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Last week, the Biden administration announced its final car emission standards, aimed at pushing the auto industry to create more zero-emission vehicles. While there’s plenty in the 1,200-page document for policy wonks, politicians, environmental advocates, and automakers to hem and haw over, there’s at least one thing no one seems too bothered about: The new emissions rules stand to boost plug-in and conventional hybrid sales, thanks in part to some small changes to how their emissions are considered within the mix of an automaker’s fleet.
To recap: The biggest headline change from the proposed rule to the final one is that automakers now have a slower ramp toward reducing their fleet-wide emissions by roughly 50% come 2032. A handful of sensational headlines notwithstanding, the new rules do not mandate that automakers build and sell only EVs. The point is to reduce tailpipe emissions. How automakers go about it is their business.
“Automakers may see it fit to introduce more hybrids and plug-in hybrids, along with some electrics,” Thomas Boylan, regulatory director at the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, told me. “Or if they can find the engineering capacity to create an internal combustion engine that doesn't produce tailpipe emissions, that's a viable pathway to these standards,” he added. That said, how automakers account for the emissions from their fleets — and specifically from hybrids and plug-in hybrids — is not open to interpretation.
When plug-in hybrids are running on battery power, the Environmental Protection Agency counts those as zero-emission miles. Historically, the EPA has assumed that everyone with a PHEV plugs it in every day and is therefore maximizing its battery-powered mileage, however more recent studies have shown that is probably not actually the case.
“There's some mixed data out there in terms of how frequently people who own these [PHEV] vehicles plug them in, and that's a big factor in how much compliance they should get,” Chris Harto, the senior policy analyst for transportation and energy at Consumer Reports, told me.
“How much compliance they should get” became a key question in how the new car emissions standards would account for PHEVs. The draft rule issued last year had proposed reducing the amount of compliance credit automakers would get for plug-ins starting in model year 2027 to account for the discrepancy in battery miles traveled. But the final rule delayed that phase-in until model year 2031, in order “to provide additional stability for the program, and to give manufacturers ample time to transition to the new compliance calculation.”
Hybrid and PHEV vehicle sales have been surprisingly robust over the past few years, as Jesse Jenkins pointed out on Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. Hybrid electric sales were about on par with battery electric sales in 2023, at around 1.1 million vehicles each, Jenkins said, which is “way higher than what we expected.”
As of February, plug-in and traditional hybrid sales were growing five times faster than EV sales, Morgan Stanley reported. The Argonne National Laboratory also found that during the same month, PHEV and hybrid sales rose to more than 130,000 all together. To put that in perspective, last year's record EV sales alone averaged just about 100,000 per month across all brands. These robust sales numbers, combined with the new EPA tailpipe emission rules, could continue to drive growth in hybrid and PHEV sales, even as EV sales growth cools.
“I think a lot of automakers underappreciated the big bump in hybrid sales that many people have rightly celebrated in 2023. That huge jump in hybrid sales coincides directly with a huge jump in EPA emission standards from 2022 to 2023,” Harto told me. In 2021, the Biden administration revised a Trump-era rule that sought to weaken vehicle emission standards. Those revised rules, which took effect for the 2023 model year, were 10% tighter than the year prior.
“These standards have a history of pushing automakers to deliver vehicles that save consumers money on fuel,” Harto said. “I don't think we would have seen the jump in hybrid sales that we saw last year without the jump in emission standards in 2023.”
Still, he noted, “The more hybrids (or other gasoline efficiency improvements) and PHEVs automakers build, the fewer BEVs they will have to build to comply.”
This will likely slow the EV adoption curve, but if it leads to more and cheaper plug-in hybrids than we would have had otherwise, it could help U.S. consumers get more comfortable with the idea of plugging in rather than filling up their cars.
“I think the final rule reflects more of an understanding that there will be more hybrid electric vehicle penetration rates over the next few years,” Boylan told me. While the true cost and emissions savings are in fully battery electric vehicles, it might take consumers a minute to get there. “I think, ultimately, a PHEV offers an opportunity to educate a consumer on what an electric vehicle might be able to do to meet their personal needs, and that creates a pathway to a true BEV purchase, on the next vehicle.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.