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The roughly 550-mile SunZia power line is crucial to America’s climate goals. Here’s how it almost didn’t happen — and how it was saved.
Two years ago, John Podesta met with Jennifer Granholm, the U.S. Secretary of Energy. Podesta, a longtime Democratic aide, had just started a new role in the Biden administration, overseeing the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation, and he was going to meet with Granholm about high-priority clean electricity infrastructure.
First on the agenda was a list of transmission projects to ferry electricity from wind and solar farms to cities and suburbs where it would actually be used.
“Up pops the list,” Podesta told me later. The first project was a line called SunZia.
“My jaw dropped,” he said. “I thought we solved that in 2014!”
No, no, Granholm said. There had been twists and turns. But now it was back.
If you want to understand why the United States can’t build infrastructure, look at SunZia.
Envisioned as a roughly 550-mile high-voltage transmission line connecting a sprawling 900-turbine wind farm in central New Mexico to the growing cities of Arizona and California, SunZia is — according to its developer — one of the largest electricity projects in American history. When it’s finished, the line will deliver 4,500 megawatts of electricity to consumers. Only two power plants nationwide produce more: the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, and the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.
“It’s the largest clean energy project in America, and I think the largest clean energy project in the Americas,” Podesta told me. “It’s huge.”
For nearly two decades, SunZia has bounced through successive stages of regulatory review, financial restructuring, and litigation. It has been fought over, bought, sold, and at one point, forcibly relocated by the Department of Defense. Today, 18 years after it was first conceived, it is finally under construction. At least one outstanding lawsuit is contesting its right of way. If all goes according to the current plan, SunZia will begin to deliver power to consumers in 2026.
SunZia’s timeline would present an inconvenience — arguably an embarrassment — in any context. In this particular context, it could even invoke despair. “It’s a classic example of how we’ve gotten excellent at stopping things in America, and if we’re going to take the climate crisis seriously, we have to get excellent at building things in America,” Podesta said.
The stakes are far larger than electricity bills. The United States has pledged to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Reaching that target will require tripling the size of America’s power grid in the next 26 years, according to Princeton University’s Net Zero America study. If America were to power its grid entirely with renewable energy — a feat that many experts doubt is possible — then it would need a grid five times as large as what it has now.
Even if that study (led by my podcast co-host, Jesse Jenkins) overstates the need for new transmission, the mechanics of renewables dictate that the country must hook up its existing grid to the places where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest. The Desert Southwest — and New Mexico specifically — features some of America’s richest solar and wind resources. To decarbonize America, that energy must be harvested and transported from these largely unpopulated areas to the dense urban centers where people actually live.
That is easier said than done. Although transmission projects are unusually important for climate change, they are also unusually difficult to build, especially compared to fossil fuel infrastructure. Or, well, not difficult to build, exactly — it’s just a big power line, and we know how to put those up — but difficult to get permission to build. Ultimately, that permission is in the hands of the government. But when it comes to long, linear infrastructure projects like power lines, there isn’t really a single “government” to talk about it with in the first place.
To build a transmission line, a developer has to secure permission from every state, county, city, and property owner along the route. If any of them denies the project, poison-pills it with endless requirements, or even sits on an application, then the entire project stalls. (Building a natural gas pipeline, by contrast, requires getting permission only from a single federal agency.) Electricity utilities don’t usually like transmission lines because they erode their local monopoly over power generation and distribution. Those utilities have such great influence at the state and local level — through outright lobbying and by funding local Little League teams, churches, and more — that they can often convince politicians and regulators to slow down or block a line.
For these reasons and more, America’s rate of new transmission construction has plummeted over the past few decades. In this history of stasis, though, SunZia presents a special case. SunZia is such a high-profile project that its enormous delays have terrified the rest of its small industry. If SunZia was defeated nearly 20 years after it was first proposed, then it could render the field un-investable, one investor confided to me.
Yet for all the hand wringing, SunZia is a success story. It has now fought off its most credible lawsuits, meaning that it is likely to get built. Within two years, huge amounts of climate-friendly electricity could be coursing through the American desert.
Earlier this year, I went to Arizona to examine more closely why SunZia has been so difficult to build and what finally allowed it to move forward. I spoke to the SunZia’s developer and the environmentalists who support the project — as well as those who oppose it. The question I was trying to answer: What did it get right? If America is going to reach its climate goals, learning those lessons — and learning them well — is going to be crucial. When SunZia is completed and running at full blast, it will generate roughly 1% of the country’s electricity needs. After that, to fully decarbonize the electricity sector, we will need to run it all back 99 more times.
The saga of SunZia begins in the summer of 2006, when representatives from utilities, developers, and government agencies from across the Southwest gathered to discuss expanding the region’s power grid. After looking at energy and economic data, the group decided that Arizona and New Mexico needed a powerful new transmission line to connect the swelling populations in the west with New Mexico’s abundant wind and solar potential.
The Southwest Power Group, a Phoenix-based energy company that had attended the conference, soon put together an ownership team of four utilities and stepped in to lead the project. They christened the line “SunZia,” after the setting sun on Arizona’s flag and the sign of the Zia people on New Mexico’s flag.
In June 2008, Southwest Power Group applied to the Bureau of Land Management, or the BLM, the national agency tasked with managing federal lands, for the right to build a major new transmission line across the two states. “Local, state, and federal permitting efforts will begin immediately,” the coalition announced in an optimistic press release.
The first phase of SunZia was expected to initiate commercial operation by 2013, the developers added.
Back then, when a developer tried to build a transmission line, they had a strong but not definitive sense of the route — in part because the federal government could ask them to change it if needed. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, the government must study how infrastructure projects — or, really, any federal action — affect the environment, inviting input from local governments, environmental groups, and nearby Native American nations. (That law does not require the government to protect the environment in any substantive way; it simply requires that it consult everyone and study a project’s impact.)
Heatmap Illustration/Pattern Energy
Southwest Power Group knew that SunZia would begin in central New Mexico, southeast of Albuquerque, and that it would eventually connect to a large-scale renewable project there. (At the time, the vast wind farm hadn’t yet been planned.) Then it would proceed due west, passing below Albuquerque, before veering southwest and passing north of the White Sands Missile Range. After that, SunZia would turn west again, eventually crossing into Arizona. It would pass near Tucson, Arizona — the exact route was uncertain — before finally turning north again and terminating in a substation in Phoenix’s southeastern suburbs. From there, the existing grid could ferry electricity into Phoenix or further toward California.
This route presented many difficulties, but two river crossings dominated concerns over the project.
First, SunZia had to cross the Rio Grande. Although that river is best-known back East for forming the U.S.-Mexico border, it begins in the Colorado Rockies and flows in a southerly direction through New Mexico, bisecting the state. In other words, you cannot cross New Mexico without crossing the river.
The Rio Grande creates an environment in New Mexico unlike anywhere else in the United States: a high-desert wetlands, where hundreds of thousands of birds from across North America spend the winter. The BLM and the Southwest Power Group decided that SunZia would shoot through a small gap between two wildlife refuges — the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge to the north, and the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to the south — that had been formed to protect these birds.
Second, SunZia would have to pass near Tucson, Arizona by one of three routes, each of which required some kind of sacrifice. The first option involved running the line alongside an existing 345 kilovolt transmission line that passed to the city’s south and west. But the city and county opposed that route, and it required securing a permit to cross the Tohono O’odham Nation’s land, which the tribe refused to allow.
That left two remaining routes. One option ran near the center of Tucson, passing very close to overwhelmingly poor and Latino neighborhoods. This route raised “environmental justice” concerns, the BLM said, in that it forced poor people of color who already live alongside energy infrastructure to bear even greater environmental costs for it. The other choice was to run SunZia east of Tucson and through the beautiful San Pedro Valley, one of the most pristine desert ecosystems remaining in Arizona. Although vast swaths of that valley are privately owned, Native American relics and cultural sites dot its landscape.
Forced to choose between harming civil rights or damaging the environment, the BLM reluctantly chose the latter. But to blunt some of the damage to the valley, the bureau directed the developers to follow existing pipelines or transmission lines for more than 40% of its mileage. It also ordered SunZia to commission studies of archeological sites along the route’s path so they could be mitigated or avoided entirely. (SunZia would later adjust its route to avoid some of the most archaeologically sensitive sites.)
Studying these options took much longer than the Southwest Power Group had ever imagined. The Bureau of Land Management published its final environmental study on SunZia in June 2013 — the same year SunZia was once due to begin operation. Southwest Power Group was finally ready to start construction. Then the Pentagon stepped in.
Scarcely a month after SunZia’s course was finalized through New Mexico, the Pentagon filed a formal protest. The approved route passed way too close to the White Sands Missile Range, the complaint said, and the BLM had “not adequately analyzed the significant risks to national security” that would result from building it.
The White Sands Missile Range is the country’s largest military installation and is vital to New Mexico’s economy. By suggesting that SunZia might imperil the base’s activities, the Pentagon was at risk of killing the project. But something about that claim didn’t sit right with Senator Martin Heinrich, a first-term Democrat and former Albuquerque city councilman. Heinrich was an engineer by training, and his father had been a utility lineman, giving him at least some familiarity with how the power grid worked. Why did a big power line threaten the military base miles away? Heasked MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to investigate whether the line would damage the base as much as the Pentagon said.
Six months later, in March 2014, the study was completed. According to news stories at the time, the classified study found that SunZia would impair the base’s activities, but that its effects could be mitigated. After months of intense negotiations with the White House, the Pentagon, the Department of the Interior, and Senator Heinrich’s office, Southwest Power Group agreed to bury five miles of the power line — an expensive solution, but one that would allow the project to move forward.
By that point, however, SunZia had captured the public’s attention and polarized New Mexicans. The state’s Republicans gleefully undermined the project in the press. As the Obama administration prepared to approve the line, a Republican congressman and former oil company CEO intoned that SunZia would “permanently damage” national security.
“Greenlighting the completion of SunZia along the chosen route is a reckless rush to judgment without thorough examination,” the congressman, Steve Pearce, said. (The federal government had, by this point, been studying SunZia for seven years.) He worried too that the line would “potentially destroy ancient Pueblo sites.”
In 2015, the Obama administration finally approved SunZia’s route. After nearly a decade, Southwest Power Group had the federal government’s permission to build SunZia.
But that was only the first step: Now, the company had to secure state and local permits. That would prove even more confounding.
The truth is that New Mexico’s environmentalists had never been comfortable with what SunZia would mean for the state’s wildlife. They hated the Rio Grande crossing. They were particularly stressed about what the structure might mean for sandhill cranes, a regal and crimson-headed bird that migrates to New Mexico from as far away as Alaska and Siberia. Few sights are more treasured by the region’s birders than the vast flocks of cranes that form in the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge each winter.
Birders imagined that SunZia’s towers and low-hanging wires could maim or kill the elegant cranes. If SunZia could bury the line to help White Sands Missile Range, people asked, why couldn’t they also bury it below the Rio Grande and save some birds? They whispered, too, that the line would transmit not wind-generated electricity as promised, but rather gas-fired electricity from a power plant owned by Southwest Power Group.
When Southwest Power Group applied for a state permit to cross the Rio Grande, the birders’ moment came. The developers were still finalizing construction details and didn’t seem to have a strong sense of where exactly the line would go. In 2018, New Mexico’s utility commission rejected the permit and asked the Southwest Power Group to come back with more information.
SunZia was flailing. Building the line had taken much longer than Southwest Power Group had ever envisioned. Burying the line, even for a few miles, had made it a much more costly project. Now environmentalists doubted that it would help fight climate change at all and were making increasingly expensive demands.
Then a new company came into the picture: Pattern Energy, a San Francisco-based energy developer partially owned by Canadian pension funds. Pattern promised to build a vast wind farm — comprising more than 900 turbines — at SunZia’s eastern end. It became the line’s “anchor tenant,” in the jargon of energy developers, and, more importantly, the project’s public face.
“They came in, and they were quite honestly pretty frustrated with the way that [the SunZia project] had approached community engagement and talking with environmental groups,” Jon Hayes, a wildlife biologist and the executive director of Audubon Southwest, told me. Up to that point, SunZia had been the story of an “industry just trying to push their lowest-cost alternative through sensitive areas,” he said.
But Pattern behaved differently. “Why it was a success is that Pattern acted and negotiated it in good faith with us,” Hayes said.
Pattern hired researchers to study how and where the cranes fly. It agreed to install infrared lights on SunZia’s towers as an “avian avoidance system” that will be visible to cranes and make the lines shimmer in the dark. It bought a nearby farm to create a sandhill crane reservation (the cranes also eat corn from the fields) and donated the water rights to local conservation organizations. When a coalition of environmentalists, including Audubon, asked it to study the benefits of burying SunZia, Pattern warned that doing so could permanently alter the project’s economics — but they studied it anyway. Burying the line would ultimately have been more disruptive than building lines, Hayes said.
Heinrich’s office continued its involvement in the negotiation and also helped move the process along. Environmental groups that had initially opposed the project switched their allegiance, Audubon Southwest included.
Pattern’s research led it to conclude that the line should be moved into Serivetta National Wildlife Refuge so it could be co-located with another transmission line. (Moving it inside the refuge would also, counterintuitively, avoid the largest bird populations.) When Pattern brought the new route to local environmentalists and the Audubon Society, the conservationists agreed. Pattern then took the extraordinary step of applying to the BLM for a new route through New Mexico. By adopting the new route, SunZia could also avoid the White Sands Missile Range entirely, avoiding the costly need to bury the line.
Cary Kottler, Pattern’s chief development officer, told me that the project’s pre-existing climate credentials incentivized it to find ways to make SunZia more environmentally sound. “I think we did figure out a way for environmental groups to support infrastructure, which has not always been the case in the past,” he said.
“Pattern being a company that was willing to have discussions with us in good faith — and that conversation happening before the re-permitting process — was, I think, really important,” Hayes agreed.
Heinrich echoed that thought in a statement. “I am especially proud of our work to engage local communities, conservation organizations, and other stakeholders to find pathways forward while securing strong economic and conservation benefits for New Mexico,” he told me. He also thanked the BLM, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Pattern Energy, for their “hard work and collaborative approach.”
“I firmly believe that when we work together, we can build big things in this country,” the senator said. “SunZia will have a massive economic impact in New Mexico while bringing us one major step closer to meeting our climate goals and conserving wildlife habitat.”
In 2020, Pattern entered into a deal with New Mexico’s Renewable Electricity Transmission Authority, a state agency meant to encourage long-distance power lines. The deal allowed New Mexico to reap some of the benefits of owning SunZia, and it spared SunZia from some scrutiny under state permitting law. It had taken 14 years, but SunZia was finally ready to build in New Mexico. It still had to tackle Arizona.
Pattern Energy bought SunZia outright from Southwest Power Group in 2021, and outside fundraising began to pile in. Last year, Pattern Energy announced that it had secured $11.5 billion in financing for the line, making SunZia the largest clean infrastructure project in dollar terms in American history.
But the line’s journey through Arizona — and specifically the San Pedro Valley — has remained controversial.
The San Pedro Valley.Robinson Meyer
Throughout last year, a coalition of environmental groups, local property owners, and two tribes — the Tohono O'odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe — pushed for the project to avoid the San Pedro Valley, alleging that the BLM had failed to study how SunZia would affect the landscape’s cultural value to Native Americans. In November, the BLM ordered Pattern Energy to pause construction on SunZia so that it could consult with the tribes again; the groups held a series of meetings in the fall.
But the tribes deemed that effort insufficient. In January, the Tohono O'odham and San Carlos Apache Tribe, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and Archaeology Southwest, sued BLM, alleging that it had not studied how SunZia would erode the valley’s cultural value.
Their argument turned on the interplay of two federal laws: NEPA, the law that governs the federal permitting process; and the National Historic Preservation Act, which says that the government must evaluate how its actions will affect archeological sites and Native American cultural sites.
If an infrastructure project will destroy an archeological or cultural site, the National Historic Preservation Act says that the government must mitigate that harm, mapping the relics and preserving what it can from them. Pattern and the BLM say that they have followed this law. After mapping and mitigating archaeological sites along its route, they agreed to move the line to avoid some of the most sensitive areas.
But the tribes argue that the entire San Pedro Valley is a sensitive cultural area. The Tohono O’odham Nation has argued in court and in the press that SunZia abuses its cultural property not by destroying any one cultural site, but rather by entering the San Pedro Valley in the first place. In essence, the tribe is claiming that the entire valley is a cultural site unto itself.
They say that the BLM must do what’s called a “cultural landscape” study, investigating not only discrete archeological sites along the route but the cultural value of the San Pedro Valley as a whole. “The tribes have been trying to say that this [valley] has central cultural and religious importance,” Robin Silver, an Arizona resident and the cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity, told me.
Their argument was legally daring. The federal government approved SunZia’s route through the San Pedro Valley under NEPA in 2015, meaning that the six-year statute of limitations for that decision had already expired. But the National Historic Preservation Act process only wrapped up last year. The tribes and the environmental groups argue that if that law’s process had been correctly followed, then the BLM would have been forced to change SunZia’s route — even though doing so would essentially re-open the NEPA process.
“Pattern Energy and the Bureau of Land Management, all they do is hire consultants that confuse hard archaeology with anthropology. So they go out and dig in front of the bulldozers and say everything’s fine,” Silver said. “The fact of the landforms having significant cultural and religious importance has been here as long as the tribes have been here. It’s just that when Manifest Destiny became the rule of law, tribal concerns were blown off, and they’re still being blown off.”
The coalition’s argument also raised the specter of old trade-offs — trade-offs that the tribe, by focusing on procedural and cultural matters, did not address in its lawsuit. The San Pedro Valley is incredibly beautiful, for instance, but it is not completely pristine: It is already home to a large natural gas pipeline and a few smaller transmission lines. When I asked Silver why the pipeline did not destroy the valley, but the transmission line did, he said in essence that the pipeline did not have the same visual impact as SunZia.
“There are no 200-foot large power lines going through the San Pedro Valley,” he said. “The gas pipeline doesn’t have 200 foot towers.”
I pointed out that this suggested fossil fuel projects would never face the same scrutiny as transmission lines. “We need to figure out a way to connect the sources of our new energy to the users, and our grid is woefully archaic. No argument,” he added. “But we don’t need to go up every single valley, we don’t need to sacrifice everything else, because of this mantra of climate change.”
Yet there is no way to upgrade the grid without building large transmission towers somewhere. Silver suggested that the line could be shifted back toward Tucson, but that would seemingly place it back into the low-income, majority-Latino neighborhoods that BLM had hoped to avoid in the first place. The other available route would be to run SunZia west of Tucson, but that would force the line onto Tohono O’odham Nation land. When I asked a tribal spokesperson if the tribe had lifted its decade-old ban on SunZia crossing its land, he didn’t respond.
In fact, the Tohono O’odham Nation has not responded to multiple emails and calls requesting comment beginning in March.
Two weeks ago, a district court judge in Arizona tossed the tribe’s lawsuit. She said that the statute of limitations had expired and SunZia’s route could no longer be altered. While BLM had once suggested that it would do a cultural landscape study on the San Pedro Valley, it did not do so in a way that would change its obligation to the tribes, she ruled. Silver told me that the coalition will appeal.
SunZia hasn’t made it out of the desert yet. It still has to clear at least one remaining legal challenge, a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies in Arizona state court. But with the federal lawsuit against it dismissed last month, SunZia now seems more likely than ever to become complete, making it a key piece of American zero-carbon infrastructure.
Which raises the inevitable question: Could SunZia have succeeded more quickly? SunZia required no fundamental technological leaps or engineering miracles; we have known how to build a power line of its size and length for years. Yet just the permitting has taken nearly two decades. If we finally get SunZia in 2026, that means that we could have had it in 2016. And that means that we could have burned less natural gas to meet the country’s electricity needs, or at least enjoyed more energy, for lower prices, with less pollution. America’s ponderous approach to building infrastructure is often described as an economic problem. But climate change transforms that regulatory torpor into an environmental challenge. What can we learn from SunZia such that we never have to go through this again?
You can see SunZia — as many in New Mexico now do — as a lesson in different approaches to building big new infrastructure projects. Many interests across the Southwest were unhappy with SunZia’s initial route in 2013. But in New Mexico, the Pentagon’s formal protest to that route led — quite happily — to Pattern Energy, Audubon Southwest, and environmental advocates working out a better plan for everyone involved. In Arizona, meanwhile, the old plans never changed, the same contentiousness remained, and they ultimately gave rise to a lawsuit.
You could also see it as a lesson in political power. Silver, the Center for Biological Diversity cofounder, told me SunZia succeeded in New Mexico for one reason: “Martin Heinrich.” Speaking with a mix of resentment and respect, Silver said that Heinrich pushed for negotiations between environmentalists, clean energy advocates, tribes, and the Defense Department, eventually nudging those groups to arrive at a mutually agreeable outcome. In Arizona, Silver said, national and state-level leaders have not taken the same hands-on approach, so the process has been much more acrimonious.
There’s some truth to each of these views. To get large-scale infrastructure projects done, it clearly helps to have a federal chaperone — someone who can spur cities, states, tribes, and conservation groups toward a final and constructive conclusion. The Biden administration is playing that role now for some projects, although it lacks local credibility, and Congress has helped to standardize the process by creating a “Fast 41” process where the government can prod along stalled infrastructure efforts.
But there is also something substantively different in New Mexico — you could call it high trust, good will, or a solutions-oriented approach to problem solving. It certainly helped that Pattern Energy was willing to work in good faith with local environmental groups. But that only works if all the other key stakeholders, including environmentalists themselves, respond in kind. The current tangle of state, local, and federal laws that dictate infrastructure permitting do not encourage this kind of constructive engagement, pushing opponents instead toward prolonged and costly legal battles. These laws also fail to substantively protect the environment, guaranteeing only that a process gets followed — not that the environment gets protected.
For decades, developers and conservationists have attacked each other over every project and prepared to fight bitter court battles over every detail. Developers assumed that conservation groups were out to block them at every turn and shut down, even when members of the public asked worthy questions. Environmentalists, meanwhile, suspected that any developers would destroy the land if given the opportunity, whether they were putting in oil pipelines or transmission lines, and would accept no protest to the contrary.
SunZia’s story repeats this old, messy tradition, while also laying the model for a new one — one in which clean energy builders and environmental protectors work together to find the best solution for the environment and the climate. We will need many more success stories like it if America is to meet its climate goals — 99 more, to be exact.
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Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.
How Hurricane Helene is still putting the Southeast at risk.
Less than two months after Hurricane Helene cut a historically devastating course up into the southeastern U.S. from Florida’s Big Bend, drenching a wide swath of states with 20 trillion gallons of rainfall in just five days, experts are warning of another potential threat. The National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast of fire-risk conditions for the coming months has the footprint of Helene highlighted in red, with the heightened concern stretching into the new year.
While the flip from intense precipitation to wildfire warnings might seem strange, experts say it speaks to the weather whiplash we’re now seeing regularly. “What we expect from climate change is this layering of weather extremes creating really dangerous situations,” Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, explained to me.
Scheuller said North Carolina had been experiencing drought conditions early in the year, followed by intense rain leading up to Helene’s landfall. Then it went dry again — according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, much of the state was back to some level of drought condition as of mid-November. The NIFC forecast report says the same is true for much of the region, including Florida, despite its having been hit by Hurricane Milton soon after Helene.
That dryness is a particular concern due to the amount of debris left in Helene’s wake — another major risk factor for fire. The storm’s winds, which reached more than 100 miles per hour in some areas, wreaked havoc on millions of acres of forested land. In North Carolina alone, the state’s Forest Service estimates over 820,000 acres of timberland were damaged.
“When you have a catastrophic storm like [Helene], all of the stuff that was standing upright — your trees — they might be snapped off or blown over,” fire ecologist David Godwin told me. “All of a sudden, that material is now on the forest floor, and so you have a really tremendous rearrangement of the fuels and the vegetation within ecosystems that can change the dynamics of how fire behaves in those sites.”
Godwin is the director of the Southern Fire Exchange for the University of Florida, a program that connects wildland firefighters, prescribed burners, and natural resources managers across the Southeast with fire science and tools. He says the Southeast sees frequent, unplanned fires, but that active ecosystem management helps keep the fires that do spark from becoming conflagrations. But an increase like this in fallen or dead vegetation — what Godwin refers to as fire “fuel” — can take this risk to the next level, particularly as it dries out.
Godwin offered an example from another storm, 2018’s Hurricane Michael, which rapidly intensified before making landfall in Northern Florida and continuing inland, similar to Hurricane Helene. In its aftermath, there was a 10-fold increase in the amount of fuel on the ground, with 72 million tons of timber damaged in Florida. Three years later, the Bertha Swamp Road Fire filled the storm’s Florida footprint with flames, which consumed more than 30,000 acres filled with dried out forest fuel. One Florida official called the wildfire the “ghost” of Michael, nodding to the overlap of the impacted areas and speaking to the environmental threat the storm posed even years later.
Not only does this fuel increase the risk of fire, it changes the character of the fires that do ignite, Godwin said. Given ample ground fuel, flame lengths can grow longer, allowing them to burn higher into the canopy. That’s why people setting prescribed fires will take steps like raking leaf piles, which helps keep the fire intensity low.
These fires can also produce more smoke, Godwin said, which can mix with the mountainous fog in the region to deadly effect. According to the NIFC, mountainous areas incurred the most damage from Helene, not only due to downed vegetation, but also because of “washed out roads and trails” and “slope destabilization” from the winds and rain. If there is a fire in these areas, all these factors will also make it more challenging for firefighters to address it, the report adds.
In addition to the natural debris fire experts worry about, Helene caused extensive damage to the built environment, wrecking homes, businesses, and other infrastructure. Try imagining four-and-a-half football fields stacked 10 feet tall with debris — that’s what officials have removed so far just in Asheville, North Carolina. In Florida’s Treasure Island, there were piles 50 feet high of assorted scrap materials. Officials have warned that some common household items, such as the lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes and electric vehicles, can be particularly flammable after exposure to floodwaters. They are also advising against burning debris as a means of managing it due to all the compounding risks.
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department in North Carolina, told Blueridge Public Radio that his department’s work has “grown exponentially since the storm.” While cooler, wetter winter weather could offer some relief, Scheuller said the area will likely see heightened fire behavior for years after the storm, particularly if the swings between particularly wet and particularly dry periods continue.
Part of the challenge moving forward, then, is to find ways to mitigate risk on this now-hazardous terrain. For homeowners, that might mean exercising caution when dealing with debris and considering wildfire risk as part of rebuilding plans, particularly in more wooded areas. On a larger forest management scale, this means prioritizing safe debris collection and finding ways to continue the practice of prescribed burns, which are utilized more in the Southeast than in any other U.S. region. Without focused mitigation efforts, Godwin told me the area’s overall fire outlook would be much different.
“We would have a really big wildfire issue,” he said, “perhaps even bigger than what we might see in parts of the West.”