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Even with Trump in the White House, we’ll still have electric vehicles.

It would be easy to feel down about the state of electric vehicles with an avowed EV foe set to reenter the White House. Yes, the election’s fallout will no doubt reshape the car market in the years to come. But in the short term, there’s good news in the form of the new slate of EVs already in the pipeline. For those looking to ditch their fossil fuel-burner for an electric model, there’s plenty to be excited about in 2025.
Having long since displaced the minivan and the sedan as America’s family car, the crossover is the most important piece of the electric car market, and the biggest seller. Next year, we’ll welcome a slew of new models.
Hyundai’s Ioniq EVs have been a hit, with the hatchback/crossover hybrid Ioniq 5 selling impressive numbers (more than 30,000 in the first three quarters of 2024) and the quirky Ioniq 6 sedan earning rave reviews. The Korean brand will be filling out more Ioniq numbers in the years to come, and 2025’s major arrival in terms of size and importance is the three-row Ioniq 9 SUV. The sharp-looking big boy joins the EV9 by Hyundai’s partner brand, Kia, in offering a more affordable EV for those who need to move six or seven people at a time.

Audi was a pioneer offerer of EVs in America: The original Audi e-Tron came to the U.S. in 2019, when Tesla was just starting to sell the Model 3 and many legacy brands had yet to enter the electric market. That model’s 204-mile range looks puny and outdated by today’s standards, however. Next year, Audi is slated to roll out a much-anticipated update to the lineup with the Q6 e-tron (and its A6 e-tron sedan counterpart) delivering a respectable 350 miles of battery power.

The EV startups are expanding their lineups, too. No, we won’t see the new, more affordable Rivians until at least 2026. Lucid, however, plans to inflate the successful Air sedan up to the size of a three-row SUV when it introduces the Gravity, which it claims will deliver 440 miles of range. The story is similar at Polestar, where the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV looks like an expanded version of the Polestar 2 sedan that’s been on sale for several years now.
Remember Chrysler? The erstwhile member of Detroit’s Big Three had withered to a brand that, in the U.S., sells only minivans and the obsolete 300 sedan. Stellantis (parent company of Chrysler, Ram, Jeep, and others) has pinned its hopes for an American revival on electrification, which includes an EV Chrysler crossover planned for 2025. It looks to be called the Airflow and will target the Ford Mustang Mach-E as its competitor.

The same is true of another decaying American giant. Cadillac, fresh off some success with the Lyriq EV (20,000-plus sold through Q3 2024), is pushing out a slate of electric vehicles in the hopes of reminding buyers of its former glory. The smaller Optiq, three-row Vistiq, and extravagant Escalade iq are soon to join the brand’s EV lineup, the latter bringing the icon of early 2000s wealth-bragging into the electric age.

For those who swear by the go-anywhere potential of the true 4x4, battery power is a tough sell — there aren’t too many plugs in the backcountry. Yet as EV driving ranges get longer and EVs get more capable, the icons of off-roading are coming around.
Jeep, which has introduced plug-in hybrid models of some of its best-selling SUVs, is at last taking the all-electric plunge. No, you won’t be able to buy an EV Jeep Wrangler, which is still years away. (Stellantis is being cautious with its icon.) But we are on the cusp of having the Jeep Recon, a mid-size EV 4x4, as well as an EV version of the big, luxe Wagoneer called the Jeep Wagoneer S.

Wagoneer won’t be alone in the market for expensive luxury SUV EVs. Land Rover is telling anyone who’ll listen about the torture testing it is now performing on the upcoming Range Rover EV, subjecting prototypes to the 120-degree heat of the UAE’s desert. Arriving soon alongside the electric Range Rover is the battery-powered version of Mercedes-Benz’s G-Wagen, a $170,00 status symbol.
We may be on the cusp of seeing the titans of muscle embrace electricity. At last month’s L.A. Auto Show, Dodge’s machismo-dripping presentation of the Charger Daytona EV promised the brawny battery-powered pony car would “save our planet … from all those lame, soulless, weak-looking, self-driving sleep pods.” With silent power that more than matches its combustion days, the Charger should win converts to the church of instantaneous electric torque. Oh, and in 2025, we just might get a look at the fully electric Chevy Corvette that’s in the works.

For those with no interest in dropping a wheelbarrow of cash on an electric sports car, fear not: The Chevy Bolt is coming back. The plucky, affordable Bolt was the best-selling non-Tesla EV when GM suddenly gave it the axe to focus on its Ultium EV platform. Chevrolet says it’ll release the new, Ultium-based Bolt in 2025, and that this version will feature faster charging and other bells and whistles lacking in the original car.
Finally, the most fascinating offering to come next year is the 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger, the first time range-extender EV technology comes to one of America’s best-selling vehicles. Like a normal EV, the Ramcharger has electric motors to propel it, a battery to store electricity, and can be plugged in to charge the battery, however, it also carries a gasoline engine that can turn on to recharge the battery when necessary. If this hopefully seamless version of a hybrid convinces America’s legion of truck buyers, it’ll go a long way toward advancing the pace of EV adoption.
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The proportion of voters who strongly oppose development grew by nearly 50%.
During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Donald Trump attempted to stanch the public’s bleeding support for building the data centers his administration says are necessary to beat China in the artificial intelligence race. With “many Americans” now “concerned that energy demand from AI data centers could unfairly drive up their electricity bills,” Trump said, he pledged to make major tech companies pay for new power plants to supply electricity to data centers.
New polling from energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro shows just how dramatically and swiftly American voters are turning against data centers.
Earlier this month, the survey, conducted by Embold Research, reached out to 2,091 registered voters across the country, explaining that “data centers are facilities that house the servers that power the internet, apps, and artificial intelligence” and asking them, “Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live?” Just 28% said they would support or strongly support such a facility in their neighborhood, while 52% said they would oppose or strongly oppose it. That’s a net support of -24%.
When Heatmap Pro asked a national sample of voters the same question last fall, net support came out to +2%, with 44% in support and 42% opposed.
The steep drop highlights a phenomenon Heatmap’s Jael Holzman described last fall — that data centers are "swallowing American politics,” as she put it, uniting conservation-minded factions of the left with anti-renewables activists on the right in opposing a common enemy.
The results of this latest Heatmap Pro poll aren’t an outlier, either. Poll after poll shows surging public antipathy toward data centers as populists at both ends of the political spectrum stoke outrage over rising electricity prices and tech giants struggle to coalesce around a single explanation of their impacts on the grid.
“The hyperscalers have fumbled the comms game here,” Emmet Penney, an energy researcher and senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, told me.
A historian of the nuclear power sector, Penney sees parallels between the grassroots pushback to data centers and the 20th century movement to stymie construction of atomic power stations across the Western world. In both cases, opponents fixated on and popularized environmental criticisms that were ultimately deemed minor relative to the benefits of the technology — production of radioactive waste in the case of nuclear plants, and as seems increasingly clear, water usage in the case of data centers.
Likewise, opponents to nuclear power saw urgent efforts to build out the technology in the face of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union as more reason for skepticism about safety. Ditto the current rhetoric on China.
Penney said that both data centers and nuclear power stoke a “fear of bigness.”
“Data centers represent a loss of control over everyday life because artificial intelligence means change,” he said. “The same is true about nuclear,” which reached its peak of expansion right as electric appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines were revolutionizing domestic life in American households.
One of the more fascinating findings of the Heatmap Pro poll is a stark urban-rural divide within the Republican Party. Net support for data centers among GOP voters who live in suburbs or cities came out to -8%. Opposition among rural Republicans was twice as deep, at -20%. While rural Democrats and independents showed more skepticism of data centers than their urbanite fellow partisans, the gap was far smaller.
That could represent a challenge for the Trump administration.
“People in the city are used to a certain level of dynamism baked into their lives just by sheer population density,” Penney said. “If you’re in a rural place, any change stands out.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, has championed legislation to place a temporary ban on new data centers. Such a move would not be without precedent; Ireland, transformed by tax-haven policies over the past two decades into a hub for Silicon Valley’s giants, only just ended its de facto three-year moratorium on hooking up data centers to the grid.
Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican firebrand, proposed his own bill that would force data centers off the grid by requiring the complexes to build their own power plants, much as Trump is now promoting.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Republicans such as Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, who on Tuesday compared halting construction of data centers to “civilizational suicide.”
“I am tempted to sit back and let other states fritter away the generational chance to build. To laugh at their short-sightedness,” he wrote in a post on X. “But the best path for all of us would be to see America dominate, because our foes are not like us. They don’t believe in order, except brutal order under their heels. They don’t believe in prosperity, except for that gained through fraud and plunder. They don’t think or act in a way I can respect as an American.”
Then you have the actual hyperscalers taking opposite tacks. Amazon Web Services, for example, is playing offense, promoting research that shows its data centers are not increasing electricity rates. Claude-maker Anthropic, meanwhile, issued a de facto mea culpa, pledging earlier this month to offset all its electricity use.
Amid that scattershot messaging, the critical rhetoric appears to be striking its targets. Whether Trump’s efforts to curb data centers’ impact on the grid or Reeves’ stirring call to patriotic sacrifice can reverse cratering support for the buildout remains to be seen. The clock is ticking. There are just 36 weeks until the midterm Election Day.
The public-private project aims to help realize the president’s goal of building 10 new reactors by 2030.
The Department of Energy and the Westinghouse Electric Company have begun meeting with utilities and nuclear developers as part of a new project aimed at spurring the country’s largest buildout of new nuclear power plants in more than 30 years, according to two people who have been briefed on the plans.
The discussions suggest that the Trump administration’s ambitious plans to build a fleet of new nuclear reactors are moving forward at least in part through the Energy Department. President Trump set a goal last year of placing 10 new reactors under construction nationwide by 2030.
The project aims to purchase the parts for 8 gigawatts to 10 gigawatts of new nuclear reactors, the people said. The reactors would almost certainly be AP1000s, a third-generation reactor produced by Westinghouse capable of producing up to 1.1 gigawatts of electricity per unit.
The AP1000 is the only third-generation reactor successfully deployed in the United States. Two AP1000 reactors were completed — and powered on — at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia earlier this decade. Fifteen other units are operating or under construction worldwide.
Representatives from Westinghouse and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The project would use government and private financing to buy advanced reactor equipment that requires particularly long lead times, the people said. It would seek to lower the cost of the reactors by placing what would essentially be a single bulk order for some of their parts, allowing Westinghouse to invest in and scale its production efforts. It could also speed up construction timelines for the plants themselves.
The department is in talks with four to five potential partners, including utilities, independent power producers, and nuclear development companies, about joining the project. Under the plan, these utilities or developers would agree to purchase parts for two new reactors each. The program would be handled in part by the department’s in-house bank, the Loan Programs Office, which the Trump administration has dubbed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
This fleet-based approach to nuclear construction has succeeded in the past. After the oil crisis struck France in the 1970s, the national government responded by planning more than three-dozen reactors in roughly a decade, allowing the country to build them quickly and at low cost. France still has some of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity.
By comparison, the United States has built three new nuclear reactors, totaling roughly 3.5 gigawatts of capacity, since the year 2000, and it has not significantly expanded its nuclear fleet since 1990. The Trump administration set a goal in May to quadruple total nuclear energy production — which stands at roughly 100 gigawatts today — to more than 400 gigawatts by the middle of the century.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have periodically announced plans to expand the nuclear fleet over the past year, although details on its projects have been scant.
Senator Dave McCormick, a Republican of Pennsylvania, announced at an energy summit last July that Westinghouse was moving forward with plans to build 10 new reactors nationwide by 2030.
In October, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a new deal between the U.S. government, the private equity firm Brookfield Asset Management, and the uranium company Cameco to deploy $80 billion in new Westinghouse reactors across the United States. (A Brookfield subsidiary and Cameco have jointly owned Westinghouse since it went bankrupt in 2017 due to construction cost overruns.) Reuters reported last month that this deal aimed to satisfy the Trump administration’s 2030 goal.
While there have been other Republican attempts to expand the nuclear fleet over the years, rising electricity demand and the boom in artificial intelligence data centers have brought new focus to the issue. This time, Democratic politicians have announced their own plans to boost nuclear power in their states.
In January, New York Governor Kathy Hochul set a goal of building 4 gigawatts of new nuclear power plants in the Empire State.
In his State of the State address, Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois told lawmakers last week that he hopes to see at least 2 gigawatts of new nuclear power capacity operating in his state by 2033.
Meeting Trump’s nuclear ambitions has been a source of contention between federal agencies. Politico reported on Thursday that the Energy Department had spent months negotiating a nuclear strategy with Westinghouse last year when Lutnick inserted himself directly into negotiations with the company. Soon after, the Commerce Department issued an announcement for the $80 billion megadeal, which was big on hype but short on details.
The announcement threw a wrench in the Energy Department’s plans, but the agency now seems to have returned to the table. According to Politico, it is now also “engaging” with GE Hitachi, another provider of advanced nuclear reactors.
On nuclear tax credits, BLM controversy, and a fusion maverick’s fundraise
Current conditions: A third storm could dust New York City and the surrounding area with more snow • Floods and landslides have killed at least 25 people in Brazil’s southeastern state of Minas Gerais • A heat dome in Western Europe is pushing up temperatures in parts of Portugal, Spain, and France as high as 15 degrees Celsius above average.

The Department of Energy’s in-house lender, the Loan Programs Office — dubbed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing by the Trump administration — just gave out the largest loan in its history to Southern Company. The nearly $27 billion loan will “build or upgrade over 16 gigawatts of firm reliable power,” including 5 gigawatts of new gas generation, 6 gigawatts of uprates and license renewals for six different reactors, and more than 1,300 miles of transmission and grid enhancement projects. In total, the package will “deliver $7 billion in electricity cost savings” to millions of ratepayers in Georgia and Alabama by reducing the utility giant’s interest expenses by over $300 million per year. “These loans will not only lower energy costs but also create thousands of jobs and increase grid reliability for the people of Georgia and Alabama,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement.
Over in Utah, meanwhile, the state government is seeking the authority to speed up its own deployment of nuclear reactors as electricity demand surges in the desert state. In a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dated November 10 — but which E&E News published this week — Tim Davis, the executive director of Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality, requested that the federal agency consider granting the state the power to oversee uranium enrichment, microreactor licensing, fuel storage, and reprocessing on its own. All of those sectors fall under the NRC’s exclusive purview. At least one program at the NRC grants states limited regulatory primacy for some low-level radiological material. While there’s no precedent for a transfer of power as significant as what Utah is requesting, the current administration is upending norms at the NRC more than any other government since the agency’s founding in 1975.
Building a new nuclear plant on a previously undeveloped site is already a steep challenge in electricity markets such as New York, California, or the Midwest, which broke up monopoly utilities in the 1990s and created competitive auctions that make decade-long, multibillion-dollar reactors all but impossible to finance. A growing chorus argues, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote, that these markets “are no longer working.” Even in markets with vertically-integrated power companies, the federal tax credits meant to spur construction of new reactors would make financing a greenfield plant is just as impossible, despite federal tax credits meant to spur construction of new reactors. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis by a trio of government finance researchers at the Center for Public Enterprise. The investment tax credit, “large as it is, cannot easily provide them with upfront construction-period support,” the report found. “The ITC is essential to nuclear project economics, but monetizing it during construction poses distinct challenges for nuclear developers that do not arise for renewable energy projects. Absent a public agency’s ability to leverage access to the elective payment of tax credits, it is challenging to see a path forward for attracting sufficient risk capital for a new nuclear project under the current circumstances.”
Steve Pearce, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, wavered when asked about his record of pushing to sell off federal lands during his nomination hearing Wednesday. A former Republican lawmaker from New Mexico, Pearce has faced what the public lands news site Public Domain called “broad backlash from environmental, conservation, and hunting groups for his record of working to undermine public land protections and push land sales as a way to reduce the federal deficit.” Faced with questions from Democratic senators, Pearce said, “I’m not so sure that I’ve changed,” but insisted he didn’t “believe that we’re going to go out and wholesale land from the federal government.” That has, however, been the plan since the start of the administration. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote last year, Republicans looked poised to use their trifecta to sell off some of the approximately 640 million acres of land the federal government owns.
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At Tuesday’s State of the Union address, as I told you yesterday, Trump vowed to force major data center companies to build, bring, or buy their own power plants to keep the artificial intelligence boom from driving up electricity prices. On Wednesday, Fox News reported that Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI planned to come to the White House to sign onto the deal. The meeting is set to take place sometime next month. Data centers are facing mounting backlash. Developers abandoned at least 25 data centers last year amid mounting pushback from local opponents, Heatmap's Robinson Meyer recently reported.
Shine Technologies is a rare fusion company that’s actually making money today. That’s because the Wisconsin-based firm uses its plasma beam fusion technology to produce isotopes for testing and medical therapies. Next, the company plans to start recycling nuclear waste for fresh reactor fuel. To get there, Shine Technologies has raised $240 million to fund its efforts for the next few years, as I reported this morning in an exclusive for Heatmap. Nearly 63% of the funding came from biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who will join the board. The capital will carry the company through the launch of the world’s largest medical isotope producer and lay the foundations of a new business recycling nuclear waste in the early 2030s that essentially just reorders its existing assembly line.
Vineyard Wind is nearly complete. As of Wednesday, 60 of the project’s 62 turbines have been installed off the coast of Massachusetts. Of those, E&E News reported, 52 have been cleared to start producing power. The developer Iberdrola said the final two turbines may be installed in the next few days. “For me, as an engineer, the farm is already completed,” Iberdrola’s executive chair, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, told analysts on an earnings call. “I think these numbers mean the level of availability is similar for other offshore wind farms we have in operation. So for me, that is completed.”