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On ominous forecasts, Ford’s hybrid pivot, and Disney’s Autopia ride
Current conditions: Nearly 4,000 schools in the Philippines have suspended in-person classes due to extreme heat • Large parts of the central and southern High Plains are under red flag fire warnings • It will be 57 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy in Baltimore today for President Biden’s visit to the site of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.
The coastal United States and Caribbean should prepare for an “extremely active” 2024 hurricane season. That’s the message from Colorado State University researchers, who yesterday released their preseason extended range forecast for the region. They estimate there will be more named hurricanes than usual (11 compared with the 30-year average of 7.2) and that five of them could be major storms. There’s an above-normal chance (62% compared with 43% historical averages) that at least one of these major hurricanes will make landfall somewhere along the continental U.S. coastline. While these are just predictions, the team says they are more confident than in past years in their forecast “given how hurricane-favorable the large-scale conditions appear to be.”
NOAA forecast for El Niño and La Niña. Black arrow indicates the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season.CSU
They’re referring to two factors: Unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, and an expected transition out of El Niño and into La Niña. Warmer waters provide more energy for storms, and La Niña “typically increases Atlantic hurricane activity through decreases in vertical wind shear.” Ocean temperatures last year were the hottest ever recorded, driven by both El Niño and climate change from burning fossil fuels. “A key area of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form is already abnormally warm,” explainedThe New York Times, “much warmer than an ideal swimming pool temperature of about 80 degrees and on the cusp of feeling more like warm bathtub water.” The oceans have absorbed 90% of the excessive heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.
Ford is delaying production of its next-generation electric pickup and its long-awaited three-row electric SUV, with the vehicles now set to be available in 2026 and 2027, respectively. In the near-term, the company plans to follow market trends by focusing on hybrids. Sales of hybrids climbed last quarter by 45% in the U.S., compared with 2.7% growth in sales for EVs. And more than half of the Ford Maverick compact pickup trucks sold last quarter had conventional hybrid engines, “a sign of how rapidly hybrids and plug-in hybrids are ascending in the American car market,” says Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer. Ford plans to offer hybrid versions of its entire gas-powered lineup in North America by 2030. “We are committed to scaling a profitable EV business, using capital wisely and bringing to market the right gas, hybrid and fully electric vehicles at the right time,” said Ford president and CEO Jim Farley.
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A Boston-based battery startup called Alsym Energy has raised $78 million in a new funding round. The company has created a rechargeable battery that’s lithium- and cobalt-free, which means it’s less flammable and not as vulnerable to supply shortages. As VentureBeatexplained: “When it comes to batteries, we’ve put all our eggs in one basket. Non-lithium batteries help diversify the global battery mix so that lithium-ion supply chain disruptions or pricing volatility don’t derail the clean energy transition.” The company will use the new funds to hire more people and build production lines to provide samples to customers, according toTechCrunch.
Germany’s transport minister dismissed reports that the country’s autobahn may introduce speed limits in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is unique among industrialized countries in that many of its highways have no nationwide speed limits. Studies suggest lowering top speeds to 75mph could cut 6.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year. Germany aims to become carbon neutral by 2045, but the country’s transport sector has been the slowest to cut emissions, reported Reuters. Support for speed limits has been growing, even though Transport Minister Volker Wissing said “people don’t want that,” according toPolitico.
Disneyland’s Autopia ride is ditching its gas-powered cars and going electric as part of its plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. The attraction, which lets visitors drive around a miniature motorway in small cars, is located at Disneyland’s Tomorrowland in Anaheim, California. When Tomorrowland opened in 1955, Walt Disney called it “a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come.” But Autopia’s existing cars are loud and produce noxious fumes, prompting complaints from visitors and climate activists alike. This week Disney announced it will swap them out for electric versions “in the next few years,” though it didn’t say whether the new cars would be fully electric or hybrid. Bob Gurr, who helped Walt design Tomorrowland in the ‘50s, told the Los Angeles Times it’s time to “get rid of those God-awful gasoline fumes.”
“The transition to all-electric buildings is so well underway that legal obstacles thrown up by the fossil fuel industry and its allies won’t be enough to stop it.” –The LA Times editorial board says Berkeley’s decision to abandon its natural gas ban is just a “bump in the road.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
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.