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Americans want a variety ... of crossovers.
America’s electric car market has a new champion. The automaking alliance of Hyundai Motor Group and Kia Motors is now the second biggest seller of electric cars in the United States, according to new data released last week by Bloomberg BNEF.
The two companies sold more than 117,000 electric vehicles in the United States last year, or about 8% of all new EVs nationwide, according to the research firm. Only Tesla, the industry’s longtime leader, sold more electric cars: It still commands about half of U.S. market share.
The two companies’ success is an encouraging sign in what was more broadly a weird year for the EV market. Scarcely more than a year ago, the public’s demand for electric cars overwhelmed available inventory, and dealers were selling every EV they could get their hands on.
But as gas prices have fallen, the growth in EV sales in the United States has slowed, and the market has gotten more uneven. Tesla, looking to shore up its market position, launched a price war last year that juiced sales but cut deep into its profits. Ford and General Motors, meanwhile, are suffering anemic sales and cutting back on their short-term EV plans.
Amid this patchy landscape, Hyundai and Kia’s growth stands out. While the two companies are technically independent, Hyundai owns about a third of Kia Motors, and they collaborate on vehicle design, engineering, and manufacturing. They also use the same vehicle “platforms,” a common set of parts that can be used across models.
Since the news came out last week, I’ve seen climate people on Twitter and elsewhere try to explain why it’s happening. Many of these explanations conform to the views that the urban, progressive climate commentariat already hold about the car market. Look, Hyundai and Kia are winning because they’re making smaller cars, not behemoth SUVs.
But the answer, while not quite the opposite, doesn’t line up with what many might wish. In fact, Hyundai and Kia are dominating the EV market right now by churning out a mostly unbroken stream of crossover and SUVs. All but one of their electric cars qualifies as an SUV or crossover; all of their plug-in hybrids are SUVs. It is this commitment to repetition — to giving the consumer a lot of choices on a central theme — that sets their product lines apart right now.
You can see the importance of this by looking at their models in more depth. Take the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Kia EV6, for instance, which have led EV sales at the two brands and which are built on the same platform. Each is an electrified take on the type of car that, for years now, Americans haven’t been able to get enough of: the compact crossover SUV. The Ioniq 5 and EV6 each have two rows of seating and 25 cubic feet of trunk space. They drive more or less like a car, sit high on the road like an SUV, and fall in the broad category of cars that — as a friend’s wife puts it — looks like a fist with its thumb stuck out.
The Ioniq 5 and EV6 are also really, really similar to the Mustang Mach E, Ford’s attempt at an electric crossover. In fact, if you look only at specs, they’re basically the same car. All three have the same length and width and take up about 95 square feet of road space. All three have five seats. All three have roughly the same size trunk, although the Ford’s is maybe slightly bigger. And all three have an entry-level model starting at about $42,000 — although the lowest trim Ford has slightly more range and horsepower, and costs about a grand more.
As you might expect from those specs, the Mach E narrowly outsold the Ioniq 5 and EV6 in the United States last year. Ford sold more than 40,000 Mach Es in 2023, while Hyundai moved nearly 34,000 Ioniq 5s and Kia sold 19,000 EV6s. But here’s the thing: The Mach E did not outsell the Ioniq 5 and EV6 combined. And unlike Ford, which only sells one electric SUV, Hyundai and Kia continued to flood the zone with SUV options for consumers.
How many options? Hyundai sold plug-in versions of its Tuscon and Santa Fe SUVs. Kia sold an electric version of its subcompact Niro SUV and a plug-in hybrid version of its Sportage SUV. And even though Kia only started selling its new three-row SUV, the EV9, in December, it had already delivered more than 1,000 of them by the end of the year.
In fact, only one electric car from Hyundai-Kia — the new Ioniq 6 — was designed like a traditional sedan. But it made up only around 8% of the alliance’s total sales. Hyundai and Kia achieved their commanding position by giving Americans what they want: a seemingly endless stream of SUVs and crossovers.
Now, it matters here that Kia and Hyundai are two different companies, so there is some automatic duplication in their product lines. It might never make sense for Ford or GM to sell cars as similar as the EV6 and Ioniq 5. But if we’re being honest, their SUV lineups are already pretty duplicative: Do most consumers understand the difference between a Ford Edge and a Ford Escape? There’s no reason Ford couldn’t add an Escape EV to its lineup — something a little smaller and a little cheaper. That’s exactly what Kia does with the EV Niro, after all.
It helps, too, that lots of Kia and Hyundai’s cars look like great deals for consumers. Many of their key offerings hover in the high $30,000s to mid $40,000s, seemingly the sweet spot for new family cars today. Even though Hyundai and Kia’s cars don’t qualify for the new EV tax credit, Americans can use the $7,500 federal tax credit if they lease a vehicle instead.
Hyundai especially has used this credit — and a creative mix of rebates and low-interest-rate offers — to bring down the monthly payment for consumers. (Nearly half of new Ioniq 5s are leased, according to BNEF, which is a much higher rate than normal for Hyundai’s cars.)
Finally, it helps that Kia and especially Hyundai are making more interesting-looking vehicles than any other automaker right now. Compared to the staid peoplemover that is, say, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Ioniq 5 is striking, novel, and seems to push EV design forward. Its pixelated taillights are unlike anything else on the road, and it’s an extremely charismatic vehicle to drive; it’s just a better product, overall, than other cars out there.
And that might be the most important lesson behind Hyundai and Kia’s success. For the past few decades, decarbonization advocates have gotten used to thinking about electric cars primarily as a market abstraction: Are they cheap? Are they available? Are they growing as a sector? But as the EV transition continues, we are going to have to think about them more as products, as specific tools that can improve someone’s life by their presence. The EV companies that ultimately win will make better products than their competitors — cars that bring together capability, design, and price in a special way. Right now, Hyundai and Kia are pushing to the front of that race.
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That’s okay for clean energy firms, terrible for manufacturers, and a big risk for everyone.
Over the past few months, you could put together three different — and somewhat conflicting — pictures of the American economy.
For companies exposed to the AI boom, business has been good — excellent, even. The surge in ongoing capital investment into data centers and electricity has been larger than other recent booms, such as the telecom buildout. Electricity demand is soaring, especially in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic. Technology companies have signed power offtake deals with nuclear and hydroelectricity companies. If anything, companies exposed to artificial intelligence are more afflicted by congested supply chains and shortages than by slack demand — see the yearslong waiting lists to get a new transformer or natural gas turbine.
Outside of the AI economy, though, the economy has been a fair bit colder. You might even say it’s been frozen by indecision. When you talk to business leaders, they confess confusion about where things are heading. President Trump’s constantly changing tariffs — and his administration’s mercurial policy shifts — have made it difficult for non-AI-exposed businesses to plan long-term capital investment.
You could hear this view from clean energy manufacturing and traditional fossil firms alike. When I talked to John Henry Harris, the CEO of the medium-duty truck maker Harbinger Motors, for an episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast in June, he told me that his company was just about to shift a production process to Mexico when a last-minute Trump change made it cheaper to keep it in China. Meanwhile, an oil and gas executive recently told the Dallas Federal Reserve: “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”
But the data contradicted that tepid view. This was the third picture that we were getting of the economy. Through the summer, federal surveys showed an economy that was performing okay. In May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs; it gained another 147,000 jobs, apparently, in June. The AI boom was clearly contributing to those robust reports. But how could an economy that business leaders otherwise described as difficult be going so well?
Now we can finally square these disparate pictures.
On Friday, the federal government released its newest tranche of job numbers. The headline number was mediocre — the U.S. added a mere 73,000 jobs in July — but the guts of the report were worse. The government revised down its estimate of the May and June reports by a total of 258,000 jobs. With these new numbers in hand, it’s clear that the labor market has essentially stalled out since Liberation Day in April.
The unemployment rate slightly rose to 4.2%, which was in line with what economists predicted.
These new reports clarify that the broader American economy wasn’t actually thriving. Its summer strength was a mirage the whole time. Outside of AI, things are downright frigid. And as President Trump continues to shuffle tariffs and increase trade uncertainty, we can expect conditions to worsen. Trump seems hellbent even on clouding our ability to understand the underlying economy: on Friday afternoon, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, a career civil servant.
If you squint, you can see a hazy “AI sector” versus “non-AI sector” distinction in the data, even among the energy and decarbonization companies we cover at Heatmap. But it’s not obvious. Contrary to what you might expect when power demand is surging, utility employment was basically flat last month. Heavy and civil engineering construction jobs were up by 6,000, and “nonresidential specialty trade contractors” — a category that can include electricians — gained nearly 2,000 jobs.
But manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs last month, with the motor vehicles industry driving 2,600 of those losses. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas jobs were down. The Institute of Supply Management report, a private survey of U.S. manufacturing activity, showed the sector shrank in July for the fifth month in a row.
And even though the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred buyout program for more than 150,000 people has yet to hit, the federal government bled 12,000 jobs.
In a way, the clean energy industry — or at least solar, battery, nuclear, and geothermal developers — might consider themselves lucky. Despite the best efforts of Trump’s officials, and despite the chaos of President Trump’s policies, they have been able to eke through the past few months because of the AI boom. Nearly 70% of all new power-generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of this year came from solar panels, and the government has thrown its weight behind next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies. A tepid jobs report might even bring some interest rate relief from the Federal Reserve.
But if that AI boom slows down, we should all watch out below.
A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.