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“We all need to get our heads wrapped around more fire, in more places, at more times of the year.”
When I initially set out to interview Justin Angle, one of the authors of This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat, I’d expected we’d mostly be talking about California.
The forthcoming book is a practical guide and a history of living in the age of wildfires, and has been an invaluable resource in my own reporting on the subject. Written with environmental journalist Nick Mott, This Is Wildfire springs from the co-authors’ six-part 2021 podcast Fireline, and is shrewdly scheduled to be published on August 29, when western fire season really starts to pick up (you can preorder the book here).
Though midsummer is often considered “peak wildfire season,” it is September and October that are “far more destructive and burn through many more acres” due to the abundance of dried-out vegetation and blustery autumnal winds, the Western Fire Chiefs Association writes. In fact, the 2018 Camp Fire — the most deadly and destructive wildfire in California’s history — didn’t start until early November. But last week, as a benchmark for modern wildfire devastation, the Camp Fire was surpassed by the horrific wildfires in Maui; so far, there are 96 confirmed fatalities, a number that authorities expect to rise as search efforts continue.
When I spoke to Angle at the end of last week, we were both still reeling from the news. Our conversation touched on why the tragedy in Hawaii is “shocking but not surprising,” the practicalities of home-hardening and evacuation preparedness, and how Americans will need to come together to learn to live with wildfire. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
This Is Wildfire feels like a natural progression from your podcast, Fireline, but I wanted to go back before that, to when you first became interested in wildfires. What was — if you’ll excuse the pun — the spark?
It might not seem obvious; I’m a business school professor at the University of Montana. But when I moved here in 2012, it was a particularly bad fire and smoke year and I’d never really been exposed to those things in my life. Living through it for the first time, I quickly learned that fire plays a large role not only in the ecosystem here in the northern Rocky Mountains but also in the culture. Missoula is an epicenter for so much important fire work, whether it’s the smokejumper training center and the base, the Rocky Mountain research lab, or the Forest Service and the University of Montana College of Forestry and Conservation doing some really important fire science.
Many of the people I was meeting were prominent players doing important work on fire. So I set out to understand it myself and quickly realized that there seemed to be a lack of general understanding in the community. You know, you read about wildfires and there will be all kinds of vocabulary and jargon, “type three this,” “type one this,” “incident response team,” all sorts of stuff that seemed like gobbly-gook to the average person. It seemed like there was a need for a general explainer. And I was a podcaster — I’d been doing a current affairs radio show for a few years at the time — and I thought about doing a single episode [on wildfire] and quickly realized that, wow, this is a much bigger project that needs journalistic treatment. I’m not trained in journalism so I teamed up with Nick [Mott], who’s an outstanding journalist, and we made Fireline together.
This has been a strange fire year so far, from the smoke event on the East Coast in June to the deadly fires in Maui this week. I have the uneasy sense that your book is going to be increasingly relevant to people who live beyond the traditional borders of the American West in the coming years. As an expert on the topic of wildfire, what are you making of all this?
It’s shocking but not surprising. If you think back to a very formative moment in our country’s relationship with fire, that was the Big Blowup in 1910 when 3 million acres burned [in the inland Northwest]. The smoke from that event blanketed New York City and caused a lot of folks living in that area to think a lot more about wildfire. So maybe we’re witnessing a similar moment where the smoke effects reach more people.
Fiery images in the media this time of year are common, but seeing it in a place that’s unusual, that people don’t associate with burning to the extent they’re seeing now — maybe it breaks through and helps. I mean, one of the big themes of the book is trying to help people imagine and grasp how they can be a part of solutions moving forward. Maybe this is a little motivation for people to, you know, not necessarily wake up, that might be too pejorative a framing, but for fire to be more on the radar screen and for folks to think, Oh, this is a thing that I should be more cognizant of and be thinking about protecting myself and my family from.
One of the really scary things we saw in the Maui fire was how little time people had to evacuate, in part because the fire spread so quickly and unpredictably due to the high winds. In writing a guide for wildfires, what did you want your readers to understand about what they should do in the seconds and minutes after getting an evacuation alert?
First off, be tuned in to all those sources of information. Be signed up for evacuation notices and air quality notices. How that information is disseminated varies a lot from locality to locality. It’s often organized at the county level, but it’s hard to give a one-size-fits-all recommendation; you really have to investigate it in your own area. But that’s absolutely worth the effort, it’s critical.
In the book, we talk about a simple thing called a go bag. If you live in wildfire-prone lands, or any place where natural disaster is a risk — and that’s almost everywhere now — have a go bag with your essential items ready to go. If you need to scramble out the door in moments, it’s ready with your critical items. And it helps put you in that mindset of preparedness.
The other thing for homeowners, with a wind-driven fire — in Maui, I don’t know exactly how much of this occurred — but one of the biggest risks to homes is floating embers finding a weak spot in your home, whether that’s some pine needles in your gutter, or a wooden roof, or some spare wood under your deck. Understand the risks to your home and how they manifest and the work you can do to make your home safer. That could provide a margin of safety and protection that, as a homeowner, you have a lot of control over. Understand how home ignitions work and how they can be prevented with sound maintenance and in some communities, better zoning and better construction and better materials. Some of it is very much accessible to the individual and some of it is going to take more change at the system and policy level.
How close to your home does a wildfire have to be in order to be considered a threat? When should someone start to follow the progress and alerts?
I would advise any distance, and what I mean by any distance is a couple of considerations. If a fire is throwing smoke into your breathing air, then you should be paying attention, you should be in tune with the air quality ratings and how that has an effect on your health, and you should be moderating your activities according to the air quality.
The studies on embers and how far they can float — it’s up to two miles in some of the studies, although some of these fires are creating more intense wind systems. I don’t think I’d want to put a number on it. If there’s a fire within 20 miles of my home, I’m paying attention to it for sure. It’s most likely throwing smoke my way and these fires can spread really fast.
Understanding not only the distance away, but: What are the prevailing wind patterns? What’s the landscape like between your home and the fire? And how much vegetation is there? What areas of defense are there — existing burn scars or areas that have been thinned from previous work by the Forest Service? What sort of access does the Forest Service and other agencies have to that area? So a few different things make it hard to say, like, “This is the number,” but if you’re getting smoke from a fire, generally speaking, it’s close enough for you to be paying attention.
In the book you write, “When [fire is] on the news, it’s nearly always an enemy — something wreaking havoc that we must put an end to.” How should people who write about and cover wildfires rethink the narrative?
Fire is a scary thing and it’s a scary thing for good reason: It can cause tremendous loss of life and property. But I think the notion that it’s always this terrible thing that we have to eradicate from the natural world is, one, incorrect, and two, impossible.
We got really good at suppressing fire for a really long time — so much so that the public expected it to be this thing that the government did for us. Clearly, seeing by the intensity of many of these fires we’re experiencing, that is no longer the case. These fires, if they get out of hand, nobody can control them.
And the other piece of that is: A certain amount of fire is needed. We actually need more fire at the right times of the year in the right places to create more balance in the ecosystem. Our forests will be more resilient to fire; there will be better species health. Some species of trees and animals require fire to germinate, to be healthy. And so I think framing fires as an enemy, as this imminently scary thing, has had some consequences that we now need to think through a little bit more and with a little bit more complexity.
How do you tell the difference between a good and bad fire?
A fire that can burn without creating any risk to human values, homes, and life; a fire that can rejuvenate a forest, clean out the understory, thin out the trees, and create defensible space for future fires to run into or for firefighters to base operations out of — they’re called “resource benefit fires” by the agencies. The takeaway is that not all fire is bad: some are good and in general, we need more of them.
We need to accept that, and also be more accepting of smoke from prescribed fires at different times than we expect it. Here in Missoula, people commonly expect August to be a smoky time of the year and we brace ourselves for it. But sometimes when we get smoke in May, people get cranky, people get upset, and they might even get a little PTSD. Like, “Oh my gosh, is my summer gonna be ruined.” And you know, the truth of the matter is maybe some smoke in those times, when it’s safer to do prescribed burns, is something we need to adapt to. A lot of times, the smoke from prescribed burns or lower-intensity fires is much less concentrated and much shorter in duration. So cumulative exposure to smoke — even though any exposure can have consequences — might lead to better air quality in general if it is spread across a wider period of time.
That was one of the parts of the book that was both very surprising to me and also a lightbulb moment. I can’t remember what the quote was exactly, but it was something along the lines of, like, You’re going to have smoke one way or the other. Do you want it from a megafire, and to have that horrible choking thick smoke, or from a lower intensity burn?
That’s a quote the Forest Service uses commonly and it’s attributable, to the best of my knowledge, to Mark Finney, a scientist based out here in Missoula. He basically says: “How do you want your smoke and when do you want it?” I mean, you’re going to get it regardless.
One of the things we talked about in the book is the relationship between the climate and fire; higher temperatures mean more fire. If you were to look at the historical relationship between temperature and fire, we’re actually in a fire deficit. You would expect to see more fire right now. That’s largely attributable to our suppression. So that doesn’t necessarily mean what we’re seeing in Maui is the new normal, but I think we all need to get our heads wrapped around more fire, in more places, at more times of the year.
A major theme of This Is Wildfire is that we need to tackle these problems as a community, even when that runs against the rugged individualism and libertarian bent of much of the rural West. Are you optimistic that wildfires are something we can come together on?
I think so, mostly because I think we have to. The fire doesn’t care who you voted for if comes for you and your home. And though there is a sense of rugged individualism in the West, there’s also often a spirit of community, particularly in rural areas.
There are things that people can do at the individual level that we outlined in the book about making sure your home ignition zone is resilient to fire. But your efforts need to be part of a community effort. And that can just increase the need for neighborly relations and making fire more salient in community conversations. I’m optimistic that there is a pathway to more communication and coordination.
Where it gets a little thornier, I think, and where I’m still optimistic but maybe not as optimistic, is: Are we going to be able to have more productive conversations around zoning and building policies and saying, “Hey, is it a good idea to build in that place? Is it a good idea to rebuild in that place? Is that appropriate?”
Historically, particularly with wildfire, we’ve not done a good job of asking the hard questions of whether or not we should build in a certain place and how we should build in a certain place. We’re starting to see more and more of it with hurricanes and tornadoes in a variety of states with a variety of political sentiments, so I am optimistic that it can be done with fire and hopefully some of the fire events that we’re having are going to motivate the necessity for those types of hard conversations.
If there’s one thing readers walk away from your book understanding, what would you want that to be?
That not all fires are bad. Some are really beneficial and we actually, on balance, need more fire in the system. And doing so well, I think, gets us to a healthier place on a variety of levels.
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.