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There isn’t one EV transition. There are two.
This has not been a good week for the electric-vehicle transition. On Wednesday, General Motors scrapped a self-imposed plan of building 400,000 electric vehicles by the middle of next year. Then it jettisoned plans with Honda to build a sub-$30,000 EV. On Thursday, Mercedes Benz announced that its profits had fallen in part due to turbulence in the EV market, and Hertz ditched a plan to have EVs make up 25% of its fleet by 2024.
Nor has the past month been much better. Ford has slowed down its EV factory build-out. Elon Musk announced that Tesla was taking a wait-and-see approach to opening its next plant, in Mexico, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that EV demand is proving weaker than once expected. Higher interest rates and, perhaps, a continued lack of public chargers now seem to be impairing the EV transition.
It’s an odd time, because while the day-to-day news is bad, the overall trend remains good — surprisingly good, even. More than 1 million EVs have been sold in America this year, and the country is likely to record 50% year-over-year EV market growth for two years in a row. That is not the usual sign of an industry in trouble. The industry is faltering, yes, but only compared to the rapid scale-up that companies once aimed for — and that the Paris Agreement’s climate targets demand. And at a global level, the news is better: The economics of batteries and trends in the Chinese and European markets leave little doubt that EVs will eventually win.
So how to make sense of this moment? Automakers, it seems, are not doubting whether the EV transition will happen; they are pausing to figure out how best to proceed. Journalists often talk about the “EV transition,” but this is something of a misnomer — there are really at least two different transitions, two different bridges to the EV future.
One of those transitions must be navigated by the legacy automakers, such as Ford and GM. The other must be completed by the new electric-only upstarts, such as Tesla and Rivian. Both transitions are, today, half-complete. What is notable about this moment is that both transitions are also in flux — and the companies and executives tasked with navigating them are struggling with their next steps.
The first bridge must be built by Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and every other legacy automaker heavily invested in the U.S. market. You can think of it as a bridge made of cross-subsidies — subsidies not from the government, but from other cars in their product line.
Right now, many automakers earn their biggest profits by selling big, gas-burning vehicles: crossovers, SUVs, and pickup trucks. They lose money, meanwhile, on each EV that they sell. So over the next few years, these companies must take the huge profits from their SUV-and-truck business and reinvest them into scaling up their EV business.
You can see how difficult this will be by looking at Ford, which conveniently reports earnings from its internal combustion business separately from its electric vehicle business. During the first half of 2023, Ford’s global gas and hybrid sales earned $4.9 billion before interest or taxes. Ford’s EV business, meanwhile, lost $1.8 billion before interest or taxes.
During this same period, Ford sold nearly half a million trucks and SUVs in the U.S. alone, and roughly 25,000 electric vehicles. By one calculation, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV that it sold during the first quarter of this year.
This is the narrow bridge that Ford and its ilk must walk: They must remain mature businesses, delivering consistent profits to shareholders, even as they overhaul their entire product line and manufacturing system. And while these legacy automakers have certain advantages — brand cachet, a network of dealerships, and an understanding of how to make car bodies — they lack the deep familiarity with software or battery chemistries that underpin the EV business. What’s more, their current business rests on uneasy foundations: Because their profits are so heavily concentrated in just a few SUVs and trucks, a sudden shift in consumer tastes, fuel prices, or regulation could undercut their whole hustle.
We’ve already seen one consequence of this concentration in the United Autoworkers strike. By focusing its strikes on just a few factories at first, and then gradually expanding them to include each company’s most profitable facilities, the UAW was able to make its strike fund go further than outside commentators initially estimated. That strategy resulted in record high pay raises for workers in the UAW’s tentative deal with Ford; strikes continue at GM and Stellantis.
But this is, of course, only the first bridge to the EV future. Other companies — including Tesla, Rivian, and the early-stage EV startups Canoo and Fisker — have to build a different path across the river. You can think of this as the bridge of scaling up, although some auto-industry analysts give it a different name: crossing the EV valley of death.
These companies have to survive long enough to build up economies of scale. You can think of it this way: At the beginning of an EV company’s lifespan, it knows very little about how to mass-produce its EVs, but it has a lot of cash to burn. As it matures, it gets better at making EVs and grows its customer base, and it makes cars more frequently and more cheaply. Eventually, it reaches a point where it can sell lots of EVs for more money than they cost to make — that is, it can be a mature, profitable business.
But in the middle, it faces a hold-your-breath moment where its high costs can overwhelm its meager production. This is the valley of death, “the challenging period between developing a product and large-scale production, when a company isn’t earning much if any revenue, but operating and capital costs are high,” as the journalist Steve Levine puts it at The Information.
Nearly every EV company faces this problem to some extent right now. Elon Musk discussed it during a recent rambling Tesla earnings call. “People do not understand what is truly hard. That’s why I say prototypes are easy. Production is hard,” he said. “Going from a prototype to volume production is like 10,000% harder… than to make the prototype in the first place.”
Now, Tesla seems to have mostly cleared the valley of death with its Model 3 and Model Y this year, allowing it to undertake a campaign of aggressive price cuts that have increased demand while retaining some profitability.
But what Musk was talking about — and what Tesla is clearly struggling with — is the Cybertruck, which will debut next month after a multi-year delay. Musk warned that the company had “dug its own grave” by trying to build the Cybertruck and that there would be “enormous challenges” in producing it profitably and at scale.
But “this is simply normal,” he added. “When you've got a product with a lot of new technology or any brand-new vehicle program, but especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you're trying to solve at scale.”
Every other EV company finds itself on the same narrow bridge. Rivian, for instance, is somewhere further behind Tesla in general but is fast making up ground. It scaled up its production of its R1T and R1S models last quarter faster than analysts thought, but was at last report still losing money on each vehicle. Rivian’s CEO, R.J. Scaringe, told me that the company is focusing on making its next line of vehicles, the R2 series, easier and simpler to manufacture to avoid this problem.
Even further behind Rivian are Fisker, which claims to have delivered 5,000 of its Ocean SUVs, and Canoo, which is struggling to stay solvent.
What’s hard about this moment, then, is that the downsides and risks of each approach have never been clearer.
If a legacy company completes its EV transition too quickly, then it risks finding itself with a fleet of electric vehicles that the public isn’t ready to buy. Companies like Ford, GM, Volkswagen, and Toyota must scale up a profitable EV product line at the same time that they sell vehicles from their legacy business.
Worldwide, no historic automaker has transitioned fully to making battery-electric vehicles, although some have come very close: BYD, the Chinese automaker that has surpassed Tesla as the world’s biggest producer of EVs, opted to quit making internal-combustion vehicles last year, but it still sells plug-in hybrids. Volvo, too, is making an attempt: It has promised to stop selling internal-combustion cars by 2030. But Volvo is owned by the Chinese automaker Geely, meaning that both of these companies can sell their cars to a much larger and more EV-interested Chinese domestic market.
Yet the second transition is tough, too. Although it may seem that EV-only companies have a lot of freedom (by lacking a network of EV-skeptical dealerships, for instance), they also have no alternative revenue to cushion themselves through a period of soft demand — they can’t ever cross-subsidize. Although it sold buses and not private vehicles, the American EV-only vehicle maker Proterra is indicative here: It went bankrupt earlier this year after getting stuck halfway through the valley of death.
America is going to have a domestic EV industry. By the mid-2030s, most automakers will be integrated EV companies, building and selling electric vehicles that include some in-house hardware, software, and battery components. Consumers will think of their new vehicles more as technology than as a simple mode of transportation, and they will power them from ubiquitous charging stations, which will be as mundane and abundant as wall outlets are today.
That future is certain. But what kinds of cars will we be driving, and what companies will count themselves among the electric elect? I couldn’t tell you. It will all depend on what happens next — on who makes it across the narrow bridge.
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Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.
“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”
To name just a few announcements from this year: planning for a 4.4-gigawatt nuclear power complex is now underway in Texas; South Carolina’s state-owned utility is seeking buyers to restart construction on two partially built AP1000 reactors; New York governor Kathy Hochul is looking to build a new reactor in upstate New York; The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a construction permit for a small modular reactor; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems; and another fusion company, Helion Energy, raised a whopping $425 million round of venture capital. On top of all that there’s the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which is targeted to restart by year’s end, bringing 800 megawatts of new nuclear power online.
Heading into the second Trump term, there were plenty of indications that the administration would support this technology with increasingly bipartisan appeal. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that while the One Big Beautiful Bill eviscerated tax credits for solar and wind, it preserved them for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Now that this support is assured, Stein expects the nuclear announcements to keep rolling in. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told me.
How much of this is, I asked him, is due to data centers and their seemingly insatiable demand for clean, firm power? “Most of it,” he said simply. By way of example, he pointed out how data center load growth has changed the outlooks for two small modular reactor companies in particular. “NuScale has been trying to find their first project for a long time now, after they had to cancel their [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] project. Kairos didn’t have a clear buyer for its first-of-a-kind, even though it was building two test reactors,” Stein explained. “Then all of a sudden, they all had additional deals in the works because of data center demand.”
Last year, Kairos inked a 500-megawatt deal with Google to meet the hyperscaler’s growing data center needs, while this year, Texas A&M selected the company — along with three others — to build a reactor at the university’s research and development campus. And while NuScale infamously canceled its first project in 2023 due to rising costs, this year it received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new and improved reactor design. Now the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, told Reuters that NuScale is in talks to deploy its tech with five unnamed “tier one hyperscalers.” Its stock is up more than 150% on the year.
That’s a big turnaround for a company that, less than two years ago, was widely considered a cautionary tale — and it’s not the only one in the industry with this type of comeback story. Right before NuScale’s project failed, another nuclear company, X-energy, announced that it would no longer go public due to “challenging market conditions” and “peer company trading performance.” But while X-energy still has yet to IPO, it appears to be doing just fine. In February, the company announced the close of a $700 million Series C follow-on round, coming on the heels of Amazon’s strategic investment last year.
“I think every company has their stories about how things are changing,” Seth Grae, CEO of the advanced nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, told me. Things have moved a lot faster, Grae said, since Trump released a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear energy deployment. “Just since May, we’ve received this highly enriched uranium [from the Department of Energy], made these fuel samples, got them qualified already at Idaho National Lab. We expect they’ll be in the reactor this year. Grae told me. “Things didn’t used to happen that fast in nuclear.”
Trump’s plans to fast track nuclear development have also raised serious concerns, however, as critics worry that acceleration could lead to laxer safety standards The executive orders call for, among other things, cutting staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just as the industry enters a period of intense activity. In June, the President fired one of the agency’s commissioners, Christopher Hanson, without cause. Another commissioner, Annie Caputo, resigned in July.
But right now, the nuclear industry is mostly basking in optimism. Grae credits the government’s strong support for the surge in nuclear stocks — Lightbridge’s own stock price has jumped 180% this year, while another nuclear fuel company, Centrus Energy, is up even more. The small modular reactor company Oklo is up 285% for the year, on the heels of last year’s 12-gigawatt non-binding deal with the data center company Switch — one of the largest corporate clean power agreements to date.
Last year’s slew of deals involving Oklo, X-energy, and Kairos show that the sector’s momentum had been building well before Trump took office. By 2023, the writing was already on the wall in terms of data center load growth, as grid planners began to predict a sharp rise in electricity demand after over a decade of stagnation. But when I asked Erik Funkhauser of the Good Energy Collective whether the prior two years compared with this one, he concurred with Stein. “Nope,” he told me. “We’re seeing capital infusion at a really, really high pace, as high of a pace as the company’s suppliers can keep up with on projects.”
Still, the party may not go on forever. “I see a potential for a Valley of Death,” Stein told me, similar to what many startups go through when they’re trying to raise later-stage funding rounds.
“If things don’t start to actually move forward with real progress, either getting licenses or building prototypes on time, then all of that investment will be pulled back.” That’s what the U.S. saw during the last so-called “nuclear renaissance” in the late 2000s, he explained, when a rash of large reactors were proposed with only two actually reaching completion.
These were the notorious Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, which finally came online in 2023 and 2024 respectively, running billions over budget and years behind schedule. In order for this latest round of nuclear enthusiasm to avoid the same fate, Stein told me it’s critical that leading projects demonstrate enough early success to maintain developer confidence in the economic and technical viability of new — and old — nuclear technologies.
That being said, the sector will inevitably contract. “Back when we saw this last scale-up, there were three designs that were really competing for attention, and now there are 75. So we’re going to see a lot of failures,” Stein said. The question for venture investors, he told me, is “how many failures of startups that you didn’t invest in are you willing to tolerate before you start to think the whole segment has trouble?”
The second main way this could all fall to pieces, he told me, is if “somebody tries to move too fast,” and that recklessness leads to “either a bankruptcy or an accident or something like that that will send ripples or shock waves through the whole sector.”
Indeed, a metaphorical or literal meltdown in the sector could put a quick halt to this year’s frenzied momentum. But within the next few years, as these announced projects begin to line up their licenses and come online — or fall apart— we’ll soon see whether this latest nuclear revival is a true turning point or just another bubble.
On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.