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Elon Musk is chasing his shiny object.
While channel-surfing over Thanksgiving weekend, I stumbled upon The Aviator — specifically, the scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes maniacally scrambles a fleet of biplanes to capture the greatest air combat scenes even filmed, and rants that he doesn’t care if the conservative suits at his company worry he’s squandering his fortune in pursuit of a mad dream. It’s hard to watch these scenes and not think of Elon Musk, Hughes’ heir apparent (with apologies to Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos) as the leading air-and-space-obsessed billionaire man-child of his era. That’s doubly true this week, with the long-awaited official launch of the Tesla Cybertuck.
Bold pursuit of the big dream has always been Musk’s calling card. Before his rise to prominence, onlookers said it would be impossible to start a new space launch company that could outcompete established giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin or start a new car company that could outmaneuver giants like Ford and GM, much less do both at the same time. Musk’s self-marketing as the real-world Tony Stark helped to sell his electric vehicles and kept tech enthusiasts tuned in to his attempts to land reusable space rockets on ocean-going platforms. The man and his mad science were the message.
But the Tesla Cybertruck seemed like a turning point. Instead of chasing another sci-fi dream of a better tomorrow, Musk in 2019 revealed a boyhood cartoon: an all-metal, supposedly bulletproof tank that would feel at home as an armored personnel carrier in some PlayStation theatre of warfare. In the four years since, Cybertruck has swallowed much of Musk’s focus as Tesla tried to bring the vehicle to fruition, which he recently admitted has been a much bigger struggle than he anticipated. The first 10 Cybertrucks will finally be delivered to their very patient owners on November 30.
In light of this misadventure, it’s worth asking: Is it time for Tesla to get boring?
I am on record as saying Cybertruck could succeed. Despite the jeers of auto journalists and onlookers who think Tesla’s truck is ill-conceived, poorly constructed, and, well, stupid, it’s clear that Musk’s cult of personality will sell some of these EVs. Plenty of buyers with the same man-boy fantasy of owning a pointy tank as a daily driver will see the appeal. So will shoppers whose main priority is feeling safe and protected on the highway.
Still, the case for the Cybertruck is eroding. Musk initially teased single- and double-motor versions that would start at $40,000 and $50,000, respectively, bringing the EV in well below the price of some electric truck competitors. After all the time and trouble it took to realize the Cybertuck, though, Tesla will reportedly begin sales by offering only double- and triple-motor versions, and at prices estimated to be $70,000 to $80,000. That puts them on par with pricey trucks like the Rivian R1T.
The biggest trouble with the Cybertruck, though, is the opportunity cost of what Tesla could’ve been doing with all this time and industrial energy. That’s not to say the EV maker is struggling, exactly — the Model Y became the world’s best-selling car during this time, and Tesla has revealed what will become the redesign of the very successful Model 3.
During the development of Cybertruck, however, Tesla seems to have deprioritized the redesign of the Model X, which has looked basically the same on the outside since 2015, for example. It has made slow progress on the promise to build a truly affordable EV in the $25,000 range, which could have entrenched for Tesla a leading position in the entry-level EV market that will soon emerge. Tesla could’ve tried to fill out its lineup with crossovers of other sizes, the way a boring legacy company would have done to keep its huge advantage in market share from slipping away. But Musk chased the shiny steel object instead, allowing his rivals to get back into the game in the process.
Such is the tension inherent in any successful startup. The mercurial, damn-the-torpedoes founder or CEO leads the firm to the promised land, but somewhere along the way to true success comes the pressure to button down and grow up, and to start making sound, sane business decisions instead of building the Spruce Goose.
Musk himself seems to realize this, at times. He once called the gullwing-doored Model X a “technology bandwagon” into which Tesla poured all the whiz-bang technology ideas it could think of. This led to an admittedly wild vehicle, but one that never sold in huge numbers. He seemed to learn his lesson with the simpler and more affordable Model 3 and Y, which led to enormous sales numbers and made Tesla the most valuable car brand in the world. Here in California, Teslas went from exotic to ordinary. Every time I drive my Model 3 down the freeway, there are at least two more within view.
But with those volume successes in hand, the devil on Musk’s shoulder made itself heard once more. Musk’s obsession with making the exterior from stainless steel led to long production delays. And Cybertruck clearly follows the Model X pattern, with Tesla including every possible feature from bulletproof windows to a slide-out tailgate for loading your Tesla ATV in the back.
Maybe Musk got afraid of getting old and becoming boring. Maybe nobody was around with the authority to tell him “no.” Maybe the Cybertruck, once it emerges from its production quagmire, will be another rousing success. But if it’s not, it will be remembered (along with Musk’s ill-advised purchase of Twitter) as the vanity project that ate Tesla's attention right when it had the whole EV world by the tail.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.