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What’s next for electric cars? There’s no consensus.
The automaker had a decent second quarter, but projects its best-ever year-end performance, as we wrap up a busy week in the energy economy.
On Trump’s inverter ban, American antimony, and thermal batteries
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
Strip away the restaurant and the hype, and Tesla Diner is an 80-plug fast-charging station plunked right in the middle of a former charging desert.
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
The company’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, shows that carbon intensity per kilometer traveled has dropped 81% since 2019.
Lime, the electric scooter and bike-sharing company that recently raised $174 million in its initial public offering, estimates that it replaced 38 million car trips across the globe last year. Even as it helped prevent substantial vehicle pollution, though, Lime racked up about 90,000 metric tons of carbon emissions tied to its own activities.
While that number pales in comparison to the tens of millions of tons of carbon that tech companies like Microsoft and Google emit, or the hundreds of millions of tons that traditional car companies like Ford report, the point stands: Even companies producing solutions to climate change have emissions to deal with.
For such a small player, Lime has made quite a bit of progress reducing its climate impact. Since 2019, when Lime first began tracking its carbon footprint, the number of kilometers traveled by Lime’s bikes and scooters each year has grown nearly 250%, while the carbon intensity of each kilometer has decreased by 81%. All in all, Lime has reduced its total reported emissions from direct and indirect sources by 35%. The company made much of that progress in just the past two years.
According to Lime’s latest sustainability report, shared exclusively with Heatmap, its biggest recent strides came from doing something that is generally considered to be pretty difficult: It decarbonized part of its supply chain.
Most of the emissions related to Lime’s business come from activities that are not within the company’s control. Its biggest source has always been the manufacture of the vehicles and batteries it uses, and more specifically from the manufacture of aluminum, which requires a huge amount of electricity to smelt.
Lime doesn’t manufacture its own vehicles, so it had to convince its partners to find and use lower-carbon metals and batteries. “One of the strategic advantages we have is that we design our own vehicles. We’re not buying them off the shelf,” Andrew Savage, Lime’s vice president of sustainability, told me. “So we don’t own the manufacturing, but we have a large amount of input and ability to work with suppliers to modify a supply chain.”
Savage said that a significant sourcing effort in 2024 paid off in 2025, when the company increased the amount of aluminum in its products that was made using renewable electricity and sourced more batteries made with renewable power. That combination of efforts cut the company’s total capital goods-related emissions in half compared to the previous year, and reduced the carbon intensity of each Lime vehicle by more than 25%. It also didn’t cost too much, Savage told me, adding that the expenditure was “marginal enough that it has made sense for us.”
Lime has also invested in its repair capabilities, which allows the company to keep its vehicles and parts in circulation much longer and avoid buying as many new ones. This has helped to keep emissions down even as its business has grown.
Another major source of emissions for Lime is shipping and logistics — again, a part of the business that is somewhat out of its hands. Lime hires third parties to pick up its bikes and scooters from major ports, transport them to regional hubs, and then distribute them to the markets where it operates. Initially, the vehicles were transported in trucks fueled by diesel. In 2024, Lime found partners that would be able to pick up its cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and bring them to its logistics hubs in electric drayage trucks.
The company made similar moves throughout its European business, transitioning most of its port-to-hub shipments to trucks running on a bio-based diesel fuel called HVO100, which is made from used cooking oil and other waste oils and estimated to reduce emissions by 89% compared to conventional diesel. This past year, Lime expanded its use of HVO100-fueled trucking partners to cover shipments from hubs to 16 cities.
The problem with HVO100, according to Nikita Pavlenko, the program director for fuels and aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation, is that there will never be enough of it to fully decarbonize heavy duty trucking. “Particularly in Europe, where the transport sector is more reliant on diesel, it could never feasibly be met with waste oils entirely,” he told me. Purpose-grown crops like palm and soy could meet the increased demand for bio-based diesel, but that starts to come at the expense of land-use emissions and deforestation.
Savage was well aware of the limitations, and told me he views HVO100 as an interim solution. “We looked across Europe and somewhat shockingly found very few options on the electrification side,” he said. Even a country like Norway, which is famous for its adoption of electric vehicles, does not yet have much in the way of electric trucking and logistics, he said. “But it’s something that we absolutely expect to come in as part of our decarbonization roadmap.”
Interestingly, Lime reported that its upstream shipping and logistics emissions slightly increased in 2025 compared to 2024, although the company has cut this category in half overall since 2019. Lime attributed this to an increased use of expedited shipping for certain parts last year, but said its increased use of EVs and HVO100 helped mitigate the impacts.
Lime currently operates on five continents and in 230 cities. While it’s made some progress on low-carbon shipping within the EU and U.S., there’s still Australia, South America, and Asia to figure out. Looking ahead to next year, Savage said he wants to expand the number of markets and the amount of goods the company moves using lower-carbon vehicles. He also wants to augment the company’s repair practice.
“We view the work we’re doing on decarbonizing the business as going completely hand in hand with our mission and objective as a company,” Savage said. “It’s not a sideshow.”
A new 60-home pilot program aims to expand vehicle-to-grid charging.
When energy experts imagine the grid of the future, they often dream of millions of electric vehicles moonlighting as mobile power banks, using their hefty batteries to send electricity back to the grid when it needs a boost. But despite rapid EV adoption, this utopia has remained largely out of reach. Most vehicles don’t yet support bidirectional power flow, and most markets lack incentives for customers to feed power back to the grid in the first place.
That’s finally starting to change. While vehicle-to-grid — a.k.a. V2G — technology is still in its earliest innings, a new Massachusetts program announced on Thursday is working to make the technology something closer to commonplace. Funded by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s economic development agency, the initiative will install 60 bidirectional charging systems in participating residents’ homes.
The program has already begun enrolling its first participants, joining a small but growing group of V2G demonstrations across the country. But the field remains so nascent that even a 60-home project stands out. Kip Hack, who leads the distributed energy resource management company EnergyHub’s EV work, told me he very much considers it a “leading program for North America.”
The Massachusetts initiative brings together a wide variety of partners: utility companies Eversource and National Grid, EnergyHub, and technology partners Sunrun and The Mobility House, which each provide the software and device integrations needed to connect various EV models to the grid. Depending on their vehicle, eligible customers will enroll in the program through either Sunrun or The Mobility House, which will then connect them to their utility’s existing demand flexibility program, ConnectedSolutions. This decade-old initiative pays customers to reduce strain on the grid by leveraging smart thermostats, batteries, and other commercial and industrial energy systems. Now EVs will join the mix.
“They don’t actually care what the participating technology is. They only care about the output,” EnergyHub’s president, Seth Frader-Thompson told me, referring to ConnectedSolutions’ technology-agnostic design, which runs on EnergyHub’s software platform. That means the program can readily incorporate new distributed energy resources as they become available, simplifying the entire process in a way that many other regions have yet to figure out. “So when V2G technology was ready, nobody had to create a new program. You already had a program structure, an incentive structure, et cetera, that you could just have these vehicles participate in.”
Each distributed energy asset enrolled in the program can earn up to $275 per average kilowatt of grid support provided during the summer months. But customers don’t receive that payment directly from their utility. Rather Sunrun and The Mobility House set their own customer incentive structures based on that underlying $275 per kilowatt value.
Chip Silverman, Sunrun’s director of grid services and virtual power plants, told me that its customers will receive a fixed payment simply for signing up, just as the company’s stationary battery storage customers do. That gets new participants in the door — they can then earn additional performance incentives if they actually discharge power back to the grid during a demand response event. “We want to incentivize people to plug in 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on weeknights because we want to get you to try to hit the peak events whenever possible,” Silverman told me.
The pool of qualifying vehicles remains quite limited, however. Sunrun’s system only supports the Ford F-150 Lightning, while The Mobility House’s software integrates with chargers compatible with the Kia EV9, Volvo XC90, Polestar 3, and several Nissan Leaf models. Teslas with V2G capability — which today means just the Cybertruck — are not eligible. That’s because while every other vehicle in this program places the requisite DC to AC power converter within the wall charger, Tesla installs this hardware in the car itself. While that will likely prove to be a smarter, cheaper long-term approach, for now it doesn’t align with how utilities certify and approve grid-connected equipment.
Yet even at this early stage, with limited scale and narrow eligibility requirements, Massachusetts’ early adopters are already demonstrating the technology’s value. “It has been quite hot, unseasonably hot in New England these last several weeks,” Hack told me, explaining that participants’ EV batteries have already been tapped to discharge power “more than once” since enrollment began earlier this month.
The potential for far greater impact is enormous. “The size of the battery in the car is remarkable,” Frader-Thompson told me. While a typical home battery stores around 10 to 15 kilowatt-hours of energy, an EV battery can hold on the order of 70 to 100 kilowatt-hours. “So if the vehicle is plugged in, it essentially has the ability to export the equivalent of an entire residential battery every hour during an event,” he explained.
To truly turn V2G from a promising concept into a reliable grid resource, however, utilities and grid operators will need much more data on when these batteries are available and how much power EV owners are actually willing to provide. By the end of this summer, Massachusetts’ latest experiment could offer some of the first real-world answers.
