You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”