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Five years ago, the world met the Model Y. Tesla officially unveiled its smaller crossover in March 2019 and, the next year, began to sell the car in staggering numbers. The Model Y helped Tesla tighten its grip on the electric vehicle market. By 2023 it had displaced the Toyota Corolla as the world’s best-selling car of any kind.
It’s not easy to follow up a massive success. What’s worse is having no plan at all — or being chronically unable to stick to one. That’s where Tesla seems to be amid yet another shakeup at the company.
This week, Tesla announced it would lay off 10% of its worldwide staff, while some influential leaders are leaving of their own accord. The news comes as Tesla has just announced a sales dip and prognosticators wonder whether we’re entering an “EV winter” where more buyers choose hybrids instead. Now, this is neither the first time Tesla has run into difficulty nor the first time the EV maker has commenced mass layoffs to cut costs. Somehow, though, this time feels different.
During the Model’s Y’s ascendance over the past half-decade, Tesla’s path forward to the next thing has turned into a mess of distractions and left turns. Musk became obsessed with and then purchased Twitter, a boondoggle of a deal that clearly distracted him from his car company. The oft-touted Roadster supercar has yet to materialize.
More importantly, the long-promised $25,000 car appears to be dead (or at least tabled indefinitely). Musk had initially indicated the affordable Tesla would finally arrive next year, leaving the company to endure a single gap year without a new vehicle. But Reuters reported that Tesla has killed the idea in part because of competition overseas from ultra-cheap Chinese EVs, and while Musk responded to the report by saying Reuters was “lying,” he’s done nothing to indicate the “Model 2” is anything but dead.
Meanwhile, the only new-ish vehicle in the Tesla lineup, the Cybertruck, is stuck. Tesla stopped deliveries of the steel beast for an unknown issue, rumored to be related to sticky accelerator problems, and shortened production shifts at the factory. And while it’s possible to squint and see a case for the Cybertruck, I’ve written here numerous times that Tesla’s big mistake wasn’t putting that eyesore on the road. Instead, it was focusing the company’s attention on something so adolescent and absurd at a moment when it could have tightened its grip on the EV market, and given American EV drivers some interesting new options, by rolling out new cars that look more like something the average American would want to buy.
So what is Tesla up to? In a follow-up tweet after he attacked Reuters, Musk suddenly announced that he would reveal the company’s “robotaxi” on August 8. This would be Tesla’s completely self-driven vehicle. Musk’s favorite claim about the car is that it would earn its owners passive income by driving itself around, picking up and dropping off passengers as a kind of dystopian Uber.
The dream certainly fits in with Musk’s oeuvre. The CEO clearly still sees Tesla as a lean startup that moves fast and breaks things, not an established car company that would do something so expected and bland as building a perfectly acceptable three-row family crossover to compete with the Kia EV9. Compare that to the way other companies born of Silicon Valley began to act once they got big. Apple may have engaged in a long, fruitless dalliance with the self-driving car, but ultimately, it knows its bread is buttered by iterating on everything in the iPhone ecosystem. Facebook may have changed its name to Meta to highlight its mission to create the metaverse, but it still leaned into the revenue engines it built or acquired, like Instagram or Whatsapp.
It’s fine to tell yourself a story about who you want to be. And to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt for a moment: sure, maybe it will be the one to crack full autonomous driving. But in practical terms, that tech is not close to reality, and Tesla’s version of it has encountered its fair share of bugs and been sued over crashes.
(In the spirit of “robotaxi,” the company just offered a month-long free trial of Full Self Driving to Tesla drivers. I will certainly not be using it with a young child in the car. The brand has also mandated that potential drivers be given a demo of FSD during test-drives, seemingly to hammer home the idea that Tesla is just a few steps away from having the car drive you home while you take a nap.)
In the meantime, you have to wonder just what Tesla is going to sell to humans who want a plain old electric car. It recently completed a refresh for the Model 3, and while the new one looks a little like next year’s iPhone — the same product with a facelift and a couple new features — you’d expect to see a similar update coming to the Model Y.
It’s important to remember: Despite the ill wishes from his online haters, Musk isn’t exactly dead in the water. Tesla sold 220,000 Model 3s in America last year and nearly 400,000 Model Ys, a huge lead over competitor EV from legacy car brands. Those companies are hitting the same EV headwinds as Tesla this year, while golden child Rivian is still at least a couple of years away from selling its exciting smaller SUVs. Tesla is the established giant in electric cars, even as it looks in the mirror and sees an upstart.
Yet with Cybertruck landing with a thud, and no obvious follow-up in the works, Tesla is in danger of blowing that huge lead. It may want to transform into a software company, and to earn back some of Musk’s Iron Man sci-fi cred by realizing the self-driving car. But at this moment, it feels a little like an electric car company that forgot it makes cars.
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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.