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The tax agency reopened its online portal to allow dealerships to register sales retroactively.
On auto levies, NOAA’s new lawyer, and the future of FEMA
On EV sales, a clean energy lobbying blitz, and fusion
On the IEA’s latest report, wildfires in North Carolina, and EV adoption
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck
The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?
The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.
On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.
It’s still not entirely clear whether the technology actually works, although BYD has a good track record on that front. But it suggests that the highest-end EVs worldwide could soon add range as fast as gasoline-powered cars can now, eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption.
The new charging platform won’t work everywhere. BYD says that it will also build 4,000 chargers across China that will be able to take advantage of these maximum speeds. If this pans out, then BYD will be able to charge its newest vehicles twice as fast as Tesla’s next generation of superchargers can.
“This is a good thing,” Jeremy Wallace, a Chinese studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Yes, it’s a Chinese company. And there are geopolitical implications to that. But the better the technology gets, the easier it is to decarbonize.”
“As someone who has waited in line for chargers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I look forward to the day when charging doesn’t take that long,” he added.
The announcement also suggests that the Chinese EV sector remains as dynamic as ever and continues to set the global standard for EV innovation — and that American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up. The Trump administration is doing little to help the industry catch up: It has proposed repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers, which provide demand-side support for the fledgling industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back tailpipe-pollution rules that have furnished early profits to EV makers, including Tesla. Against that background, what — if anything — can U.S. companies do to catch up?
The situation isn’t totally hopeless, but it’s not great.
BYD’s mega-charging capability is made possible by two underlying innovations. First, BYD’s new platform — the wiring, battery, and motors that make up the electronic guts of the car — will be capable of channeling up to 1,000 volts. That is only a small step-change above the best platforms available elsewhere— the forthcoming Gravity SUV from the American carmaker Lucid is built on a 926-volt platform, while the Cybertruck’s platform is 800 volts — but BYD will be able to leverage its technological firepower with mass manufacturing capacity unrivaled by any other brand.
Second, BYD’s forthcoming chargers will be capable of using the platform’s full voltage. These chargers may need to be built close to power grid infrastructure because of the amount of electricity that they will demand.
But sitting underneath these innovations is a sprawling technological ecosystem that keeps all Chinese electronics companies ahead — and that guarantees Chinese advantages well into the future.
“China’s decisive advantage over the U.S. when it comes to innovation is that it has an entrenched workforce that is able to continuously iterate on technological advances,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told me.
The country is able to innovate so relentlessly because of its abundance of process knowledge, Wang said. This community of engineering practice may have been seeded by Apple’s iPhone-manufacturing effort in the aughts and Tesla’s carmaking prowess in the 2010s, but it has now taken on a life of its own.
“Shenzhen is the center of the world’s hardware manufacturing industry because it has workers rubbing shoulders with academics rubbing shoulders with investors rubbing shoulders with engineers,” Wang told me. “And you have a more hustle-type culture because it’s so much harder to maintain technological moats and technological differentiation, because people are so competitive in these sorts of spaces.”
In a way, Shenzhen is the modern-day version of the hardware and software ecosystem that used to exist in northern California — Silicon Valley. But while the California technology industry now largely focuses on software, China has taken over the hardware side.
That allows the country to debut new technological innovations much faster than any other country can, he added. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now. Tesla might say, we’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.”
“China can say, we’ll put it in three months from now,” he said.“You have a much more focused concentration of talent in China, which collapses coordination time.”
That culture has allowed the same companies and engineers to rapidly advance in manufacturing skill and complexity. It has helped CATL, which originally made batteries for smartphones, to become one of the world’s top EV battery makers. And it has helped BYD — which is close to unseating Tesla as the world’s No. 1 seller of electric vehicles — move from making lackluster gasoline cars to some of the world’s best and cheapest EVs.
It will be a while until America can duplicate that manufacturing capability, partly because of the number of headwinds it faces, Wang said.
On the WMO’s latest report, EPA climate grants, and BYD
Current conditions: More than 2 million people are under blizzard warnings across the Midwest • A landslide is suspected of rupturing an oil pipeline in northwest Ecuador, triggering an environmental emergency • Beaches are closed in South Australia due to a dangerous microalgal bloom, which officials believe could be caused by the combination of unusual hot and dry weather, low wind, and low tides.
A U.S. district judge issued a temporary restraining order yesterday blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from taking back billions of dollars in climate grants issued to a handful of nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Under the order, Citibank, where the funds are held, cannot transfer the money out of the nonprofits’ accounts because doing so would cause them “imminent harm.” The nonprofits in question – Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities – received about $14 billion of more than $20 billion awarded for clean energy and climate solutions. The Trump administration’s EPA, led by Lee Zeldin, has frozen and attempted to claw back the funds, accusing the Biden administration of approving them hastily and without oversight, and accusing the nonprofits of “fraud, waste, and abuse.” Several of the grantees have sued the EPA and Citibank. In her decision, Judge Tanya Chutkan of Washington, D.C., said “there are serious due process concerns” about the EPA’s actions.
The World Meteorological Organization’s annual “State of the Global Climate” report is out today. It’s packed full of numbers from 2024 that tell an alarming story:
“WMO and the global community are intensifying efforts to strengthen early warning systems and climate services to help decision-makers and society at large be more resilient to extreme weather and climate,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster. Only half of all countries worldwide have adequate early warning systems. This must change.”
The Science Based Targets initiative, an influential nonprofit authority on best practices for corporate sustainability, published a draft proposal for its revised Net Zero Standard yesterday. It “requires that net-zero targets across all scopes (1, 2 and 3) be aligned with pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot.” In other words, companies that want an SBTi seal of approval can’t abandon the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, even as the world comes off its first year of average global temperatures above this threshold. “The finance industry is already abandoning voluntary initiatives intended to align their businesses with 1.5C,” notedBloomberg, “with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance now virtually wiped off the map in North America.”
Companies were hoping the new standard would give direction as to whether they should be buying carbon removal in the near-term. But as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains, in the section on carbon removal, SBTi described several potential approaches, none of which appears to be particularly ambitious. Feedback on the draft is due by June 1, after which the group’s technical department and expert working groups will refine it. SBTi expects companies to begin using the new standard to refine their targets in 2027.
A court has dismissed a legal challenge against New York City’s Local Law 154, which sets strict carbon dioxide limits that effectively ban fossil fuel-based space heating, hot water systems, cooking ranges, and clothes dryers in new buildings and buildings being gutted for renovation. Some industry groups and a plumber labor union challenged the law, claiming it “preempted” national energy-efficiency standards. The court disagreed, finding the law “regulates, indirectly, the type of fuel that a covered product may consume in certain settings, irrespective of that product’s energy efficiency or use.”
“This ruling is a major victory for local democracy and New York City residents who deserve healthy air and climate protection,” said Daniel Carpenter-Gold, staff attorney on the Climate Justice Team at the Public Health Law Center. “The court has affirmed that cities have the legal authority to address the use of fossil fuels in buildings, a major contributor to both climate change and air pollution.”
Chinese auto giant BYD claims to have developed technology that can charge an electric vehicle for 250 miles of range in just five minutes, or about the same amount of time it takes to fill up a gas-powered car. The Super e-Platform “can achieve a charging power of one megawatt and a peak charging speed of two kilometers per second,” Bloombergexplained, “making it the fastest system of its type for mass-produced vehicles.” The claims boosted the company’s shares on Tuesday. Over the last year, the Tesla rival’s stock has gained 85%.
The area of land covered by monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico this year has doubled compared to 2024, indicating a possible rebound for the iconic insects.
