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Sleekness to the rescue.
If there’s one thing Americans want from an electric vehicle, it’s range. Consumers regularly cite the distance an EV can travel before recharging as one of their biggest hang-ups about the transition away from gas cars. And yet longer range EVs come at an environmental cost, thanks to bigger batteries. Some have surveyed this sad situation and concluded that Americans need to settle for less range.
But what if we didn’t have to settle? As the Hyundai Ioniq 6 shows, it’s possible to go really far on an average battery.
Electric vehicles in the United States have become dominated by crossovers and SUVs, just like their gas-powered counterparts. These mega-sized, mega-powered, luxury behemoths are fast and technically impressive, and they have certainly helped entice people to embrace electrification. But they can seem incredibly silly when viewed through the lens of why we’re going electric in the first place.
Now, the Ioniq 6’s isn’t necessarily immune to that critique. Like its sister model, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Hyundai’s styling department did a good job disguising the vehicle’s physical girth, because the Ioniq 6 isn’t really all that small. Park the Ioniq 6 next to any traditional sedan or hatchback from not that long ago, like say, a Toyota Prius, and the Ioniq 6 towers over it. The Ioniq 6’s sedan body may stand out in the sea of electrified crossovers and SUVs, but its 4,200-pound as-tested curb weight puts it in the same ballpark as them.
However, we can’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and the Ioniq 6 is very, very good. A week with the Ioniq 6 showed me exactly how good it really is.
The 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6 uses a common vehicle architecture, called E-GMP, shared with sister brands Genesis and Kia. This purpose-built, electric-only architecture is found under the Kia EV6, Genesis GV60, and SUV (or hatchback, depending on who you ask) Hyundai Ioniq 5. It will form the basis of many other Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis EVs in the near future, like the Kia EV9. The platform is modular, allowing for a bevy of electric motor outputs, battery sizes, and wheelbase lengths to accommodate varying types of vehicles. But, the Ioniq 6 stands out from its SUV-shaped mechanical cousins by having the best battery-to-range ratio of them all, partially because of its slippery sedan shape.
In the SE Long Range, single-motor rear-wheel-drive, with 18-inch wheels with aero wheel covers, the Ioniq 6 is rated for 361 miles of range. This all comes from a relatively svelte 77.4 kWh (74 usable) battery – that’s about 60 miles more than the Ioniq 5 in similar specifications with the same sized battery. In fact, the Ioniq 6 is the most efficient vehicle on sale in the U.S., edging out the Lucid Air Grand Touring.
The Ioniq 6 accomplishes this feat by focusing hard on aerodynamics. With a drag coefficient of 0.21, the Ioniq 6 is one of the most aerodynamic cars in the world; its low drag shape means it uses a lot less energy to cut through the air. Even in Hyundai’s own stable, the boxy Ioniq 5 with its 0.29 drag coefficient can only manage 303 miles of range with the same motor and battery as the Ioniq 6.
Now, manufacturers may advertise all sorts of numbers, but achieving them in real-world driving, especially freeway driving, isn’t always that easy. To get the 361-mile range that Hyundai advertises on the Ioniq 6, I would need to average 4.87 miles per kilowatt hour. That is a very tall order. Most of the EVs I’ve driven have struggled to break the 4-mile-per-kilowatt-hour barrier, including the supposedly hyper-efficient Lucid Air.
But the Ioniq 6’s real-world efficiency impressed me. Even with the air conditioning on, in 85 to 90-degree weather, the Ioniq 6 could touch as high as 6 miles per kilowatt hour under stop-and-go short trips. Under one long journey, averaging 70 MPH with the air conditioning set to 72 degrees, the Ioniq 6 averaged 4.6 miles per kWh. At that rate, the Ioniq 6 was on track to travel 340 miles on a full charge, or about 94% of the Ioniq 6’s claimed range – all done on the freeway. These efficiency numbers mean the Ioniq 6 could easily do a 5-hour freeway drive, without stopping. From my perspective, Hyundai has succeeded in creating an EV that has compromised little to nothing compared to a gas-powered vehicle.
That strong on-road, real-world efficiency begs the question: What if the Ioniq 6 was smaller and lighter? Could we get the same range with an even smaller battery? Or, at the very least, what if more automakers adopted the Ioniq 6’s streamlined ethos? Instead of big mega SUVs that cost six figures and need 200 kWh to go 450 miles, we’d have sleek sedans and hatchbacks that go plenty far on a battery that’s a third of the size or less.
The Ioniq 6 may not be perfect, but it does suggest that one day, we might be able to drive more sustainably — while still going super far.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …