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Electric vehicles are heavy because batteries are heavy. But building a lighter battery is no easy feat.
The transition from gasoline to electric vehicles will be a massive one in more than just a metaphorical sense. EVs have a weight problem — one that could undo some of the good created by going electric and exacerbate a bunch of cascading problems.
Electric vehicles are heavy because batteries are heavy. There’s just no way around it. The lithium-ion packs in EVs are the state of the art in modern battery technology and can store far more energy in a given amount of space compared to other rechargeable battery types such as nickel-cadmium. But their energy density still pales in comparison to gasoline. So, giving a car hundreds of miles of driving range means slinging a huge, heavy battery along the bottom of the vehicle.
A simple way to see the difference is between two versions of the same vehicle, one electric and one not. Depending on the various configurations, the Ford F-150 Lightning EV outweighs the gas-powered version of the pickup by at least 1,000 lbs., and sometimes closer to a full ton. Differences aren’t always so dramatic, but adding a giant battery, even when it means losing a bunch of internal combustion components, typically inflates weight.
Electrics are also heavy because all cars are heavy. The story of the last half-century of the auto industry is the death of smaller passenger cars, with consumer preference and regulatory loopholes having now led to the utter dominance of SUVs and trucks. In the EV market, smaller and lighter vehicles like the Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt sold in decent numbers by hitting the market early and meeting the car-buyers who don’t want a giant ride. Now, though, the EV space is going the same way as gas. With American car-buyers willing to pay more for the crossovers and pickups they desire, automakers are moving away from less profitable modestly sized EVs in favor of crossovers and pickups.
It adds up to a lot of extra bulk rolling down the streets and highways. The most pressing danger from all these oversized electric vehicles is the threat they pose to anybody outside the car. The extra mass, combined with additional safety tech that can be built into places where engines and hoses used to go, means a big EV’s passengers are inside a fortress. It’s not such good news for pedestrians, cyclists, and occupants of any vehicle that’s not a multi-ton tank. Pedestrian deaths, which had been declining for years, began to climb again in 2010 and have reached their highest point in 40 years. It’s more difficult to see out of our increasingly huge vehicles, and when accidents happen, they are deadlier.
That’s not the only weighty concern. Over time, heavy vehicles cause more damage to roadways, bridges, and other driving infrastructure, and require them to need maintenance more often — causing even more of those pesky construction zones that slow highway traffic. At the same time, electric vehicles don’t pay for gasoline taxes that fund road maintenance, something economists are trying to solve, fast. EVs and other new vehicles are so hefty, Slate reports, that those auto-hauler semi-trucks — the ones you see on the interstate ferrying a bunch of cars to their new homes — can carry fewer cars at once because of overall limits on their cargo weight.
There is also the question of energy use. The relative fuel efficiency of electric cars is a rarely discussed part of the discourse about climate, cars, and energy. Perhaps that’s because EVs don’t come with a handy metric everyone is accustomed to, like miles per gallon (EVs can deliver an equivalent, or Mpg-e, but it’s a murky number that requires some math). Perhaps it’s because so few Americans drive electric — or because the focus, from a national perspective, has been on convincing as many people as possible to go electric, even if it means selling them a war machine like the GMC Hummer EV.
But not all electric cars are created equal. Using its imperfect data, the EPA rates a smaller electric sedan like the Tesla Model 3 at about 140 Mpg-E. For bigger SUVs, that figure falls under 100, and as low as the 60s for the Porsche Taycan or the fully loaded F-150 Lightning. That mark is still better than what you could get from an ordinary gas or hybrid car. However, it means you’re using roughly twice as much energy to run errands in an Audi E-Tron as in a Chevy Bolt. From a climate perspective, we’re giving away much of the good of transitioning to electric cars by selling bigger, bulkier, more inefficient ones.
It’s not clear there’s an immediate fix to this problem. Carmakers will sell what car shoppers want to buy. Most Americans clearly want big vehicles, and no amount of climate scolding will change that. To convince car buyers who are already wary of range anxiety to switch to electric, new vehicles need as much range as they can get — and that means packing as much battery as possible into the bottom of the car.
Are lighter EV batteries the solution, then? Well, lowering a car’s power-to-weight ratio has been an automotive obsession since the dawn of the industry, because getting more power from less weight makes a vehicle zoom-ier. As the industry transitions to electric power, lots of auto engineers are now focused on squeezing more juice out of batteries, while researchers like Kimberly See at Caltech experiment with new battery chemistries that could, one day, perhaps supplant the lithium-ion cells of today. [Editor’s note: Caltech is where I do my day job.]
It’s a tough problem, See told me. Some ideas for alternative battery chemistries potentially can store more energy per unit of mass, but their design is nascent compared to that of lithium-ion, which has been developed since the 1990s. Building an actual working battery always involves trade-offs between weight, safety, and power — and weight can’t always win.
“There are chemistries out there, like Li-S [lithium-sulfur], that would make packs much, much smaller,” See says. “But there are many fundamental science challenges.”
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Big electric vehicles need big batteries — and as electricity gets more expensive, charging them is getting pricier.
As the cost to charge the Rivian R1S ticked up over $50, then $60, I couldn’t help but recall those “Pain at the Pump” segments from the local news. Perhaps you’ve seen the familiar clips where reporters camp out at the local filling station to interview locals fed up with high gas prices. I watched the Rivian charger’s touchscreen as the cost to refuel my weekend test-driver ballooned and imagined the chemically dewrinkled TV anchors doing their first story on “Pain at the Plug.”
I should have been ready for this. Back in the 90s, I remember the shock of filling my parents’ gas-guzzling Ford Explorer, which cost two or three times as much as it took to fill my dinky Escort hatchback. The story isn’t the same in the age of electric vehicles, but it rhymes. It rarely costs more than $20 to top off the small battery in my Tesla Model 3, so my eyes popped a little at the price of refueling a massive EV.
This isn’t a one-to-one comparison, of course: the R1S also goes farther on a charge because of how much energy its huge battery can store, so it’s a bit like comparing a compact car to a Ford F-150 and its 36-gallon gas tank — you’re spending much, much, more, but you’re going a little farther, too. Still, it is a reminder that size matters, whether you’re talking about gas or electric. Under a Trump administration where electricity prices are forecasted to spike, EV shoppers might find themselves thinking the way Americans often have during oil crises and gas price hikes: taking a long look at smaller and lighter vehicles to save money.
The EV weight problem is well-known. To summarize: EVs tend to be weighty because of their massive battery packs. Making electrified versions of the big trucks and SUVs Americans love amplifies the problem. You need very big batteries to store enough energy to give them a decent range, and adding a large lithium-ion unit along the bottom adds even more girth.
Weighty EVs have raised concerns over public safety, since they could be more dangerous to pedestrians, cyclists, and other cars during collisions. Their bulk leads to prematurely worn-out tires, which potentially creates more tire dust and forces drivers to replace their rubber sooner. Bigger batteries need larger amounts of rare metals to make them. And now, in a world of expensive electricity, a heavy EV could hammer a driver’s wallet.
Those of us raised on miles per gallon must learn a new statistical vocabulary to think about the efficiency of EVs. The simplest stat is the number of miles traveled per kilowatt-hour of energy. Lucid, the luxury EV-only startup, has been gunning for the efficiency title with its streamlined Air sedan and has bragged about making 5 miles per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, the current Tesla Model 3 makes around 4 miles per kilowatt-hour, while a big, heavy Rivian gets somewhere in the 2s. (Using a conversion formula from the Environmental Protection Agency to calculate the energy present in a gallon of gas shows that a relatively efficient sedan like the Honda Civic scores around 1, by Lucid’s math, and a big pickup truck even worse.)
These numbers are context-dependent, of course. Just as a gas car or hybrid is judged by its city, highway, and combined mileage, an electric car goes much farther at slow speeds than it does on the highway. A big three-row Hyundai Ioniq 9 EV that can deliver 3 miles or more per kilowatt-hour at slower speeds made right around 2.0 when I sped down Interstate 5, the AC blasting to keep the baby comfortable on a hot California day. The Supercharger bill was enough to make me miss my little Tesla.
The dollars-and-cents calculation is a little different with all-electric vehicles than it was in the all-gasoline era. Drive a gas car and you pay whatever the gas station charges; there is little recourse beyond knowing which service station in your city is the cheapest. With EVs, however, most drivers do their charging primarily at home, where the cost per kilowatt-hour for residential energy is much lower than the inflated cost to refill the battery at a public fast-charger. (Even California’s high cost for home electricity amounts to just half of what some EV fast-chargers cost during afternoon and evening times of peak demand.) But there’s no way to beat the system entirely. Drive a giant, electron-guzzling EV and you’ll be much more vulnerable to a spike in electricity prices.
And it’s not just the cost of recharging a battery — size also matters a lot for the up-front cost of the EV. Americans have become accustomed to paying a premium for larger vehicles, but for combustion cars, this is simply a market phenomenon. It doesn’t cost that much more to build a crossover instead of a sedan, or to give a vehicle a bigger gas tank. The car companies know you’ll pay thousands more for a Toyota RAV4 than for a Corolla. With electric vehicles, however, you’re paying for size in a much more direct fashion. That huge battery needed to move a Rivian is simply much more expensive to build than the one in a Chevy Bolt.
Carmakers are now confronting this problem as they try to crack the affordable EV problem. A subtle detail in Ford’s big announcement last week that it would build a $30,000 mid-size electric pickup is that the vehicle would have a battery perhaps half as big as the one in the F-150 Lightning EV and four times smaller than the biggest one you can get with Chevy’s Silverado EV.
Building a truck with a relatively small battery will undoubtedly slash costs compared to the monster units we’ve seen in full-size electric pickups. It also means that Ford will have to be especially conscious of the vehicle’s weight to maximize the range that can be squeezed out of those few kilowatt-hours. Until battery production costs tumble, that is the way to the more-affordable EV — do more with less.
On COP30 jitters, a coal mega-merger gone bust, and NYC airport workers get heated
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is lashing Virginia Beach with winds up to 80 miles per hour, the Mid-Atlantic with light rain, and New York City with deadly riptides • Europe’s wildfires have now burned more land than any blazes in two decades • Catastrophic floods have killed more than 300 in Pakistan and at least 50 in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Offshore oil rigs in California. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Two weeks after de-designating millions of acres of federal waters to offshore wind development, the Trump administration Tuesday set a new schedule for auctions of oil-and-gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet, stretching all the way out to 2040. In a press release, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum cited the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a “landmark step toward unleashing America’s energy potential” by “putting in place a bold, long-term program that strengthens American Energy Dominance, creates good-paying jobs and ensure we continue to responsibly develop our offshore resources.”
The lease plan may violate federal law, however, as the administration has not conducted environmental analyses or held public hearings before putting the auctions on the calendar. “There’s no world in which we will allow the Trump Administration to hold dozens of oil sales in public waters, putting Americans, wildlife, and the planet in harm’s way, without abiding by the law,” Brettny Hardy, an oceans attorney at the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a statement. “Even with its passage of the worst environmental bill in U.S. history, the Republican-led Congress did not exempt these offshore oil sales from needing to comply with our nation’s environmental statutes.”
In an open letter published Tuesday, André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat leading the next United Nations climate summit, warned that “geopolitical and economic obstacles are raising new challenges to international cooperation — including under the climate regime.” The letter comes after UN-sponsored talks over a plastics treaty collapsed last week, with the U.S. joining fellow oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in standing athwart more than 100 other countries that supported a deal to curb production of new disposable plastics.
The climate summit, known as COP30, is set to take place in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém in November. It will be the first global climate confab since President Donald Trump returned to office and, on his first day back in the White House, kicked off the process to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate deal.
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Peabody Energy backed out of its $3.8 billion agreement to buy Anglo American’s coal mines following the unexpected closure of the deal’s flagship mine. On Tuesday, the largest U.S. coal producer said that an explosion last March at Anglo America’s Moranbah North mine in Australia resulted in a “material adverse change” to its deal. The move dealt a major blow to London-based Anglo American, which had planned to use the sale as part of a broader restructuring to fend off a hostile takeover attempt by rival BHP. Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad said he was “very disappointed,” according to the Financial Times, and the company said it would “seek damages for the wrongful termination.”
The deal comes amid a global comeback for the main fuel blamed for climate change. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “the evidence for coal’s stubborn persistence globally has been mounting for years. In 2021, the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2024, annual coal demand would hit an all-time high of just over 8,000 megatons. In 2024, it reported that coal demand in 2023 was already at 8,690 megatons, a new record; it also pushed out its prediction for a demand plateau to 2027, at which point it predicted annual demand would be 8,870 megatons.”
The California startup ChemFinity got a big boost on Tuesday, raising $7 million in a funding round led by At One Ventures and Overton Ventures. The company, spun out from the University of California, Berkeley, claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner and 10 times faster than existing approaches currently found in the mining and recycling industries. “We basically act like a black box where recyclers or scrap yards or even other refiners can send their feedstock to us,” Adam Uliana, ChemFinity’s co-founder and CEO, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”
At a time when record heat is regularly halting flights on sweltering tarmacs, service workers at New York City’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports are slated to protest on Wednesday to demand new workplace protections from extreme heat. The workers, many of whom handle cargo and ramp services for major airlines, said in a press release that extreme heat and lack of access to water, rest breaks, and proper training threatened more incidents of heat illness. One worker claimed to have recently lost consciousness inside the cargo hold of a plane due to heat. The members of chapter 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union will be joined by State Assemblymembers Steven Raga and Catalina Cruz in their demonstration, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. near LaGuardia’s Old Marine Terminal.
I swear by the shvitz. My great grandfather, after whom I’m named, went to the same Russian bathhouse in Manhattan that my cousin, brother, and I visit regularly to enjoy the sauna and cold plunge. Turns out amphibians feel the same. A researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney found that frogs could fight off the deadly chytrid fungal infection plaguing the green and golden bell frog by sitting in “frog saunas.” Spending a few hours a day in warm enclosures that reach temperatures higher than 83 degrees Fahrenheit for a week or less is all that’s needed to kill off the fungus.
Rob and Jesse quiz Mark Rothleder, chief operations officer at the California Independent System Operator.
So far on Shift Key Summer School we’ve covered how electricity gets made and how it gets sold. But none of that matters without the grid, which is how that electricity gets to you, the consumer. Who actually keeps the grid running? And what decisions did they make an hour ago, a day ago, a week ago, five years ago to make sure that it would still be running right this second?
This week on Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Mark Rothleder, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the California Independent System Operator, which manages about 80% of the state’s electricity flow. As the longest-serving employee at CAISO , he’s full of institutional knowledge. How does he manage the resource mix throughout the day? What happens in a blackout? And how do you pronounce CAISO in the first place?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: To make this a little bit more concrete, walk through how you’re orchestrating the generation fleet. What is the typical mix of resources that you’re calling on at different times of day, on a typical California day. Let’s start at 8:00 a.m. and, you know, move through the day.
Mark Rothleder: So if it’s like today, it’s a moderate summer day, there would be in the. There would be some thermal resources, gas resources that would already be on, probably near their minimum load, which is probably about 30%, 40% of their full operating capability. And they would be sitting there waiting for dispatch instructions as the load increased.
And I talk about the morning because people start turning lights on. This is when the load starts to increase, in that morning hour. So to balance the system as that load increases relatively quickly, you’re going to have a combination of probably solar starting to come up and produce, naturally, because the sun is coming out. You may have a little bit of wind production starting to increase because the wind’s starting to blow because the temperatures and the system are driving that wind. If that’s not enough energy, we’re dispatching probably thermal resources, probably doing some exchanges through the Western Energy Imbalance Market with the neighbors.
And then you get to about probably 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock ,and things stabilize. And then what ends up happening, at least in our system, is you start to see solar production continue to go up, but the load is not increasing. It’s kind of flattened out. We start to probably see some backing off of thermal resources that were brought up during that morning load pull. And now we’re starting to back off on those, and maybe even getting to the point where surplus energy in the middle of the day — we’re exchanging and maybe exporting some of our energy to our neighbors because we have surplus. We’re probably starting to see batteries charge up in the middle of the day because now we’ve got this cheap energy. And this is going to probably go on until about 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock in the afternoon, when the traditional peak of the day is, and this is when the highest gross load is.
And then we start to see another dynamic happen, and that is, at least in our system, the sun starts to set and then the solar production starts to decrease. What’s interesting about that is, as the solar production decreases, it happens over about a three-, four-hour period, and it’s a relatively fast ramp out of those solar resources. The load is not dropping. And in fact, if you think about —
Jenkins: It’s rising often, right?
Rothleder: It’s actually still rising because some of the load that was previously served by behind the meter rooftop solar, that load is also coming back on the system because the solar production is decreasing. So again, to rebalance the system and keep that balanced and straight, we have to start ramping up a couple things. We start to turn, maybe, what was exports around, and we start importing energy from our neighbors. We start discharging the batteries that we just charged up earlier. And to the extent we still need other energy, we probably have a combination of thermal gas resources that we’re bringing them off their minimum load, dispatching them up during the day, and probably some hydro resources that are able to be dispatched during the day.
Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. we hit what we call our net peak. We call it net peak because it’s the gross load minus wind and solar production. And that tends to be the most critical time when we need — since the ramp out of wind and solar, more solar, that kind of is the highest where we need other resources to be available and dispatched. And so once we get through that net peak, come around 6:30, 7 o’clock, things just start to gradually turn around. And then we’re ramping out over the rest of the day the thermal resources, the interchange, and the hydro resources that we previously dispatched up to get to that net peak. And this all starts over again the next morning.
Mentioned:
Jesse’s slides on long-run equilibrium and electricity markets
Shift Key Summer School episodes 1, 2, 3, and 4
Also on Shift Key: Spain’s Blackout and the Miracle of the Modern Power Grid
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.