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Bay Area battery maker Lyten sources 80% of its components in the U.S. But its ability to scale still depends on trade.
China dominates the lithium-ion battery supply chain at nearly every level, from critical minerals processing and refining to cell manufacturing and battery pack assembly. So now that the nation faces a cumulative 54% tariff rate, one might think domestic battery manufacturers in the United States — especially those exploring lithium-ion alternatives — would be celebrating their good fortune.
But the actual picture is markedly more mixed. Take Bay Area-based lithium-sulfur battery producer Lyten. On the one hand, Lyten is particularly well positioned to take advantage of the administration’s focus on building out U.S. supply chains. The company has been around since 2015, and last year snatched up a shuttered 200-megawatt factory from Northvolt after the Swedish battery giant declared bankruptcy.
Lyten aims to use entirely domestic inputs in its battery — a goal it’s been chasing since well before Wednesday’s tariff announcement. It currently sources “well over 80%” of its core components domestically, which is largely possible because its lithium-sulfur battery chemistry doesn’t require critical minerals such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, or graphite, which are mined globally and almost always refined in China. Sulfur, Lyten’s key cathode material, is cheap and abundant in the U.S. The company has ambitious plans to start producing at the old Northvolt facility this year, and is planning a much larger gigafactory in Reno, Nevada for 2027.
But Lyten’s plans for scale will depend on its ability to source affordable construction materials. The company’s timeline hasn’t changed for now, but Trump’s tariffs have introduced a big new question mark into its future operations. “We're not drawing any conclusions quite yet,” Lyten’s Chief Sustainability Officer Keith Norman told me.
As Norman emphasized, Lyten is fundamentally “a hard tech company that needs to build a lot of infrastructure” in order to scale, and tariffs could make that a much more expensive proposition. “The building of physical factories, those materials, the infrastructure to do that, the equipment to do that, a lot of that is coming through international trade,” Norman told me.
“The reality is the energy transition is a manufacturing transition,” Norman told me. “There’s nothing in the energy transition that doesn’t require pretty significant investments in manufacturing and build out.” Therefore, tariffs that hit construction materials and equipment will put emergent domestic energy companies — climate friendly or not — at risk of a slowdown. “And so I think that’s the real question — are there ways to build a managed tariff strategy that creates that opening for accelerating U.S. manufacturing?” Norman questioned.
Import duties of 25% on steel and aluminum went into effect in March, so while these building materials are exempt from the sweeping tariffs announced on Wednesday, those additional costs are already shaking out through the economy. There were also plenty of other building materials that were not exempt, such as cement and drywall. What’s more, according to the consultancy Off-Highway Research, which provided its data to Construction Briefing, the tariffs are expected to add about $4.2 billion to the cost of imported construction equipment — think things like bulldozers, cranes, and dump trucks. Costs for HVAC systems, plumbing, and electrical equipment are also set to rise.
For his part, Norman is more worried about the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the EV market than the stationary energy storage market. The electric vehicle industry is still trying to figure out how to move beyond early adopters to achieve mass market success, he told me, a process that tariffs could seriously hamper as they raise the price of innumerable EV components. Battery storage, on the other hand, is already seeing “gangbusters growth,” as Norman put it. So while tariffs will almost certainly make energy storage systems — largely dominated by lithium-ion batteries — more expensive, “In general, we expect that market to continue to grow incredibly rapidly, partially on the backs of the fact that power demand is growing rapidly,” he told me.
Lyten sees itself as a part of that rapid growth. In theory, lithium-sulfur batteries could achieve a greater energy density than standard lithium-ion, though problems with conductivity and cycle life remain. So while Lyten ultimately wants to produce batteries for use in electric vehicles and energy storage systems that are cheaper and more efficient than the industry standard, earlier applications could include use in drones, satellites, and two- and three-wheelers, which don’t have as high performance requirements.
Norman thinks he’s set up the company to survive tough times, if not precisely a global trade war. “Bringing a new battery chemistry to market, we told ourselves we need to be able to survive two major market downturns,” Norman said. “And so we’ve designed the company, the cap structure, our funding strategy, all around being ready for things like this.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct Norman’s title.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”