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In the closing days of April, Elon Musk shocked the EV world when he laid off Tesla’s entire 500-person charging division.
The company suddenly — and seemingly for reasons of professional pique — gave up on its biggest competitive advantage. At a time when every other automaker was supposed to be moving to Tesla’s best-in-class charging network, Tesla seemed to be abandoning it.
The announcement shot the American EV industry through with fear and seemed to cement the broader industry’s malaise. If Tesla was giving up on EVs and becoming an “AI and robotics company,” what chance did anyone else stand?
More than a month has now passed. Tesla hasn’t released its sales figures yet for May, and it isn’t likely to do so until its shareholders vote on a $56 billion pay package for Elon Musk next week. Given how the company has been acting lately, its sales probably won’t inspire.
But in the meantime, we can take stock of the rest of the industry. And the results have been … pretty good! Hyundai, Kia, General Motors, and Ford all saw their best May ever for EV sales. With little fanfare, EVs continue growing as a share of American car sales and making concerted progress. Tesla’s future business might be a question mark, but EVs have a foothold in the rest of the industry.
Let’s break down the data:
Hyundai, one of the Korean automakers that has emerged as an electric power player in the U.S., says that its EV sales were up 42% nationwide year-over-year. The Ioniq 5, its all-electric hatchback, just had its best sales month ever. It has already sold nearly 21,000 cars in its Ioniq line-up so far this year.
Its Korean partner, Kia, also saw its electric sales double in May, which was Kia’s best month for EV sales ever. For the first time, Kia sold more than 7,000 all-electric cars in one month. Although it’s too early for this to appear in the sales data, Kia also began to produce its three-row SUV, the EV9, at its new assembly factory in Georgia this month, which means that the EV9 will qualify for the full $7,500 tax credit under the Inflation Reduction Act.
So far this year, Kia has sold more than 16,000 EV6 and EV9s. (Hyundai and Kia also sell plug-in hybrids, but they don’t regularly break them out in their monthly sales data announcements.)
American automakers also put up solid numbers. General Motors recorded its best-ever month for EV sales in May — even though it has now stopped selling the Chevrolet Bolt, which was previously the cheapest EV on sale in America. But GM’s new electric platform, Ultium, is starting to fill the gap. Sales of the Cadillac Lyriq, which had previously lagged GM’s cars, are suddenly surging; the vehicle is on track to outsell the Tesla Model X this year. This month, Chevrolet launched the Chevrolet Equinox EV, a two-row SUV starting just around $43,000 that got “surprisingly great” reviews. The Equinox qualifies for the full EV tax credit.
Ford also put up decent numbers: May was its third-best month for EV sales ever. Sales of the Ford Lightning, Mustang Mach E, and E-Transit van were all up by 46% year-over-year, and Ford’s electric sales overall are 88% above where they stood at the same time last year. But Ford, unlike GM, hasn’t announced any new electric cars in the pipeline.
Other good news came not in the form of sales, but in product announcements and updates. The automaker Stellantis — you might know it best as Fiat-Chrysler — disclosed that it will release a $25,000 all-electric Jeep in America soon, based on the same platform as the cheap EVs that it already sells in Europe.
The electric automaker Rivian also made progress on its goal to become profitable by the end of the year. The EV truckmaker has reopened its factory in Normal, Illinois, after retooling and renovating it last month. It also unveiled new versions of its flagship R1S SUV and R1T pickup with more range and new features. While Rivian’s ultimate survival will be determined by its sales in the second half of the year, it is checking the boxes on its plan to stop burning cash by 2025.
“The last two weeks have had good vibes for maybe the first time all year,” Corey Cantor, an analyst at Bloomberg NEF, told me. “A lot of the companies that have had to make progress are starting to make progress.”
The one big weak spot in the month was in charging. As predicted, Musk has hired back some of the charging employees that it laid off five weeks ago, but the rate of its charging expansion has slowed — and no other company has stepped up to fill the gap. GM has said that its EV drivers will have access to Tesla’s network by “spring 2024,” a deadline that will arrive in 13 days. And the charging network funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has yet to produce more than a handful of stations.
Another point of caution: It’s still unclear whether EV sales in May will fall overall — but that would be entirely because Tesla, which makes up a large share of EV sales nationwide, has seen such slowing deliveries lately. In recent months, EV sales have had a “Tesla problem,” where every automaker that isn’t Tesla sees record growth, but Tesla brings down the overall rate. There’s a positive way to view that trend (the EV transition is broadening beyond Tesla!) and a negative way (fewer folks are buying EVs overall). That could happen again this month: We won’t know until Tesla reports its monthly figures.
Still, even in a year defined so far by big road bumps for electric cars, the direction of travel is good.
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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.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”