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From what it means for America’s climate goals to how it might make American cars smaller again
The Biden administration just kicked off the next phase of the electric-vehicle revolution.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled Wednesday some of the world’s most aggressive climate rules on the transportation sector, a sweeping effort that aims to ensure that two-thirds of new cars, SUVs, and pickups — and one-quarter of new heavy-duty trucks — sold in the United States in 2032 will be all electric.
The rules, which are the most ambitious attempt to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution in American history, would put the country at the forefront of the global transition to electric vehicles. If adopted and enforced as proposed, the new standards could eventually prevent 10 billion tons of carbon pollution, roughly double America’s total annual emissions last year, the EPA says.
The rules would roughly halve carbon pollution from America’s massive car and truck fleet, the world’s third largest, within a decade. Such a cut is in line with Biden’s Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon pollution from across the economy in half by 2030.
Transportation generates more carbon pollution than any other part of the U.S. economy. America’s hundreds of millions of cars, SUVs, pickups, 18-wheelers, and other vehicles generated roughly 25% of total U.S. carbon emissions last year, a figure roughly equal to the entire power sector’s.
In short, the proposal is a big deal with many implications. Here are seven of them.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Every country around the world must cut its emissions in half by 2030 in order for the world to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature rise, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That goal, enshrined in the Paris Agreement, is a widely used benchmark for the arrival of climate change’s worst impacts — deadly heat waves, stronger storms, and a near total die-off of coral reefs.
The new proposal would bring America’s cars and trucks roughly in line with that requirement. According to an EPA estimate, the vehicle fleet’s net carbon emissions would be 46% lower in 2032 than they stand today.
That means that rules of this ambition and stringency are a necessary part of meeting America’s goals under the Paris Agreement. The United States has pledged to halve its carbon emissions, as compared to its all-time high, by 2020. The country is not on track to meet that goal today, but robust federal, state, and corporate action — including strict vehicle rules — could help it get there, a recent report from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, found.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Until this week, California and the European Union had been leading the world’s transition to electric vehicles. Both jurisdictions have pledged to ban sales of new fossil-fuel-powered cars after 2035 and set aggressive targets to meet that goal — although Europe recently watered down its commitment by allowing some cars to burn synthetic fuels.
The United States hasn’t issued a similar ban. But under the new rules, its timeline for adopting EVs will come close to both jurisdictions — although it may slightly lag California’s. By 2030, EVs will make up about 58% of new vehicles sold in Europe, according to the think tank Transportation & Environment; that is roughly in line with the EPA’s goals.
California, meanwhile, expects two-thirds of new car sales to be EVs by the same year, putting it ahead of the EPA’s proposal. The difference between California’s targets and the EPA’s may come down to technical accounting differences, however. The Washington Post has reported that the new EPA rules are meant to harmonize the national standards with California’s.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
With or without the rules, the United States was already likely to see far more EVs in the future. Ford has said that it would aim for half of its global sales to be electric by 2030, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler and Jeep, announced that half of its American sales and all its European sales must be all-electric by that same date. General Motors has pledged to sell only EVs after 2035. In fact, the EPA expects that automakers are collectively on track for 44% of vehicle sales to be electric by 2030 without any changes to emissions rules.
But every manufacturer is on a different timeline, and some weren’t planning to move quite this quickly. John Bozella, the president of Alliance for Automotive Innovation, has struck a skeptical note about the proposal. “Remember this: A lot has to go right for this massive — and unprecedented — change in our automotive market and industrial base to succeed,” he told The New York Times.
The proposed rules would unify the industry and push it a bit further than current plans suggest.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
The EPA’s proposal would see sales of all-electric heavy trucks grow beginning with model year 2027. The agency estimates that by 2032, some 50% of “vocational” vehicles sold — like delivery trucks, garbage trucks, and cement mixers — will be zero-emissions, as well as 35% of short-haul tractors and 25% of long-haul tractor trailers. This would save about 1.8 billion tons of CO2 through 2055 — roughly equivalent to one year’s worth of emissions from the transportation sector.
But the proposal falls short of where the market is already headed, some environmental groups pointed out. “It’s not driving manufacturers to do anything,” said Paul Cort, director of Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign. “It’s following what’s happening in the market in a very conservative way.”
Last year, California passed rules requiring 60% of vocational truck sales and 40% of tractors to be zero-emissions by 2032. Daimler, the world’s largest truck manufacturer, has said that zero emissions trucks would make up 60% of its truck sales by 2030 and 100% by 2039. Volvo Trucks, another major player, said it aims for 50% of its vehicle deliveries to be electric by 2030.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
One of the more interesting aspects of the new rules is that they pick up on a controversy that has been running on and off for the past 13 years.
In 2010, the Obama administration issued the first-ever greenhouse-gas regulations for light-duty cars, SUVs, and trucks. In order to avoid a Supreme Court challenge to the rules, the White House did something unprecedented: It got every automaker to agree to meet the standards even before they became law.
This was a milestone in the history of American environmental law. Because the automakers agreed to the rules, they were in effect conceding that the EPA had the legal authority to regulate their greenhouse-gas pollution in the first place. That shored up the EPA’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gases from any part of the economy, allowing the agency to move on to limiting carbon pollution from power plants and factories.
But that acquiescence came at a cost. The Obama administration agreed to what are called “vehicle footprint” provisions, which put its rules on a sliding scale based on vehicle size. Essentially, these footprint provisions said that a larger vehicle — such as a three-row SUV or full-sized pickup — did not have to meet the same standards as a compact sedan. What’s more, an automaker only had to meet the standards that matched the footprint of the cars it actually sold. In other words, a company that sold only SUVs and pickups would face lower overall requirements than one that also sold sedans, coupes, and station wagons.
Some of this decision was out of Obama’s hands: Congress had required that the Department of Transportation, which issues a similar set of rules, consider vehicle footprint in laws that passed in 2007 and 1975. Those same laws also created the regulatory divide between cars and trucks.
But over the past decade, SUV and truck sales have boomed in the United States, while the market for old-fashioned cars has withered. In 2019, SUVs outsold cars two to one; big SUVs and trucks of every type now make up nearly half the new car market. In the past decade, too, the crossover — a new type of car-like vehicle that resembles a light-duty truck — has come to dominate the American road. This has had repercussions not just for emissions, but pedestrian fatalities as well.
Researchers have argued that the footprint rules may be at least partially to blame for this trend. In 2018, economists at the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley argued Japan’s tailpipe rules, which also include a footprint mechanism, pushed automakers to super-size their cars. Modeling studies have reached the same conclusion about the American rules.
For the first time, the EPA’s proposal seems to recognize this criticism and tries to address it. The new rules make the greenhouse-gas requirements for cars and trucks more similar than they have been in the past, so as to not “inadvertently provide an incentive for manufacturers to change the size or regulatory class of vehicles as a compliance strategy,” the EPA says in a regulatory filing.
The new rules also tighten requirements on big cars and trucks so that automakers can’t simply meet the rules by enlarging their vehicles.
These changes may not reverse the trend toward larger cars. It might even reveal how much cars’ recent growth is driven by consumer taste: SUVs’ share of the new car market has been growing almost without exception since the Ford Explorer debuted in 1991. But it marks the first admission by the agency that in trying to secure a climate win, it may have accidentally created a monster.
Heatmap Illustration/Buenavista Images via Getty Images
The EPA is trumpeting the energy security benefits of the proposal, in addition to its climate benefits.
While the U.S. is a net exporter of crude — and that’s not expected to change in the coming decades — U.S. refineries still rely on “significant imports of heavy crude which could be subject to supply disruptions,” the agency notes. This reliance ties the U.S. to authoritarian regimes around the world and also exposes American consumers to wilder swings in gas prices.
But the new greenhouse gas rules are expected to severely diminish the country’s dependence on foreign oil. Between cars and trucks, the rules would cut crude oil imports by 124 million barrels per year by 2030, and 1 billion barrels in 2050. For context, the United States imported about 2.2 billion barrels of crude oil in 2021.
This would also be a turning point for gas stations. Americans consumed about 135 billion gallons of gasoline in 2022. The rules would cut into gas sales by about 6.5 billion gallons by 2030, and by more than 50 billion gallons by 2050. Gas stations are going to have to adapt or fade away.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Although it may seem like these new electric vehicles could tax our aging, stressed electricity grid, the EPA claims these rules won’t change the status quo very much. The agency estimates the rules would require a small, 0.4% increase in electricity generation to meet new EV demand by 2030 compared to business as usual, with generation needs increasing by 4% by 2050. “The expected increase in electric power demand attributable to vehicle electrification is not expected to adversely affect grid reliability,” the EPA wrote.
Still, that’s compared to the trajectory we’re already on. With or without these rules, we’ll need a lot of investment in new power generation and reliability improvements in the coming years to handle an electrifying economy. “Standards or no standards, we have to have grid operators preparing for EVs,” said Samantha Houston, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from replacing gas cars will also far outweigh any emissions related to increased power demands. The EPA estimates that between now and 2055, the rules could drive up power plant pollution by 710 million metric tons, but will cut emissions from cars by 8 billion tons.
This article was last updated on April 13 at 12:37 PM ET.
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Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year.
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.