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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 That model’s 204-mile range looks puny and outdated by today’s standards, however.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 facility will power OpenAI’s 10-gigawatt data center in Pike County, Ohio.
The Trump administration aims to complete its environmental review of what would be the biggest fossil fuel power project in the country in just a few months, Heatmap has learned.
This news follows Monday’s announcement from OpenAI that it intends to lease a new 10-gigawatt data center under development in Pike County, Ohio, financed by a mixture of money from a SoftBank subsidiary and the chip company Nvidia. This AI hyperscale facility — known as the PORTS-Pike project — is expected to draw power from the largest gas power facility ever built in the United States, a 9.2-gigawatt facility sited on federal lands that would be built and owned by the Energy Department.
According to OpenAI, the data center campus will be built and started up in phases, with the first 800 megawatts starting construction this year and operational in 2028. That first phase will rely mostly on existing power infrastructure operated by AEP Ohio. How things progress from there will depend at least in part on the permitting and construction timelines for the new power plant.
Building large infrastructure of any kind on federal land or with significant federal investment typically triggers a review under the National Environmental Policy Act. I’ve been curious to find out what kind of review this particular project was going to get, especially after the administration allowed a NEPA review for a solar project to be repurposed for a data center on federal lands earlier this year.
Turns out some information about the PORTS-Pike permitting process is public. Before OpenAI confirmed its involvement with the site, the Trump administration added the project to the federal FAST-41 permitting dashboard, where it posts regular updates on the timeline for getting federal sign-offs. Per the lone federal notice available about the PORTS-Pike project, it will include “several data center buildings and power plants.” That will require at least two federal greenlights: an Army Corps of Engineers permit and approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is being consulted about potential endangered bats in the project area.
The NEPA permitting work for this historically large data center-plus-fossil fuel power project began on July 10 and will conclude on December 23, the day before Christmas Eve, according to the Trump administration’s estimates. This comes after paperwork to begin the review was submitted to the Army Corps in May, per the federal notice — a total timeline of about seven months.
Those familiar with NEPA and the debate over permitting reform will likely be surprised by the speed of this review. It’s moving fast in part because the project is receiving just an Environmental Assessment, the lesser and smaller type of analysis than the EIS. I do not know why the government decided to take this route because the government’s NEPA review determination is not currently public, but I have asked the Army Corps to explain this move.
I’m not sure exactly how air permitting will fit into this NEPA review, as the Clean Air Act isn’t listed as a review step on the federal dashboard. The Ohio EPA has primary authority over permitting projects like these under the Clean Air Act, and I’ve reached out to them to confirm whether PORTS has submitted a permitting application. The state agency’s permitting database does not have any information on air permitting for the project, though it does include reports from third-party consultants confirming wetlands and protected species warranted reviews from the Army Corps and Fish and Wildlife.
Lastly, these timetables are not sacrosanct. Under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, agencies are supposed to complete environmental assessments within one year, but nevertheless they regularly fail to meet them. The White House’s Council on Environmental Quality said in a report to Congress last year that from mid-2023 to mid-2025, the Army Corps was the agency that most often missed these statutory NEPA deadlines for environmental assessments.
Still, news of this speedy review for a priority Trump project is sure to excite pro-data center advocates who see expedited construction as an imperative in the global AI arms race. It’s also guaranteed to put a foul taste in the mouths of environmentalists already frustrated by federal revisions to NEPA regulations they say elide analysis of climate impacts.
What’s undebatable in all this is that, as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote, the PORTS project could ignite a new era of mega-gas plants. This permitting timeline couldn’t be more important for the future of the data center boom — and the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary behind the data center project, did not provide comment before publication.
A new front opens in the data center wars.
A series of lawsuits filed in federal court asks a big question – are data center moratoria constitutional?
In early August, data center developer DC Blox sued the city of Nashville in federal court to overturn a zoning moratorium stopping them from building a hyperscale facility adjacent to the city zoo. “The Data Center Moratorium, moreover, is a targeted attack against DC BLOX, in violation of federal constitutional protections,” the suit argued, claiming that it defied the corporation’s due process and equal protection rights.
Around the same time, another developer – Wixom Industrial One – filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Wixom, Michigan, to try and “invalidate the city’s illegal police power moratorium” blocking their data center.
These two cases were far from novel or the first of their kind, and they’re now a fresh front in the battle over hyperscale data centers. At least that’s what some who work on these cases say: In April, attorneys with the law firm Vorys published a “client alert” asserting “many moratoria may be vulnerable to statutory, procedural, and constitutional challenges.” The attorneys advised that constitutional arguments against moratoria “may be stronger where a government singles out data centers without a sound factual basis, treats similar land uses differently without a reasonable basis, or adopts a restriction driven more by political pressure than by defensible planning or regulatory objectives.”
Months later, according to court documents, the Vorys attorneys who authored the alert now represent real estate firm Thor Equities in a federal case against the Ohio city of Urbana, arguing the city’s decision to reject their data center project broke “fundamental protections” under the U.S. Constitution. (Vorys and Thor Equities did not respond to requests for comment.)
It’s unclear how many of these kinds of cases have been filed to date. Data on federal court cases is quite opaque. But legal experts and industry attorneys tell me we should expect them to be on the rise as developers seek whatever tools they can find to get projects built.
“Bringing a lawsuit like this is fairly cheap, something they can do at a relatively low cost, and imposes a real cost on local governments to defend themselves,” said Daniel Metzger, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center. “The cases out there will be bellwethers. And if successful, there’ll be a lot more of them.”
What developers probably want looks a lot like Hill County, Texas, where an LLC proposing an $80 million data center project was stymied in May by the state’s first countywide moratorium. (It predated Governor Greg Abbott’s temporary freeze of data center development in Texas by three months.) Within a period of only a few weeks, the LLC sued and the county rescinded the pause on approvals. The case was dropped a month later. Local reports state the county had to afterwards pay the corporation $100,000 in legal fees – a drop in the bucket compared to what a drawn-out court battle would have cost the rural county.
Metzger said whether the companies will win these cases is ultimately not the point – their goal is to win a finished data center, not a judicial ruling. By filing expansive litigation in the national court system, a hypothetical developer can exhaust the coffers of a city or county with legal expenses that are chump change compared to would-be billions in private financing for compute infrastructure.
“These lawsuits may deter some local governments from taking steps to oppose data center development, just because of the cost it would impose on them to defend a lawsuit, even if they know they have a strong legal basis for the action they want to take.”
Those I spoke to in private practice about data center developers’ constitutional arguments agreed with Metzger’s assessment that it’s too early to tell whether the companies will win. Generally, they said, a city or county will win this kind of case if it demonstrates a rational basis for its decision-making and courts typically want to defer to governmental autonomy. The onus will be on the developers to prove a moratorium was meritless – that’s the due process challenge – or unfairly targeted their industry in a way other sectors don’t face, which is the basis of the equal protection claim.
“What they’re saying is in essence that these actions the municipality is taking are arbitrary and capricious, which is one of the sort of catch-all standards,” Thomas Allen, a partner at K&L Gates, told me. “They say the laws lack a rational basis. And then they make equal protection claims, saying data centers are being singled out because of political concerns as opposed to actual things relevant to the legislature’s directive. They’re not basing their decisions on the underlying merits of the project but reacting to political pressure.”
“It’s a reliance question and it’s about the treatment of their projects,” added Laura Morton, an attorney with Ashurst Perkins Coie. “It’s always been important to talk about and engage with communities where your infrastructure is planned. Here, I think this is the developers going in, maybe having conversations, and then suddenly they’re getting a reversal after already receiving these approvals and making investments based off of what the conversations and rules were.”
The likelihood of these constitutional challenges reaching higher courts anytime soon is quite low. It’ll be a long time before we see one of these cases reach a verdict, let alone some kind of appeals process come to fruition. Nevertheless, the new legal ambiguity around these local restrictions is an important new facet of the data center wars, including for developers.
“Companies want to act within the law to get [things] done, so whatever tactics they can do to help get the project over the line that are legal and ethical, they may try those,” Allen told me. “And if that includes the pressure of a lawsuit, that’s a judgment they’ll have to make.”
And more on this week’s conflicts around project development.
1. Montgomery County, Pennsylvania – We reached a new normal in the data center backlash, and it all seems to have started in King of Prussia.
2. Columbia County, Wisconsin – The gubernatorial race in this state is transforming local fights over wind projects into must-watch popcorn fodder for anyone obsessed with the state of the energy transition, or national politics for that matter.
3. Shelby County, Alabama – One quick update on the intervention of John Rich, the country star turned Trump’s “special envoy for American landowners,” in an Alabama Power transmission project: it’s getting a lot more elected officials involved.
4. New Jersey – We try to conclude every Hotspots on a positive note. So this week’s silver lining comes to you from the Garden State, where state regulators have approved more than a dozen agrivoltaics projects.