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Maybe the PHEV really is the starter EV America needs.
When my sister’s long-lived Scion met a sudden, destructive end last month, she was ready to take the leap into electric. She tried one plug-in hybrid she could find in Topeka, Kansas — an old Chevy Volt — before rejecting it in favor of a gently used Nissan Leaf.
Across town, my parents had been car-shopping, too. And while they thought about a plug-in hybrid as a way to dip their toes into electrification, they found only one on the nearby lots — a used car the dealer tried to sell above MSRP because, well, they could. Mom and dad wound up with a traditional hybrid Hyundai crossover instead.
Such struggles are no surprise. The PHEV has become an uncommon sight as most automakers have introduced fully electrified vehicles and, increasingly, left the plug-in hybrid behind. However, as full EVs have run into headwinds, the PHEV might be due for a comeback. Five years after giving up on plug-in hybrids to go all-electric, General Motors now says it will start making them again.
This is good news for a country that, frankly, needs a starter EV.
I admit it: Five years ago, when GM ditched hybrids to go fully electric, I was glad. Yes, the Chevy Volt had shifted lots of people to electrified driving. But the plug-in hybrid is a paragon of “jack of all trades, master of none.”
With electric car components jammed in alongside its traditional hoses and belts, a PHEV is never going to be a great gasoline car. And because it must contain all the parts for petroleum propulsion, a plug-in hybrid can fit only a small battery with a limited range. The new Toyota Prius Prime PHEV can deliver up to 44 miles of electric driving, and that meager figure is a major leap from the around 25 miles of the previous model. The soon-to-be-axed Subaru Crosstrek PHEV delivers only 17 all-electric miles, and costs thousands more than a normal gas version.
From a climate perspective, PHEVs also looked like an easy way out for carmakers who should have been fully electrifying their lineups instead — a way for brands like Toyota to call their cars “electrified” without actually building battery EVs. It was a half-measure, a “stepping stone,” in a world that needs to completely turn over its car fleet.
For drivers, though, the core argument for the PHEV has always been a compelling one. Its battery range is limited, yes, but the electric miles are probably enough to accomplish a commute or local errands. Local electric driving drastically cuts one’s gasoline budget. On longer trips, there’s no need for the range anxiety that comes with a true EV since the gas engine has your back.
Yet PHEVs struggled to catch on fully during their first wave. A decade ago, when precious few mainstream EVs were on sale, plug-in hybrids accounted for about half of electrified U.S. car sales. About five years ago, when mass-market EVs like the Tesla Model 3 and Y arrived — and the Chevy Volt departed the scene — things changed. By 2023, PHEVs made up only 20 percent, meaning Americans bought four times as many pure EVs as plug-in hybrids.
Perhaps the America of five years ago simply was not yet familiar enough with electric driving to understand the benefits a plug-in hybrid could deliver. Buyers who were truly bullish on electric, like me, jumped right past the hybrid and bought a full EV. The fact that plug-in hybrids cost a lot more while delivering a pittance of electric miles didn’t help.
But that was then. In 2024, the legacy car companies sound far less enthusiastic about their plans to electrify completely. While EV demand is not cratering, as some apocalyptic headlines would suggest, it is possible that electric cars are entering a holding pattern, or at least a gap year or two. Drivers willing to buy a pricey new EV have mostly done so. Millions more are biding their time, waiting for better charging infrastructure where they live, a wave of truly affordable EVs, or some other factor to push them toward pure electric.
These people need a starter EV — something to get their feet wet in electrified driving that isn’t a $40,000 new car. Now that a handful of decent electrics have been on the market for several years, a used full EV could fill that role. That’s especially true for families that have a combustion vehicle or hybrid as their other car, and can drive a used Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf around town without having to worry so much about its diminishing battery.
Still, most Americans want their car to do everything, including a long road trip if necessary. They should consider the PHEV. In parts of the country without a lot of charging infrastructure, the plug-in hybrid would make an ideal beginner EV, given the security of the gas engine to ease one’s range anxiety.
But with the automakers having gone full electric in the past few years, plug-in hybrids are few and far between. Toyota, which has been dragging its feet about pure EVs, makes plug-in hybrid versions of the RAV4 and the Prius. The Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid is Jeep’s signature electrified effort so far. BMW, Kia, Hyundai, and others offer PHEV variants of some of their vehicles (though that’s no guarantee you’ll find the one you want at your local dealership, given their niche status.) PHEV sales lag behind both ordinary hybrids and full electric vehicles.
With General Motors ready to revive its plug-in hybrid line, perhaps the technology is due to catch its second wind just as weary buyers look for a more comfortable way to start driving on electrons. As with full battery EVs, it comes down to price and range. If Chevy can cook up a Volt 2.0 that impresses on both fronts, then the PHEV may finally find its footing in the U.S.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.