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On Trump’s mineral deals, the gas turbine backlog, and Turkic offshore wind
Investment in zero-carbon energy and transportation surged this spring, driven by consumer EV and battery buying.
On transmission corridors, China’s Russian reactor, and long-duration energy storage
On copper prices, nuclear’s jellyfish woes, and Leo DiCaprio’s Chilean NIMBYism
Facing down a sea change, the automaker has staked its next EV bet on a compact, sporty pickup.
“Full fathom five, your father lies,” the invisible spirit Ariel sings early in The Tempest, as a handsome and grieving prince listens, rapt. The song tells of a shipwrecked skeleton transforming into something else — its eyes have become pearls, and its bones pink coral — as it undergoes, yes, a “sea change.” It is the first time that phrase appears in the English language.
Ford is now facing its own kind of sea change. Over the past decade, the automaker has doubled down on its most profitable and exciting vehicles — pickups, SUVs, and the Mustang muscle car — and dropped from its line-up the cheap, boring cars that once made it famous. It embraced, then backed off, the transition to electric vehicles, in part because it failed to make money from them; and it began to reckon with the surge of cheaper, cleaner, and “far superior” EVs from Chinese producers that are transforming global auto markets around the world.
Locked into its aging but reliable line-up, yet unable to innovate at the low end, Ford might seem like the epitome of a company facing disruptive innovation. No wonder its stock has traded flat from where it was five years ago — even as the broader market has surged by more than 70%.
Its solution is an EV skunkworks, run by Tesla alumni, where it can develop a new “universal EV platform” to undergird future vehicles. Today, we got a peek at the first car to emerge from that secret shop: an all-electric compact pickup that will hit the roads by the end of next year. Its name? The Ford Fathom.
We know very little about the Fathom, as our correspondent Andrew Moseman wrote today. It will retail for just over $28,000, and even with mandatory delivery costs and other add-ons will stick to this side of $30,000. That makes it only a smidge more expensive than the gas-burning Ford Maverick, a sporty, compact, and popular pickup that starts around $27,000.
Ford promises that the Fathom will have as much seating capacity as Toyota’s RAV4, America’s best-selling car that isn’t a truck. (Ford’s own F-150, of course, holds the true No. 1 spot.) Those dimensions suggest the Fathom will sport a four-door crew cab, like the Maverick, making it more acceptable to families with kids — or young professionals who want to give their friends rides on the weekend. It will also have a frunk.
Beyond that, though, we don’t know much. We don’t know its range, for instance, and its price point shouldn’t inspire too much confidence on that front. Nor do we know, frankly, whether Ford can pull it off: When the automaker announced its first electric truck, the F-150 Lightning, in 2021, it claimed a price point of less than $40,000. Eighteen months of inflation later, it actually sold them for closer to $55,000 — and it still lost money on every EV that it made. Fixing the latter problem is part of why the skunkworks exists in the first place, and Ford now has an additional half-decade of experience making EVs. But consumers hoping for a miraculously priced electric pickup from the Blue Oval have been burned before.
If the Fathom disappoints, though, then consumers will soon have other options. The American car market is about to be deluged with sporty, compact pickup trucks — a welcome change from just a few years ago, when the segment was almost entirely dominated by mid-size and half-ton models. The Jeff Bezos-backed startup Slate will start delivering two-door, all-electric pickups starting at $25,000 at the end of this year. The automaker Stellantis, which owns the Dodge and Jeep brands, says it wants to bring another compact pickup — it’s almost more of a ute — called the Rampage to North America soon.
That’s welcome news for me — I love these little trucks — but I’m a little worried I’ll be outside my pickup-buying years by the time they actually make it to market. In the meantime, I’ll keep you posted on other updates about the Fathom. Will “sea nymphs hourly ring its knell”? No, but it will have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
On another offshore wind kill, inverter bans, and NYC’s new power line
Current conditions: The wildfires in Spokane, Washington, have burned nearly 11,000 acres and destroyed close to 900 structures in the past week • Tropical Depression Maymay is veering away from the Philippines after battering northern Luzon with 45-mile-per-hour winds • Temperatures in Seoul are surpassing 103 degrees Fahrenheit today as South Korea’s heat wave caps off before dropping about 10 degrees over the weekend.
A solar cell at the Elin Energy factory in Texas. Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
The Trump administration taketh away, and the Trump administration giveth. A month after President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act effectively eliminated a key incentive for solar developers to buy domestically-made panels, the White House has announced new tariffs on polysilicon and virtually every component in each step of the photovoltaic supply chain. The trade case originally came before the Department of Commerce when polysilicon makers complained that they couldn’t compete with Chinese manufacturers on semiconductor-grade material without also having a market for the solar-grade stuff. As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo and I reported last night, the administration will impose a 15% tariff on all imports and set baseline prices at which the levies would kick in for each part of the solar supply chain, ranging from $0.22 per watt for solar cells, the actual devices that convert sunlight into electricity, to $0.38 per watt for completed panels. Raw polysilicon, meanwhile, will start at $20 per kilogram. Tariffs have been tried before in the U.S. and Europe to keep out the onslaught of cheap Chinese products and protect domestic manufacturers in the name of national security, but those had only mixed success due to a lack of supply chain visibility. The Trump administration has vowed to try something novel, providing strict oversight over which companies qualify for offsets from the program to prevent Chinese manufacturers from gaming the market.
Still, just a small fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans who work in the solar industry are in manufacturing. The Solar Energy Industries Association, the solar sector’s largest trade group and a longstanding advocate of importing cheap panels, said the tariffs would only worsen electricity inflation. “America has made terrific progress rebuilding its solar manufacturing base,” Tim Pawlenty, SEIA’s chief executive, said in a statement, “but imposing tariffs and prices floors on solar materials will create new challenges for American manufacturers and raise energy costs for families and businesses.”
Speaking of renewables the Trump administration taketh away: Yet another offshore wind developer has reached a deal with the White House to take a payment in exchange for abandoning a project. On Thursday, the German giant RWE entered into a settlement with the Department of the Interior for $1.2 billion to surrender federal leases for offshore wind projects in New York Bight and off the coasts of California and Louisiana. “After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” RWE said in a press release. “The company determined that this resolution best serves the interests of its stakeholders and allows it to direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty.” Noting that this deal is the largest payout yet of any of the agreements the Trump administration has made to kill offshore wind projects, my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote that the price tag is “fittingly” high “because it is among the most damaging” yet. While RWE has pledged to invest in gas projects elsewhere, such as a liquified natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, RWE “well knows” that “these projects won’t help solve a coming energy shortage in New York or New England,” Rob wrote.
Dominion Energy has long dominated Virginia’s politics as the state’s utility giant and one-time political kingmaker. Now Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat who soared to victory last year promising to rein in runaway electricity prices, is getting involved in the utility megamerger that could see Dominion join forces with Florida-based NextEra Energy in what my colleague Matthew Zeitlin called a “juggernaut.” In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Spanberger said she had “serious questions about what this deal would mean” and vowed to intervene by formally submitting to become a party in the case to decide whether the deal, which would create a $420 billion behemoth, violates consumer-protection rules. “I know this action is unprecedented by a Virginia governor — but so, too, is the size of this proposed merger and its potential impact on the commonwealth,” Spanberger wrote. “Virginians deserve to know that their leaders are laser-focused on ensuring that their needs are part of” the review by the State Corporation Commission, the regulator that determines whether a utility deal harms ratepayers. The move comes as state regulators order Dominion to create a process for making data centers pay more of the direct costs for their electricity use, such as sponsoring construction of substations to meet new demand, E&E News reported.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democrats are eyeing new ways to crack down on data centers beyond backing the national moratorium progressive lawmakers proposed. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee, pitched a new excise tax and the elimination of tax breaks for data center construction, NOTUS reported.
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By the end of next year, American factories will have enough capacity to produce all the solar inverters the country needs. The U.S. once imported 90% of its large-scale inverters, including more than 30% from Chinese-headquartered vendors. But domestic manufacturers are on track to open more than 100 gigawatts of inverter-making plants by December 2027, according to a new analysis from Wood Mackenzie. The consultancy cautioned that the devices, which patch panels onto the grid, will come at a high premium than today. As I reported last week, the Federal Communications Commission banned new types of foreign inverters on the grounds that they pose a threat to the U.S. grid and the artificial intelligence buildout. “The FCC’s intent here is clear. The US government determined that the U.S.’s reliance on foreign inverters poses a national security risk, citing both cybersecurity and economic concerns,” Joe Shangraw, research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “Leading manufacturers are notifying clients that they believe their products will not fall under the scope of this ban, while project owners are concerned that their existing inverters could be blocked from receiving critical firmware updates.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, is canceling plans to award a contract worth up to $300 million for lithium carbonate after twice delaying the deadline for bids, Inside Defense reported. The Defense Logistics Agency gave no explanation for rescinding the solicitation for a five-year, indefinite-delivery deal.
Last month, New York City’s newly minted clean energy megaproject, a 339-mile transmission line plugging the five boroughs into Quebec’s famously cheap and clean hydroelectric system, went down unexpectedly for maintenance. Just in time for the city’s temperature to go back up, Hydro Quebec’s Champlain Hudson Power Express line completed repairs two weeks ago and started delivering electricity at full capacity again on Thursday, the province’s state-owned utility told me. “We are seeing full capacity flows now on CHPE as we’ve entered a heatwave,” Pete Rose, Hydro Quebec’s senior director of stakeholder relations in New York, told me via text yesterday. “This large volume of clean energy helps suppress wholesale electricity prices while displacing large quantities of CO2.”
Like Germany itself, BMW’s Munich factory has, uh, seen a lot of changes since its opening in the early 1920s. At each step of the way, however, the vehicles coming off the assembly line ran on petroleum products. Not for long. The company’s oldest manufacturing facility will begin exclusively building electric vehicles starting next year. “This marks a huge turning point for the brand, as it phases out internal combustion models for its Neue Klasse EVs. It isn’t only a production milestone for the brand but a symbolic one,” reporter Nico DeMattia wrote for InsideEVs. “Munich is the site of BMW's HQ and its Bavarian home, and it's about to be fully electric.”
