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Revoy is already hitching its power packs to semis in one of America’s busiest shipping corridors.
Battery swaps used to be the future. To solve the unsolvable problem of long recharging times for electric vehicles, some innovators at the dawn of this EV age imagined roadside stops where drivers would trade their depleted battery for a fully charged one in a matter of minutes, then be on their merry way.
That vision didn’t work out for passenger EVs — the industry chose DC fast charging instead. If the startup Revoy has its way, however, this kind of idea might be exactly the thing that helps the trucking industry surmount its huge hurdles to using electric power.
Revoy’s creation is, essentially, a bonus battery pack on wheels that turns an ordinary semi into an EV for as long as the battery lasts. The rolling module carries a 525 kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack attaches to the back of the truck; then, the trailer full of cargo attaches to the module. The pack offers a typical truck 250 miles of electric driving. Founder Ian Rust told me that’s just enough energy to reach the next Revoy station, where the trucker could swap their depleted module for a fresh one. And if the battery hits zero charge, that's no problem because the truck reverts to its diesel engine. It’s a little like a plug-in hybrid vehicle, if the PHEV towed its battery pack like an Airstream and could drop it off at will.
“If you run out of battery with us, there's basically no range anxiety,” Rust said. “And we do it intentionally on our routes, run it down to as close to zero as possible before we hit the next Revoy swapping station. That way you can get the maximum value of the battery without having to worry about range.”
To start, a trucker in a normal, everyday semi pulls up to a Revoy station and drops their trailer. A worker attaches a fully charged Revoy unit to the truck and trailer—all in five minutes or less, Revoy promises. Once in place, the unit interfaces seamlessly with the truck’s drivetrain and controls.
“It basically takes over as the cruise control on the vehicle,” he said. “So the driver gets it up to speed, takes their foot off the gas, and then we actually become the primary powertrain on the vehicle. You really only have to burn diesel for the little bit that is getting onto the highway and then getting off the highway, and you get really extreme MPGs with that.”
The Revoy model is going through its real-world paces as we speak. Rust’s startup has partnered with Ryder trucking, whose drivers are powering their semis with Revoy EVs at battery-swap stops along a stretch of Interstate 30 in Texas and Arkansas, a major highway for auto parts and other supplies coming from Mexico. Rust hopes the next Revoy corridor will go into Washington State, where the ample hydropower could help supply clean energy to all those swappable batteries. Happily, he said, Revoy can expand piecemeal like this because its approach negates the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a whole nation of EV chargers to make the vehicles themselves viable. Once a truck leaves a Revoy corridor, it’s just a diesel-powered truck again.
Early data from the Ryder pilot shows that the EV unit slashed how much diesel fuel a truck needs to make it down the designated corridor. “This is a way we can reduce a path to reduce the emissions of our fleet without having to buy anything — and without having to have to worry about how much utilization we're going to have to get,” Mike Plasencia, group director of New Product Strategy at Ryder, told me.
Trucking represents one of the biggest opportunities for cutting the carbon emissions of the transportation sector. It’s also one of the most challenging. Heatmap has covered the problem of oversized SUV and pickup truck EVs, which need larger, more expensive batteries to propel them. The trucking problem is that issue on steroids: A semi can tow up to 80,000 pounds down an American highway.
There are companies building true EV semi trucks despite this tall order — Tesla’s has been road-testing one while hauling Pepsi around, and trucking mainstays like Peterbilt are trying their hand as well. Although the EV model that works for everyday cars — a built-in battery that requires recharging after a couple hundred miles — can work for short-haul trucks that move freight around a city, it is a difficult fit for long-haul trucking where a driver must cover vast distances on a strict timetable. That’s exactly where Revoy is trying to break in.
"We are really focused on long haul,” he told me. “The reason for that is, it's the bigger market. One of the big misconceptions in trucking is that it's dominated by short haul. It's very much the opposite. And it's the bigger emission source, it's the bigger fuel user."
Rust has a background in robotics and devised the Revoy system as a potential solution to both the high cost of EV semis and to the huge chunks of time lost to fueling during long-distance driving. Another part of the pitch is that the Revoy unit is more than a battery. By employing the regenerative braking common in EVs, the Revoy provides a redundancy beyond air brakes for slowing a big semi—that way, if the air brakes fail, a trucker has a better option than the runaway truck lane. The setup also provides power and active steering to the Revoy’s axle, which Rust told me makes the big rig easier to maneuver.
Plasencia agrees. “The feedback from the drivers has been positive,” he said. “You get feedback messages like, it felt like I was driving a car, or like I wasn't carrying anything.”
As it tries to expand to more trucking corridors across the nation, Revoy may face an uphill battle in trying to sell truckers and trucking companies on an entirely new way to think about electrifying their fleets. But Rust has one ace up his sleeve: With Revoy, they get to keep their trucks — no need to buy new ones.
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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.