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Whatever your motivation for buying an electric vehicle, here’s the thing: The first day you own one, you’re going to love it.
Forget the fears that come with a new technology, the negativity that stems from the politicization of EVs ownership, or the dead-and-buried stereotype that EVs are slow and boring rides for greenies only. Electric cars are zippy and fun because, unlike gas cars, they can produce a ton of torque from a resting stop. After a lifetime of listening to a car rattle and roar, I can say from experience that you’ll find driving in electric silence to be a revelation. An EV owner wakes up every morning with the equivalent of a full tank of gas because their home is their gas station.
Want a piece of this bliss? If so, then read on.
Brian Moody, an executive editor at Cox Automotive (which owns Kelly Blue Book) and an author specializing in transportation, automotive, and electric cars.
Joseph Yoon, consumer insights analyst for the automotive agency Edmunds.
Loren McDonald, CEO of EVAdoption, which provides data analysis and insights about the electrification of the car industry.
“That’s who the PHEV is for,” Moody told me. “You can do your errands around town with 30 to 40 miles, and when the battery runs out, you just keep driving.”
Ask nearly any EV expert and you’ll hear the same thing: “People don’t drive nearly as far as they think they do,” Moody said. Most of us put the vast majority of miles on our cars within a few dozen miles of our homes, running kids around town or driving to work. You’ll use up a small amount of your battery by the time you get home, plug in, and wake up the next day fully charged. Road trips may seem daunting to the uninitiated, but the interstates are now lined with fast-chargers and the number of them is growing quickly.
Building an EV generates more carbon emissions than building a gas car, a difference that’s due to mining and creating materials for the battery. But that’s just manufacturing a vehicle; once it’s built, it has a decade or two of driving ahead of it. A combustion car constantly spews carbon as it burns fossil fuels, which dwarfs the amount it takes to make an EV. Don’t forget: An electric car gets greener as the grid gets greener. The more clean energy is added to the world’s electrical supply, the better EVs get in comparison to gas cars. You’d need to live in a state with an especially dirty energy grid, such as Wyoming or West Virginia, for an EV not to be a much better option than driving around on gasoline. Furthermore, McDonald said, you can forget the propaganda that suggests EV batteries wind up stacked in a landfill somewhere when the cars meet their end. A growing number of companies are ready to recycle EV batteries and retrieve the precious metals therein, while it’s likely that lots of batteries will find a second life in applications such as grid storage.
It’s true that price has long been one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption. Even though tax incentives — together with savings on fuel and maintenance — make many electrics cost-competitive with their gas counterparts in the long term, their high sticker price keeps many people away. But more electric models are beginning to creep down toward the cost of entry-level gasoline cars.
As with buying an old-fashioned gas-guzzler, going to the dealership to get an EV means dealing with pushy salespeople, confusing specs, and haggling over the price. The process can be doubly frustrating for the EV shopper given the relative unavailability of some electric models and reports of some car salespeople who know frustratingly little about the very EVs they hock.
If you live in a market where EVs have taken hold, like the San Francisco Bay Area, expect knowledgeable salespeople who can walk you through the EV buying process. If you live someplace where few electrics are sold, then the experience may be hit-or-miss. Do your own research, and prepare to be your own advocate.
For a long time, things were simple: If you bought an electric vehicle, then you could take a $7,500 credit on your taxes for that year. But things have gotten murkier in the past year or two — in a bid to protect domestic manufacturing, Congress passed new rules stating that a certain amount of the car and its components had to be made in the U.S. to qualify, leaving a confusing, shifting picture of which EVs qualify and which don’t. (To wit: Many Teslas qualify, Hyundais and Kias don’t, while Rivians receive only half the credit because they’re so expensive.) The upside of the changed rules is that buyers are now allowed to get tax credits on leasing an EV, or to receive the credit as an up-front discount on their new EV. Many states have generous incentives, too. Washington, for example, will give up to $9,000 in rebates for buying an EV. “There are enormous discounts on basically every EV on the market, even before we count the $7,500 with the federal tax credit,” Yoon told me.
Before you take the plunge, take a moment and really think about how you drive — because lots of people overestimate what they need. Maybe even keep notes and check your mileage every day for a week or two to find out how much you really use the car versus how much you think you do. If you find that you could get around town on a few dozen miles of charge but road trip every other weekend, then you might consider a plug-in hybrid. If you’ve already got a gas car or hybrid to handle longer trips and are shopping for a second vehicle, there’s no reason not to go for an EV, assuming you can afford one. If you just need basic transportation to take you a few miles to work, hate the idea of ever buying gas again, and want to spend as little as possible … maybe you should get an e-bike.
A refresher: When you buy a car, you typically put a downpayment on the vehicle, and then borrow enough money from the bank to pay off the rest of its price (plus interest and sales tax) in monthly payments over the course of four, five, or even more years. Leasing is like renting an apartment. You put down a deposit and then pay monthly over the course of the lease, typically three years. But like your rent, those payments don't go toward owning the car. At the end of the lease, you give it back. With EVs especially, there are some serious advantages and drawbacks to each approach you should keep in mind.
If you live in a century-old house that would need to have significant rewiring done to accommodate an EV charger, then installing a Level 2 charger might be too expensive, so you might want to stick to a plug-in hybrid. (Again, more on charging below.) Does your office have a charger? If you live in an apartment, does the parking lot have chargers?
“How you refuel your EV is similar to how you charge your smartphone — you do it either throughout the day or at night before you go to bed. You plug in, you wake up, and it's full,” McDonald said.
“The first thing I tell people? You should probably get a Tesla,” Moody told me. Still, Elon Musk’s electric car company isn’t the darling it once was. Tesla has squandered a huge lead in the EV market by focusing on vanity projects like the Cybertruck and lost a chunk of public goodwill through Musk’s misadventures in politics and social media. But the company still has an ace up its sleeve with the Supercharger network, which is better and more reliable than the competition. This will change in the coming years, as the other automakers have adopted Tesla’s plug and their future cars will be able to use Superchargers. But for now, it’s a major advantage that makes owning a Tesla a lot less stressful than trying to get by with a competitor’s EV, especially if you make road trips. For this reason, Tesla’s Model Y — the best-selling car in the world in 2023, and the best-selling EV in America — remains a compelling choice for anyone who wants an EV to be their only car and have it go nearly anywhere.
Don’t want Musk to get your money? Fret not. EV offerings from legacy car companies and new automakers are leaps and bounds better than they were five years ago when Tesla took over the industry. Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia, in particular, have outpaced other carmakers in offering fun and practical EVs. The new Kia EV9 is the best choice for buyers who want a true EV with three rows so they can accommodate six or seven passengers, and it’s a sleek-looking vehicle for its size. Its $57,000 starting price is not cheap, but it’s probably the best deal you can get for a true three-row electric vehicle right now.
The Ioniq 5 is a quirky mashup of a crossover and a hatchback. It’s got enough space to be practical as a family vehicle, but its dimensions aren’t quite like anything else on the market. In the EV-laden part of Los Angeles where I live, it’s the most common non-Tesla electric I come across.
Introduced in 2021, the F-150 Lightning’s game-changing feature is two-way, or “bidirectional,” charging — you can plug into your house and use the energy stored in the truck’s battery to back up your home’s power supply in case of a blackout. Chevy is following suit by putting this tech into the Silverado EV. But even if you’re just driving and not powering your home, the Lightning is impressive — its standard battery produces 452 horsepower, but that number can climb to 580 on more expensive versions, and both offer a ton of torque.
Today’s Rivians are luxury lifestyle vehicles, but they offer a lot for all that cash. The R1 vehicles are spacious and well-appointed on the interior while offering lots of power and range for the off-road lifestyle the brand projects — the high-end version of the SUV gets 410 miles of range with 665 horsepower. Other excellent luxury EVs at the top end of the market include the Lucid Air and Mercedes EQS, but the Air has the space limitations of a sedan (though it is a large one) and the Benz is likely to cost more than $100,000. Rivians are pricey, but they’re not that pricey.
The people’s affordable EV champion, the Chevy Bolt, got the ax last year, but GM has promised to bring it back for people who want a smallish EV that doesn’t cost a fortune. In the meantime, the “SE” version of the Hyundai Kona EV, a small SUV, starts around $36,000 and gets 261 miles of range. (There’s an even cheaper version with 200 miles of range, but trust me: Don’t buy any new EV with less than 250 miles of range — e.g. the Nissan Leaf, Fiat 500, Mini Cooper, or Subaru Solterra — unless you really, really like it.) Chevy finally electrified its huge-selling SUV and rolled out the Equinox EV; while it starts at $41,000 now, GM promises a $35,000 version soon to come.
There are a wide variety of PHEVs that are worth a look, but an especially compelling option is the Toyota Prius Prime. The entire Prius family of hybrids and plug-in hybrids just got a facelift for 2023 that is miles ahead of the frumpy, aging look the car previously had. And where the previous Prius Prime was limited to a puny 25 miles of electric range, today’s will do 44 — enough for lots of people to do their daily city driving without burning any gas.
Some vocabulary to get you started:
Since charging at home is the make-or-break feature that will make your electrified life more convenient than your gas-burning days, your first order of business is getting a Level 2 charger installed. You’re going to need an electrician for this one, since it requires stepping up the voltage (and might require installing a new breaker panel or running new wiring, depending upon your home). Be sure to get multiple quotes so you can compare work estimates and prices.
“When you buy from an EV dealer or Tesla or whomever, they might refer you to an electrician or an installer. There are companies that have services and websites where they do all the work for you. You plug in your address and information, and they'll recommend and refer you to an installer,” McDonald said.
How much this’ll cost you varies by where you live and how much work it’ll take to set up your home, but the national average is $1,200 to $1,500, McDonald says. The exception could be older houses that were not set up for anything close to the electrical load it takes to charge a car, so if you own a hundred-year-old home in New England with lots of original wiring, you might be in for a shock. Don’t forget, however, that lots of incentives are available for setting up EV infrastructure at your home. You might be eligible for a tax credit equal to 30 percent of the cost up to $1,000.
As far as charging away from home? Most EVs automatically show nearby charging stations on their touchscreen navigation systems and will route you to the necessary stops along a long drive. Teslas will even show you how many stalls are available at a given Supercharger and how many other cars are en route. As an EV driver, you’ll get to know the fast-chargers in your neighborhood and along your familiar highways, but you’ll also get to know sites like Plugshare that will display every charger of every speed and every plug throughout that country — invaluable for planning a journey.
As you get comfortable with your own driving habits, you’ll figure out whether you need to expand your choices by purchasing adapters or dongles that let your car charge at different kinds of plugs. For example, today’s non-Tesla EVs eventually will be able to charge at Tesla superchargers, but because they are still being built with the competing CCS standard, you’d need an adapter to allow today’s Ford Mustang Mach-E to use a Tesla plug. I have an adapter in my Tesla Model 3 to use the “J1772” plugs you find on the Level 2 charger at the grocery store, and I bought one for the NEMA 14-50 plugs common at an RV campsite — just in case I really get into trouble out there.
When a car brakes to slow down, energy is lost. But in an EV, some of it can be recaptured via regenerative braking, a system that captures the energy from waste heat and puts it back into the battery. This allows for an experience unavailable to the gasoline motorist called one-pedal driving: Take your foot off the accelerator and the car immediately slows itself down via the regenerative braking system. When I drive my Tesla Model 3, I only hit the brake pedal when I need to slow down in a big hurry; otherwise, I let off the accelerator and let the car coast to a stop. This system can add several miles of range back onto the battery if you’re coasting out of the mountains on a steep downgrade.
A word of warning: Many people don’t like regenerative braking, at least at first, because it feels jerky to have the car instantly slow itself down when you let off the accelerator. But trust me, you’ll get better and better at letting off the pedal slowly so you don’t make your passengers nauseous. It’s also possible in many vehicles to turn down the regen so it’s less aggressive.
For starters, think of all the car vocabulary you won’t need anymore. An EV’s power output can be measured in torque and horsepower, but say goodbye to combustion-specific vernacular like spark plugs, cylinders, pistons, or liters as a measure of engine size (unless you get a plug-in hybrid). No more mufflers, no exhaust or timing belts. An EV has no use for miles per gallon, though carmakers and the EPA try to measure an electric car’s efficiency in miles per gallon equivalent as a way to compare them with gas cars.
As the months and years go by, you’ll appreciate a number of differences in the EV owner’s lifestyle. Drivers needn’t bother with remembering the pesky oil change every 3,000 miles, nor with worrying about the lifespans of thousands of moving parts that come with internal combustion. (On the other hand, today’s EVs burn through tires faster than gas cars do because of their weight and their performance.)
There’s a lot more to learn, of course. Just remember: The first time you bypass the gas station — with its stinky fumes and pesky commercials screaming at you — to refuel your car in the comfort of your home, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.
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Current conditions: Yosemite could get 9 inches of snow between now and Sunday • Temperatures will rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as Central and Southeast Asia continue to bake in a heatwave • Hail, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms will pummel the U.S. Heartland into early next week.
It was a busy week of earnings calls for the clean energy sector, which, as a whole, saw investment dip by nearly $8 billion in the first three months of the year. Tariffs — especially as they impact the battery supply chain — as well as changes to federal policy under the new administration and electricity demand were the major themes of the week, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote.
Like companies across many different sectors, inverter and battery maker Enphase, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, Tesla, and the utility NextEra all mentioned the tariffs in their earnings reports and calls. Enphase, for one, is bracing for as much as 8% knocked off its gross margin by the third quarter, while Tesla’s highly-anticipated call managed expectations for the rest of the year, with the company citing the difficulty measuring “the impacts of global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure, and demand for durable goods and related services.” Meanwhile, on Thursday, Xcel Energy — which recently reached settlements for its role in the ignition of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history and the largest wildfire in Texas history — reported missing first-quarter estimates and feeling the squeeze of high interest rates at a time of soaring, data-center-driven electricity demand.
The Department of Justice’s lawyers warned the Department of Transportation that its case against New York City’s congestion pricing program is likely a loser. We know this because someone mistakenly uploaded the DOJ’s memo into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s actions. Whoops.
As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reports, the leaked memo was dated before Duffy announced “he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.” But as Emily goes on to say, the memo “warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes.” The New York Times adds that the DOT has since replaced the DOJ lawyers who authored the memo and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington.
More than 100 new cars and vehicles are expected to debut at the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show, which began on Wednesday and runs through next Friday. Of the approximately 1,300 total vehicles on display, 70% are new energy vehicles, according to Gu Chunting, the vice chairman of the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai, one of the event’s organizers.
The show is already off to an exciting start. Volkswagen is showcasing 50 new models, including three electrified concept vehicles specifically targeted at the Chinese market: the ID. Aura sedan, the ID. Evo SUV, and ID. Era three-row SUV, a hybrid with over 621 miles of range. BYD’s Denza line also premiered its Z, a luxury electric vehicle designed to compete with Tesla and Porsche. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but most people will find the Denza Z to be drop dead gorgeous,” Clean Technica raved.
That’s not all. The Faw Group, a Chinese state-owned car manufacturer, showed off a flying vehicle with a range of 124 miles, while fellow Chinese automaker Changan Automobile announced an autonomous flying car that reportedly already has government approval to transport passengers, per IoT World Today. France’s Le Monde was wowed by China’s innovations all around: “Gone are the days when the vast exhibition space had one hall dedicated to foreign brands and another for Chinese ones. Today, each Chinese group occupies a hall, showcasing domestic brands and leaving only some space for foreigners around the edges.”
Volkswagen
In a private ceremony Thursday night, President Trump signed an executive order to “unleash” deep-sea mining. The order — which directs the secretaries of Interior and Commerce to accelerate “the process of renewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits” for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf and “areas beyond national jurisdiction”— is an attempt to offset China’s dominance of the critical minerals supply chain. Deep-sea mining operations harvest “nodules” that take millions of years to form and contain minerals like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese necessary for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, among other applications. “For too long, we’ve been over reliant on foreign sources, and today this historic announcement marks a big step in the right direction to onshore these resources that are critical to national homeland security,” a senior administration official told reporters on Thursday, as reported by CNN.
Deep-sea mining is controversial due to how little we know about the ocean’s abyss, including the potential impact of large-scale mining operations on marine biodiversity and carbon sequestration. The United States has largely abstained from the deliberations of the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority, which determines whether and how to mine the seabed for critical minerals. The industrial mining of international waters, as cued up by Trump’s executive order, is opposed by “nearly all other nations,” The New York Times writes, and is “likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike.”
It has already been a tragic year for wildfires, with more than 57,000 acres of Los Angeles and the surrounding hillsides burned in January. Now, AccuWeather is predicting that fires in the U.S. could “rapidly escalate” and burn up to 9 million acres total this year, well above the historic average of 7 million acres and close to the 8.9 million acres that burned in 2024.
Specifically, AccuWeather predicts an extreme fire season in the Northwest, northern Rockies, Southwest, and South Central states, particularly as late summer and fall approach. “There was plenty of rain and snow across Northern California this winter. All of that moisture has supported a lot of lush vegetation growth this spring,” AccuWeather’s lead long-range expert, Paul Pastelok, said. “That grass and brush will dry out and become potential fuel for wildfires this fall,” when any “trigger mechanism … could cause big wildfire problems.”
AccuWeather
Slate Auto, a three-year-old Jeff Bezos-backed startup, has announced an EV truck that will cost less than $20,000 after the federal tax credit and before customization. “It’s the Burger King of trucks,” writes Car and Driver, because “it’s affordable” and “lets customers ‘have it their way’ with a lengthy accessory list, including one that turns this pickup into an SUV.”
Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.
America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.
While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.
“In response to recent commodity price volatility, Matador has decided to adjust its drilling and completion activity for 2025 to provide for more optionality,” the company said in its earnings release.
In February, Matador was projecting that its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $1.4 and $1.65 billion.This week, it lowered that outlook to $1.3 to $1.55 billion. “We’re very open to and want to have reason to grow again,” Matador’s chief executive Joseph Foran said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “This is primarily a timing matter. Is this a temporary thing on oil prices? Or is this a new world we live in?”
Mizuho Securities analyst William Janela wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning that, as the first oil exploration and production company to report its earnings this go-round, Matador would be “somewhat of a litmus test for the sector: we don't believe the market was expecting E&Ps to announce activity reductions this soon, but MTDR's update could signal more cuts to come from peers over the next few weeks.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices are currently sitting at just below $63, up from around $60 in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. While the current price is off its lows, it’s still well short of the almost $84 a barrel crude prices were at around this time last year.
The price decline could be attributable to any number of factors — macroeconomic uncertainty due to the trade war, production hikes by foreign producers — but whatever the cause, it has made an awkward situation for the Trump administration’s energy strategy.
The iShares U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF, which tracks the American oil and gas exploration industry, is down 9% for the year and more than 13% since “Liberation Day,” while the rest of the market has almost recovered as the Trump administration has indicated it may ease up on some of his more drastic tariff policies.
If other drillers follow Matador’s investment slowdown, it could imperil Trump’s broader energy policy goals.
Trump has both encouraged other countries to produce more oil (and bragged about lower oil prices) while also exhorting American drillers to “drill, baby, drill,”with enticements ranging from kneecapping emissions standards to a reduced regulatory burden.
As Heatmap has written, these goals sit in conflict with each other. Energy executives told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that they need oil prices ranging from $61 to $70 a barrelin order to profitably drill new wells. If prices fall further, “what would happen is ‘Delay, baby, delay,’”Wood Mackenzie analyst Fraser McKay wrote Wednesday. “We now expect global upstream development spend to fall year-on-year for the first time since 2020.”
A $65 per barrel price “dents” margins for drillers, meaning “growth capex and discretionary spend will be delayed,” McKay wrote.
Matador also announced that it had authorized $400 million worth of buybacks, and itsstock price rose some 4% on the earnings announcement, indicating that Wall Street will reward drillers who pull back on drilling and ramp up shareholder payouts.
“We’ve got the tools in the toolbox, including the share repurchase, to make Matador more value quarter by quarter,” Foran said. Rather than “blindly” pouring capital into growth, Matador would aim for a “measured pace,” he explained. “And if you mean what you say about a measured pace, that means when prices get a little lower, you take a few more moments to think about what you’re doing and don’t rush into things.”
At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.
San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”
The crowd went wild. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the stage and reminded the crowd that Gore has been telling us this for decades — maybe it’s time we listen. But I missed all that. Because just a few miles away, things were getting a little more in the weeds at the somewhat less exclusive venture capital-led panel entitled “The Economics of Climate Tech: Building Resilient, Scalable, and Sustainable Startups.” Here, I learned about a new iron-sodium battery chemistry and innovations in transformers for data centers, microgrids, and EV charging infrastructure.
I heard Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures, utter sentences such as “parity dies because of capex inertia,” referring to the need to make clean tech not only equivalent to but cheaper than fossil-fuels on a unit economics basis. Such is the duality of climate week during the Trump administration — occasionally lofty in both its alarm and its excitement, but more often than not simply business-as-usual, interrupted by bouts of heady doom or motivational proclamations.
Some panels, like the one I moderated on the future of weather forecasting using artificial intelligence, made it a full hour without discussing Trump, tariffs, or tax credits at all. So far, that’s held true for a number of talks on how AI can be a boon to climate tech. It makes sense — the administration is excited about AI, and there’s really no indication that Trump has given any thought to either the positive or negative climate externalities of it.
But rapid data center buildout and the attendant renewables boom that it may (or may not) bring will certainly be influenced by the administration’s fluctuating policies, an issue that was briefly discussed during another panel: “AI x Energy: Gridlocked or Grid Unlocked?” Here, representatives from Softbank, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the data center builder and operator Switch touched on how market uncertainty is making it difficult to procure energy for data centers — and to figure out the cost of building a data center, period.
“There is a lot of refiguring and rereading contracts and looking at the potential exposure to things like the escalation in the cost of steel for construction projects,” Skyler Holloway of Switch said. Pinning down a price on the energy required to power data centers is also a bottleneck, Gillian Clegg, vice president of energy policy and procurement at PG&E explained. “For projects that want to connect between now and 2030, any kind of uncertainty or delay means that the generation doesn't get to the market,” Clegg said. “Maybe the load gets there first, and you have an out of balance situation.”
Everyone acknowledges that uncertainty is bad for business, and that delays related to funding, contracts, and construction can kill otherwise viable companies. But unsurprisingly, nobody here has admitted that said uncertainty might put them out of business, or even deeply in the red.Every panel I attend, I find myself wondering whether a founder or investor is finally going to raise their voice, à la Al Gore, and tell the audience that while their company’s business model is well and good, the Trump administration’s illogical antipathy towards green-coded tech and ill-conceived trade war is throwing the underlying logic — sound as it may have been just a year ago — into disarray.
None of the seven energy, food, and agricultural startups that presented at the nonprofit climate investor Elemental Impact’s main show, for instance, discussed the impacts of the administration’s policies on their businesses. Rather, they maintained a consistently upbeat tone as they described the promise of their concepts — which ranged from harnessing ocean energy to developing plant-based fertilizers to using robotics for electronics recycling — and the momentum building behind them. Nuclear and geothermal companies, seemingly poised to be the clean tech winners of Chris Wright’s Department of Energy, have been especially optimistic this week.
But really, what else can climate tech companies and investors be expected to do right now besides, well, rise and grind? It’s not like anybody has answers as to what’s coming down the policy pike. In a number of more casual conversations this week, a common sentiment I heard was that it’s not necessarily a bad time to be an early-stage startup — keep your head down, focus on research and prototyping, and reassess the political environment when you’re ready to build a pilot or demonstration plant. As for later-stage companies and venture capital firms, they’re likely working to ensure that their business models and portfolios really aren’t dependent on government subsidies, grants, or policies — as they keep assuring me is the case.
Even that might not be enough these days though. Chi said he’s always tailored his investments with At One Ventures towards companies that are viable based on unit economics alone, no subsidies and no green premium. So he wasn’t initially worried about his portfolio when Trump was elected. “None of our business models were invalidated by the election,” he said. “The only way that we could be in trouble is if they mess it up so bad that it ruins all of business, not just climate …”
Oops.
If there’s one dictum that I would expect to hold, though, it’s that the startups that make it through this period will likely be around for the long haul. I’ve been hearing that sentiment since the election, and Mona ElNagger, a partner at Valo Ventures, echoed it once again this week. “Microsoft and Apple were founded in the mid 1970s, which was a time of severe recession and stagflation. Amazon started at the tail end of a big recession in the early 1990s,” ElNagger reminded the audience at the Economics of Climate Tech panel, which she moderated. “Companies that survive and actually thrive in such periods share a common thread of resilience.”
As that panel wrapped up, things got existential once more as Chi’s talk moved from describing his investment thesis to the moment at large. “This time period in history is going to bring us tragedy after tragedy, and it’s really that moment that we’re going to understand the deep underlying structure of half of the world that we’ve built, and also the character of who we are,” Chi told the audience. It was unclear whether we were even talking about climate tech anymore. Chi continued, “It’s in that time period that we are going to step up and become whatever we are meant to be or not at all.”
The crowd sat there, a little stunned. Were we, in this very moment, becoming who we were meant to be? I took a bite of my free sushi as the networking and hobnobbing began.