, we are likely to see plenty of bold proposals. Hopefully, legislators now understand the urgency, and will be ready to act.”
Data centers are now “swallowing American politics,” Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote recently. Just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center nearby, according to a poll from September by Heatmap Pro.
The 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster in India never resulted in any serious ramifications for Union Carbide, the Dow Chemical subsidiary responsible for the accident that left more than 3,700 dead from exposure to toxic gases. In 2010, India passed a law that threatened to impose full civil penalties on any private nuclear company that suffered an accident somehow. That legislation has prevented all but Russia’s state-owned nuclear company from entering the Indian market. Hoping to lure American small modular reactor companies to India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed all year to overhaul the civil liability law. On Monday, Modi-aligned lawmakers proposed legislation to reform the nuclear sector and free foreign vendors from financial responsibility for anything that could potentially happen with their equipment.
The renewables industry, meanwhile, is continuing to boom on the subcontinent. The Japanese industrial giant agreed to invest $1.3 billion into renewable power in India in its latest push into green energy in South Asia, Bloomberg reported.
There’s green hydrogen, made from blasting freshwater with electricity made by renewables. There’s blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel that comes from natural gas mitigated with carbon capture equipment. Gray hydrogen is the traditional kind made with natural gas that spews pollution into the atmosphere. And then there’s pink hydrogen, made like the green kind with clean electricity except generated by a nuclear reactor. Orange is the latest color in the hydrogen rainbow, referring to the version of the gas that comes from a chemical process that accelerates production of the gas in natural formations underground. The startup Vema has announced a 10-year conditional offtake agreement with the off-grid data center power provider Verne to supply over 36,000 metric tons per year of “orange” hydrogen for server farms, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported.
Still, the race between the two countries is heating up. Cumulative investment in fusion energy soared 30% between June and September to $15 billion, up from a little over $11 billion, according to a report by the European Union’s F4E Fusion Observatory written up by NucNet. That fusion is, as Heatmap's Katie Brigham has written, “finally, possibly, almost” arriving at the same time that data centers to power artificial intelligence are driving up electricity demand is fortuitous. Or, it would be, if AI doesn’t end up proving to be inflated by hype. On Friday, Wall Street showed jitters over the possibility that the bubble may burst, sending shares of companies such as Oracle and Nvidia plunging. It begs the question Katie raised in another story in September: What if we get fusion, but we don’t need it?
The South Korean battery manufacturer SK On canceled its partnership to work on electric vehicles with the Ford Motor Company, throwing the fate of the two companies’ three factories in the American Southeast into jeopardy. The announcement, E&E News reported, also casts doubt over the $9.6 billion loan the Biden administration gave the joint venture, known as Blue Oval SK. The collaboration came as American automakers teamed up with Korean battery companies to hasten the establishment of an EV supply chain. General Motors inked a deal with LG Energy Solution and Ford with SK On. But as sales of EVs flatline — due in part to President Donald Trump axing the federal tax credit for purchases of new electric vehicles — the nascent supply networks are withering on the vine. Ford isn’t down for the count, however. In August, as I wrote in the newsletter at the time, the company unveiled what it billed as its “Model T moment” for EVs, a whole new assembly line structure meant to scale up and iron out production of battery-powered cars.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Prime Minister Mark Carney has scrapped Canada’s carbon tax, inked major oil and gas deals, and pumped the brakes on a scheme to boost electric vehicle sales. Now the leader of the Liberal Party is facing blowback from allies and sustainability-minded executives who say the reversals put Canada’s net-zero goals out of reach. The former environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, quit the cabinet in protest, as have two founding members of the federal government’s Net Zero Advisory Body. “From a climate-science standpoint, this risks undermining the urgency of emissions reduction,” Paul Polman, the former chief executive of home-goods giant Unilever and a campaigner for sustainable capitalism, told the Financial Times. “Betting heavily on unproven massive-scale CCS [carbon capture and storage] and a cleaner-oil narrative while accelerating production ... seems like a gamble with global emissions targets, and with the credibility of net zero by 2050. Gambling with firm science does not seem smart to me.”
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Utility-scale battery storage systems are facing increased risk of cyberattack from hackers working either for governments or criminal groups. That’s according to a white paper from the consultancies Brattle Group and Dragos. Battery deployments are expected to grow by as much as 45% in the next five years, raising the need for new protections against digital meddling. “Battery storage systems are being used across the grid to enable the deployment of variable demand sources such as solar and wind,” Phil Tonkin, field chief technology officer at Dragos, told Utility Dive’s sister publication Cybersecurity Dive. “This growing dependence makes them an attractive target.” Even relatively small-scale attacks can have devastating consequences. A single outage involving a 100-megawatt system for four hours in the U.S. would cost up to $1.2 million in revenue, the report found. A large-scale cyber attack that takes out 3,000 megawatts for a day would take a $39 million toll on the economy. Dragos is currently tracking as many as 18 groups that “are known to pose a threat to the electrical grid.”
Canada may be taking a U turn on climate policy, but France just updated its National Low-Carbon Strategy with an end date for using fossil fuels. The document “foresees the end of oil use between 2040 and 2045,” France24 reported, with natural gas phasing out by 2050. France is far ahead of most developed countries toward decarbonizing its power system since the nation has generated the majority of its electricity from nuclear reactors since the late 20th century. Under the plan, the French government expected electricity consumption to increase as heat pumps replace furnaces and electric vehicles swap in for diesel cars. Renewables are expected to cover the increase in electricity production.
Conspiracy theorists who think condensation trails from airplanes are some kind of population-control chemical may have their hands full with the paranoia fodder that geoengineering efforts represent. But actual scientists at Leipzig University have made a discovery about contrails’ effect on warming. The researchers found that “hidden” contrails within naturally forming cirrus clouds — previously not factored into assessments — contribute up to 10% of the warming all contrails cause. “We now know that not only the visible contrails we see in the sky but also those that form within clouds need to be taken into account when assessing the impact of aviation on the climate,” Torsten Seelig, the study's lead author, said in a statement.
