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On Arctic blasts, Tesla sales, and offshore drilling bans
Current conditions: A cold snap in Europe could deplete natural gas supplies • More than two feet of lake-effect snow could fall this weekend in upstate New York • Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, has become the most polluted city in the world, prompting a push for more EVs.
Bitterly cold weather is descending on the central and eastern U.S. this week, and it could last through the whole of January. The first Arctic blast will send temperatures plunging as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below normal, and that will be followed by an even colder burst of air next week, and then another. “This will likely be the most significant cold we have seen in years,” said forecasters at the National Weather Service office. Energy demand will surge, and a lot of snow and ice could cause power outages in some areas. Already a winter storm is forecast for the Central Plains this weekend, with the weather system shifting eastward to the Mid-Atlantic region next week. Even Southern states like Texas and Florida will feel the cold. “At this time, it looks like there will be at least three major blasts of Arctic air that will affect the Southern states,” AccuWeather meteorologist Alex DaSilva said. “The first outbreak will be from Jan. 3-4, the second on Jan. 7-8 and then the third round on Jan. 11-12.”
AccuWeather
Tesla reported yesterday that it had delivered 495,570 cars in the last three months of the year, and 1,789,226 in 2024 as a whole. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted, that represents a decline in annual sales from 2023 — Tesla’s first annual decline in more than 10 years, back when the company’s deliveries were counted in the hundreds or single-digit thousands — although the fourth quarter figure is a record for quarterly deliveries. Tesla had forecast around 515,000 deliveries to meet its “slight growth” goals. The company had cited “sustained macroeconomic headwinds” weighing on the broader electric vehicle market in its most recent investor letter, and again referred to “ongoing macroeconomic conditions” to explain the miss on deliveries. While Tesla’s car business appears to have stalled to some extent, the energy storage business is another story. The company said that in the fourth quarter of last year it had deployed 11 gigawatt-hours of storage, and 31.4 gigawatt-hours in the year as a whole. If Tesla’s deployment rate in 2025 merely matched its fourth quarter rate, it would mean 40% annual growth.
President Biden is expected to issue an executive order permanently banning new offshore oil and gas drilling in large sections of U.S. coastal waters, Bloombergreported, citing unnamed sources. As soon as Monday, Biden will invoke the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a 72-year-old law that gives the president authority to ban drilling, but doesn’t include any wording to allow presidents to revoke a ban. That means President-elect Donald Trump will not be able to easily reverse the move. Environmental groups applauded the report. “Restricting offshore drilling is a big win for the climate, marine wildlife, coastal communities, and economies, and would be yet another chapter in President Biden’s historic climate legacy,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club. Fossil fuel groups, naturally, were less thrilled.
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Monthly sales of electric vehicles in the U.S. were up 11.5% year-over-year in November, according to new data from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Just over 141,400 plug-in EVs were sold in November alone, bringing the total for the whole year to about 1.4 million, up 9% from the same period in 2023. New electric models like Honda’s Prologue and Chevrolet’s Equinox are helping drive the increase: Sales for both rose nearly 70% between October and November. Meanwhile, more and more new charging ports are being installed across the country, with 2,490 added in November, bringing the total to 205,000.
Morgan Stanley has become the latest lending giant to part ways with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. The investment bank announced yesterday it would leave the world’s largest banking climate coalition, following recent departures by Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. The firms have said they remain committed to their internal net zero goals, but the exodus is “the latest sign corporate America may retreat from climate goals during Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president,” the Financial Timesnoted.
“The main buyers of [gas-powered] cars in Norway are rental companies because many tourists are not familiar with EVs.” –Ulf Tore Hekneby, head of Norway's biggest car importer. In 2024, battery-powered vehicles made up 90% of new car sales in the Scandinavian country.
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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.