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It will be the most expensive $25,000 you ever spend.
I’ve been saying lately that a tipping point for EVs will be the electric family crossover that can compete on price with the emperors of suburbia, the ubiquitous Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4, which both start around $30,000. Suddenly, there is one. Although I cannot in good faith recommend it.
The troubled electric vehicle startup Fisker has slashed the price of its basic Ocean EV to just $24,999 in a desperate bid to sell enough vehicles to stave off bankruptcy. The Ocean is now the cheapest EV on the American market. The high-end Ocean Extreme, with a dual motor setup and zero-to-60 time under four seconds, has been discounted from $61,499 to just $37,499.
Fisker might sell a few of these EVs to buyers looking for an offer they can’t refuse, and those sales might keep the lights on a little longer for a company that was recently shamed by historically bad reviews and delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. But all the signs say the flashy electric vehicle startup will run out of juice at any moment.
This wasn’t Henrik Fisker’s first try. Back in 2007, the Danish car designer who made his name at legacy carmakers founded Fisker Automotive, a company that would produce the fish-mouthed Fisker Karma. That car was a luxury take on the range-extended EV, or a vehicle that uses an on-board gas-powered generator to refill the batteries, thus extending its range.
Karma had the looks. Many auto enthusiasts at the time heralded its design. (The car chaps at Top Gear loved it.) Fisker teased future models that would position it as a rival to Tesla, which was still selling small numbers in the days before the Models 3 and Y. But the company didn’t have the follow-through. A series of setbacks, including the bankruptcy of its battery supplier, sent Fisker Automotive on the road to bankruptcy.
Lapses in quality control didn’t help. In 2012, the Karma delivered to Consumer Reports for its car testing program broke down upon arrival, requiring a battery replacement before the car could be driven. It earned a failing grade because of “numerous shortcomings, not just a single or even few flaws.” While Fisker the company bit the dust in 2013, Fisker the man would carry on — though saddled with a reputation as a dreamer who, to put it generously, did not have the attention to detail for a startup company to succeed.
Things looked rosier for Fisker, Inc., the second-chance company he launched in 2016. Instead of an over-engineered range-extended plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, he announced a plain old EV. The Ocean promised whiz-bang features such as a roof lined with solar panels, two-way charging, and “California Mode” — a single button that opened all the glass panels, allowing the sea breeze to waft through the car as it cruised down the Pacific Coast Highway. Underneath the tech hype, though, was a simple proposition: a mid-size crossover EV listed at a price competitive with others in that popular category.
Once again, trouble found Fisker when the car got closer to reality. The new company went public in 2020, but according to Fortune, “a slew of software, supply chain and regulatory problems” prevented Fisker from moving the first Oceans until 2023. It delivered fewer than 5,000 of the EVs last year, despite building more than 10,000 of them.
Then came the testing. YouTube super-reviewer Marques Brownlee titled his video about the Ocean, “This Is the Worst Car I’ve Ever Reviewed” and spent 20 solid minutes outlining the weirdness of his driving experience, including the company asking him to hold off reviewing the car until it could rush out a software update. More than a decade after its disastrous experience with the Karma, Consumer Reports reported that the Fisker Ocean was “unfinished,” with a “bizarre delivery experience” and “disappearing safety features.”
This disastrous narrative arrived alongside reports of Fisker’s financial ruin. Fisker suspended production of the Ocean and tried to raise $150 million to keep the startup afloat, however a rumored last-second deal with Nissan fell apart and now, despite Henrik Fisker’s promise to press on, it appears the company has no clear lifeline to stave off oblivion.
Given the relatively high cost of current EVs, some buyers might be tempted by the fire-sale Fiskers. As The Autopian says, “the Fisker Ocean is a good car when it’s functional,” and if the company can manage to push out a software update, then perhaps it will be functional more often than not. The 231-mile range of the base model isn’t impressive by 2024 standards, but the Ocean Extreme’s reported 360-mile range is a steal at its steeply discounted price.
Still: This is a capital case of caveat emptor. Given Fisker’s long history of poor build quality and software bugs, it’d be a big risk to pony up even the clearance sale price of an Ocean. Not to mention the huge uncertainty of living with one. It can be hard enough to schedule service for a Tesla; now imagine trying to deal with hardware for software problems for an orphan EV whose company bit the dust.
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.