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It’s already getting better, I promise.
My wife used to speedrun to San Francisco. A full tank of gas powered the little truck from Los Angeles to the halfway-point pit stop near Coalinga, California, where the L.A. radio stations have faded into static and the “Mr. Brightside” broadcasts from the Bay Area have yet to reach over the horizon. With just that single stop, the trip could be completed in under six hours.
It’s not that way these days in the EV. We stop twice for half-hour recharging sessions — maybe three times if we leave home with a less-than-full battery, and climbing over the Grapevine mountain pass punishes the range. Altogether, it makes the journey seven hours or longer.
I don’t mind too much. Frankly, I’d rather take the occasional break from holding my place in an endless line of cars all headed to the same destination and all trying to pass the same tomato truck than make slightly better time. If the day is already dedicated to a road trip, then it doesn’t really change my life to arrive in six hours rather than seven. Still, every time I undertake the I-5 marathon, the experience makes it clear: the true cost of owning an electric vehicle is your time.
Posts on platforms like Reddit about the hidden costs of EV ownership make me think I’m not alone in this notion.
In strictly monetary costs, one can make a straightforward case that EV life is better. Government rebates and tax credits bring down the upfront front cost to be closer to or nearly competitive with combustion cars. Some recurring routine maintenance costs, like oil changes, are absent. And depending on where you live and the current state of the ever-changing calculus of gas vs. electricity costs, going electric could save you a lot when prices soar at the pump. A New York Times graphic from 2021 illustrates that EV owners really can have it all: lower emissions and lower lifetime cost of ownership at the same time.
There are hidden EV costs in terms of dollars and cents, yes. States have begun to institute extra fees to register an electric car, which is nominally to offset the fact that EVs don’t pay the highway tax built into the price of gasoline yet smacks of political theater. Serious repairs can be expensive. EVs, because they’re powerful and heavy, seem to burn through tires at a faster rate. While the cost of a gallon of gas varies relatively little across town, the price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity can vary wildly from overnight residential electricity to the surge pricing one pays at a Los Angeles Supercharger in the middle of day. If you don’t have home charging, you’re stuck paying the higher rate — or going to get cheap electricity at odd hours, which is another tax on your time.
A lot of those extra financial costs can be strategically mitigated. The time penalty, not so much. While it mostly doesn’t matter, at least for those who can plug in at home and keep their batteries always full enough for their local driving, stopping on a long trip still takes far longer than simply topping up a gas tank. Fast-charging has seen technological leaps forward; whereas a lot of Tesla’s early Superchargers built in the 2010s maxed out at 72 kilowatts, many DC fast-chargers can now provide 250 or 350 kilowatts. But it still takes 15 to 20 minutes to refill the battery from nearly empty back to the 80% or 90% you’ll want for the next leg of a road trip.
Then there’s the not-insignificant time you spend thinking about charging. Some people who haven’t driven an EV seem to think range anxiety is an all-consuming cloud of negative energy, that every mile is driven in a panic about where the next plug will be. Yes, I’ve had my share of worried drives, mostly because I pushed my older standard-range Tesla Model 3 to its limit by trying to jump between distant chargers in the boonies of Arizona or Utah. In truth, worrying about the battery is more of a low-level mental white noise — something you must always be slightly aware of, as opposed to the old days of just noticing the needle is a little close to E and pulling off the freeway. (Again, the penalty here is higher on renters and those without home charging.)
Some of this, I’m afraid, may be unavoidable. To break free from burning fossil fuels in your car is to give up the deal with the devil that gave us the freedom to rarely think about energy.
The good news: As time goes on, these time penalties are fading. My Model 3 that started life with (an over-promised) 240 miles of range requires a lot of extra stops on a very long trip. As the range of a decent EV creeps up to 300 miles or more, we’re approaching a world where you’re not stopping much more than you would in a gas-burning car, unless you’re one of those drivers who refuses to take bathroom breaks to make good time. With range and the number of fast-chargers on the road both ticking upward, the anxiety of not making it to the next plug is dissipating, too, giving you back some of your brain time to think about something else.
EVs may never reach the two minutes it takes to fill a gas tank. They may always ask just a little more of you than a hybrid or plug-in hybrid that conserves the gas engine to keep the range worries at bay. But they might get close enough to gas-pump speed that, by the time you stretch your legs, relieve yourself, and buy another colossal can of Monster Energy, the car says it’s ready for you to resume your trip.
Besides, if those few extra minutes make you feel a little saner while also reducing the emissions of your road trip, then that’s time well spent.
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On a new loan guarantee, a Nord Stream 2 revival, and AI-aided oil recovery
Current conditions: As Tropical Storm Lorenzo looks likely to dissipate over water by Friday, AccuWeather has slashed the season’s forecast to six hurricanes from nine • Severe thunderstorms near Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, are likely too spotty to relieve long-standing drought in the Mississippi River Basin • The Netrokona district of northeastern Bangladesh is scorching in temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
A rendering of the future Cascade Advanced Energy Facility. Amazon
A year after Amazon invested in the small modular reactor developer X-energy, the tech giant has unveiled its plans to build a nearly gigawatt-sized plant in southeastern Washington, where it will install the nuclear company’s next-generation technology for the first time. The Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is set to begin construction “by the end of this decade,” with hopes of generating power from up to a dozen of X-energy’s 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactors sometime “in the 2030s.” Amazon plans to build the plant in three phases, with four reactors at each stage, eventually reaching 960 megawatts in capacity. Located in Richland, Washington, along the Columbia River, the facility will nearly double the output of the Pacific Northwest’s only nuclear plant, the nearby Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.
In a sign of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called “the nuclear dealmaking boom” back in August, rival microreactor developer Oklo suggested at a recent public meeting in Tennessee that it may propose building some of its reactors near the Oak Ridge site of its debut nuclear waste recycling project, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported Monday. On Tuesday, meanwhile, the U.S. Army announced its new Janus program, which aims to supply bases by 2028 with microreactors like the ones Oklo aims to build, which generate 20 megawatts of electricity or less. The reactors would be owned and operated by private companies. “What resilience means to us is that we have power, no matter what, 24-7,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army, told The Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has largely revoked deals made under the previous administration since President Donald Trump returned to office. But on Thursday morning, the agency’s in-house lender announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to a subsidiary of utility giant American Electric Power to upgrade and rebuild about 5,000 miles of transmission lines across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. “This loan guarantee will not only help modernize the grid and expand transmission capacity but will help position the United States to win the AI race and grow our manufacturing base,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release.
The move came a day after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to fire thousands of federal workers amid the ongoing government shutdown. At a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee based in California, granted labor unions’ request for a temporary restraining order to halt the dismissals. The hearing took place at the same time White House budget director Russ Vought appeared on the late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s podcast to preview his plans to lay off as many as 10,000 federal workers as the shutdown continued. The hearing will pause the job cuts for the roughly 4,000 workers who received notice so far. Illson said during the hearing that she granted the temporary restraining order because administration officials had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, government functioning, to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and that they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” News From The States reported. “Things are being done before they’re thought through — very much ready, fire, aim.” Nearly 200 employees at the Department of Energy began receiving notices last week, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter.
The underwater explosion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Germany to Russia’s gas supply remains one of the world’s biggest geopolitical whodunnits, and Berlin’s fellow European Union members seem keen to keep it that way. In just the past two days, Poland and Italy blocked extradition requests to send suspected saboteurs to Germany for trial. But the Germans aren’t just looking to figure out who’s responsible for destroying the megaproject. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is considering restarting the certification process for the pipeline, the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported Wednesday. The previous German government had ruled out a restart of the pipeline in March after news broke that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s business allies were angling to restore the project. In June, the new government under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz began examining legal avenues to block any future plans to reactivate the pipeline, the Financial Times reported at the time. But under current law, the economic ministry said this week a restart “cannot be ruled out in the medium term.”
Ohio passed a new law to fast-track energy projects on former coal mines and brownfields, Canary Media reported Wednesday. Called House Bill 15, the legislation took effect in August and lets the state’s Department of Development designate the former industrial sites as “priority investment areas” at the request of local governments. Roughly a third of Ohio’s 88 counties ban wind, solar, or both, but the language in the bill makes clear that “it was meant to be technology-neutral,” Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate at The Nature Conservancy, told Canary’s Kathiann M. Kowalski.
A transition from coal could yield significant health benefits, as The New York Times reported on Tuesday. A recent study found that, when a coal-processing facility near Pittsburgh shut down, the number of emergency room visits for respiratory issues in the surrounding area dropped by about 20% in the month following the closure.
The world’s annual consumption of oil isn’t expected to peak until the mid-2030s, and by 2050 it will reach a cumulative 1 trillion barrels, according to the consultancy Wood Mackenzie’s forecast. But production that’s either already onstream or ready for development is expected to gradually decline to 650 billion barrels per year by the mid century. What will make up the difference? “Traditional exploration will play its part but can’t get anywhere near bridging a gap of this scale,” Wood Mackenzie analysts wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “Even the 21st century’s biggest new play, Guyana, with 15 billion barrels of oil, barely makes a dent.” To identify potential new resources, Wood Mackenzie rolled out a new AI-powered benchmark called Analogues, which “uses a machine learning method known as clustering to identify each field’s closest matches across 60 different attributes spanning rock properties, fluid characteristics, and commercial factors.” The AI tool could increase the share of recoverable conventional oil reserves by nearly 42%.
A chart showing how the AI "analogues" could bolster oil drilling. Wood Mackenzie
Fusion energy is rapidly accelerating in the U.S., and the Department of Energy is poised to release a national plan for speeding up the deployment of the technology. In the meantime, states can prepare by beefing up regulatory capacity, speeding up permitting, clearing interconnection queues, and creating special tax credits. That’s according to a new roadmap from the Clean Air Task Force. “As fusion energy moves closer to commercial reality, states have a window of opportunity to prepare,” Jack Moore, a fusion policy consultant at CATF, wrote in a blog post. “Proactive policy design today can help states position themselves to create an effective environment for fusion energy deployment tomorrow.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated accurately reflect oil demand by 2050.
This thing is a certified clunker.
Americans certainly got the message about the end of the EV tax credit. With the $7,500 benefit set to disappear at the end of September, electric vehicle sales surged to record numbers in the third quarter of 2025 as buyers raced to beat the deadline.
The rising tide lifted just about all EVs — but not the struggling Tesla Cybertruck. According to new numbers from Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sold just 5,385 Cybertrucks from July to September, less than half as many as it delivered during the same period in 2024. The company is now expected to sell around 20,000 of the metal EVs this calendar year. That’s down from around 50,000 last year, and less than 10% of the 250,000 total Elon Musk once predicted as the truck’s annual sales figure.
Cybertruck was well on its way to flop status before these sales numbers. With its purposefully jarring aesthetic, the EV for edgelords was never going to be as popular as Musk proclaimed, and that was before his relationship to Donald Trump and online provocations pushed many more people away from the Tesla brand. Cost didn’t help, either. Tesla once said it would sell a $40,000 basic version of Cybertruck, a price point that might have enticed some buyers beyond the Musk fanboys who became early adopters, but the cheapest one you can actually buy today is around $60,000.
Still, the vehicle’s third-quarter performance is particularly damning in comparison to nationwide EV sales, where the tax credit’s demise ignited a fire sale. Americans bought more than 430,000 EVs during the quarter, an increase of about 40% from the second quarter of 2025 and about 30% from the third quarter of last year. Popular vehicles including the Chevy Equinox EV, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Honda Prologue surged to sales of more than 20,000 during the quarter. Electric trucks including the Rivian R1T, Ford F-150 Lightning, and GMC Hummer EV saw sales increases despite having high prices that rival the Cybertruck’s.
Tesla itself, despite months of bad press, did well, too. The brand’s share of the overall EV market continues to wane, reaching a new low of 41%. But the surge temporarily stabilized its tumbling sales, with plenty of people snatching up Model 3s and Model Ys while the getting was good. Those two vehicles remained the two best-selling EVs in America, with Tesla selling more than 114,000 Model Ys and more than 53,000 Model 3s.
Yet the good times did nothing to spur driver interest in Cybertruck. In fact, public enthusiasm for the vehicle might be even lower than it seems, because it turns out that one of the top customers for Musk’s electric tank is Musk himself. Electrek reports that his other companies, such as SpaceX and xAI, have been accumulating Cybertrucks as their company cars. Tesla is replacing some of its own fleet with Cybertrucks, as well.
The move makes sense for Musk. Because of weak overall demand, Cybertrucks are sitting idle on lots; selling them to his businesses at least puts them to work. The scheme also might improve the appearance of Tesla’s sales numbers, Electrek speculates. By locking in some of these sales with a downpayment before the end of September, Tesla can deliver Cybertrucks to Musk’s other business in the weeks to come and still get the tax credit on them. The approach could boost sales numbers for a fourth quarter that’s likely to be difficult with the disappearance of the federal incentive.
Now that Cybertruck has become Elon’s Edsel, Tesla’s hopes for an EV sales revival lie largely with the new “Standard” versions of its two best-sellers. These trim levels strip away some of the amenities from the Models 3 and Y to bring their starting prices down to $37,000 and $40,000, respectively. It’s far from clear that this will succeed. Anyone shopping for an EV solely on price could wait for the upcoming new versions of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt, which are expected to come in at $30,000 or less. The Equinox’s $35,000 starting price, five-grand less than even the budget Model Y crossover, has spurred its recent success.
Still, with 320-plus miles of estimated range and at least some of Tesla’s best features, the budget versions could be compelling cars at those prices. At the very least, they’ll speak to more drivers than the Cybertruck does.
It’s already conquered solar, batteries, and EVs. With a $2 billion new turbine factory in Scotland, it may have set its next target.
Batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. The story of renewable energy deployment globally is increasingly one of China’s fiercely competitive domestic industries and deep supply chains exporting their immense capacity globally. Now, it may be wind’s turn.
The Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced last week that it plans to invest $2 billion in a factory in Scotland. The facility is scheduled to start production in late 2028, churning out offshore wind equipment for use in the United Kingdom, which has over 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as well as for export, likely in Europe.
The deal comes as China finds itself at a kind of domestic clean energy crossroads, in terms of both supply and demand. On the former, the country has launched a campaign aimed at softening the cutthroat domestic competition, overproduction, and price wars that have defined many of its green industries, especially electric vehicles.
At the same time, China is setting out to alter its electricity markets to put renewable energy on a more market-based footing, while also paying coal-fired power plants to stay on the grid, as University of California, San Diego researcher Michael Davidson explained on a recent episode of Shift Key. These changes in electricity markets will reduce payments to solar and wind producers, making foreign markets potentially more attractive.
“We anticipate Chinese original equipment manufacturers will intensify their push toward international expansion, with Mingyang’s planned investment a signal of this trend,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients. “This poses a challenge for Western incumbents, as Chinese players can capitalize on their cost advantages in a market driven by price.”
Ironically, Fulop said, the market changes will make the Chinese market more like Europe’s, which has become more price conscious as the market has matured and reductions in cost have slowed or outright stopped. “The transition is expected to make renewable developers increasingly price-sensitive as they seek to preserve project returns, ultimately weighing on wind turbine manufacturers’ profitability,” he wrote.
There’s a “cliff” coming in Chinese renewable energy deployment, Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, told me. “Overall, the net effect is expected to be a pretty sharp drop, and we’re already starting to see some of the effects of that.”
And turbine manufacturers would not be the first Chinese renewable industry to show up in Europe.
“There’s already an existing model” for Chinese manufacturers to set up shop in Western countries, Chan said. Chinese companies are already planning to manufacture solar modules in France, while Chinese EV maker BYD’s is planning factories in Hungary, Turkey, and potentially Spain.
China as a whole is responsible for over half of all new offshore wind capacity added in 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor, and has been growing at a 41% annual rate for the past five years. The energy intelligence firm Rystad estimates that China will make up 45% of all offshore wind capacity by 2030. Ming Yang itself claims to be behind almost a third of new offshore wind capacity built last year.
Meanwhile, offshore wind projects in the West — especially the United States — have faced the omnicrisis of high interest rates, backed-up supply chains, and Donald Trump. News of Ming Yang’s Scotland factory sent yet another shock through the ailing Western offshore wind market, with shares in the Danish company Vestas down 4% when the market opened Monday.
But with Chinese products and Chinese investment comes controversy and nerves among European political leaders. “There’re questions about tech transfer and job creation,” Chan said. “They also face some security issues and potential political backlash.”
In August, the German asset manager Luxcara announced that it would use Siemens Gamesa turbines for a planned offshore wind project instead of Ming Yang ones after backlash from German defense officials. “We see this as further evidence that a Chinese entry into the European wind market remains challenging,” analysts at Jefferies wrote to clients in August.
They were right to be skeptical — Chinese turbines’ entry into the European market has been long predicted and yet remains unrealized. “China’s increasingly cheap wind turbines could open new markets,” S&P Global Insights wrote in 2022, citing the same cost advantages as Morningstar did in reference to the Ming Yang factory announcement.
“China was already trying to angle into the European market,” Chan told me, seeing it as comparable to the U.S. in size and potentially more open to Chinese investment. “If they were kind of thinking about it before, now it’s gotten a greater sense of commercial urgency because I think the expectation is that their profit margins are really going to get squeezed.”
While China leads the world in building out renewable energy capacity domestically and exporting technology abroad, it has “decided not to decide” on pursuing a rapid, near-term decarbonization, Johns Hopkins University China scholar Jeremy Wallace recently argued in Heatmap.
While that means that the Paris Agreement goals are even farther out of reach, it may be fine for Chinese industries, including wind, as they look to sell abroad.
“Chinese firms have lots of reasons to want to build things abroad: Diversification away from the Chinese market, the zero or negative profits from selling domestically, and geopolitical balancing,” Wallace told me.
“If Brits want to have their citizens making the turbines that will power the country,” Wallace said, “this seems like a reasonable opportunity.”