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Can Musk pull another market miracle out of his MAGA hat?
It’s long been clear that Elon Musk’s primary talent is not dreaming up electric cars, reusable rockets, or tunnel-boring machines. It is reshaping reality in a way that always seems to keep Tesla’s stock price high, which made him the world’s richest man.
That stock price has been taking a beating of late. A groundswell of Tesla resentment has arisen since Musk hitched his wagon to Donald Trump and began dismantling the American government. Public rage has taken the form of protests, vandalized Superchargers, and, most importantly to the man himself, sliding sales of Tesla vehicles. All of this has combined to send the company’s market value tumbling this year, to the delight of Musk-haters everywhere eager to see his net worth implode. Its share price has fallen more than 5% today alone.
Even so, Musk carries on as Trump’s right-hand man as if his fortunes are immune from Tesla’s ups and downs. Could this time be different?
Tesla saw plenty of dark times during its march to EV dominance, such as the notorious “manufacturing hell” needed to bring the Model 3 to fruition. Likewise, there have been plenty of times when Tesla’s soaring stock valuation appeared to be untethered from its business reality — it became the world’s most valuable automaker while building only a tiny fraction as many cars as Toyota or General Motors.
The difference in those days was that Tesla — current profits and losses aside — was clearly on the rise. Overcoming that manufacturing problem, for example, allowed the EV-maker to build lots and lots of Model 3s and Model Ys and put it on the path to worldwide electric car dominance. Today that upward trajectory is not so clear. Tesla sales in the U.S. plateaued last year even before Elon’s misadventures with MAGA. This year, sales in Europe and Australia are in freefall, seemingly in response to Musk’s embrace of the far right. Tesla is down 71% this quarter in Germany and Australia.
It would be easier for Tesla to cast this dip as a blip if something new and exciting were waiting right over the horizon. But the only new vehicle to arrive since 2020 is the Cybertruck, the metallic embodiment of Musk’s conversion on the road to Mar-a-Lago. The brand’s biggest hope for improving sales is the recently revealed redesign of the Model Y, code-named “Juniper,” which follows a similar update to the Model 3.
The company’s future is pegged not to any new EV with widespread appeal, but rather to the notion that Tesla will solve autonomous driving and dominate the next automotive era with its Cybercab and similar self-driving vehicles. Whether Musk will actually win the future is beside the point. What it achieves in the present is freeing Musk from being judged on hard sales numbers like an ordinary car company CEO and keeping him in the character of visionary innovator, able to keep his stock price afloat through his own genius.
That doesn’t mean Musk can dismiss the power of dollars and cents with a wave of his hand. Investors are once again furious with the CEO for taking a ketamine-powered journey into the abyss rather than trying to build Tesla’s business in a practical way. And even if he can keep their anger at bay, a sales tumble really is a multi-pronged problem for Tesla.
For one thing, Musk’s political machinations have cost him all the market gains he earned via Trump’s electoral victory. Tesla’s valuation soared from around $800 billion to $1.5 trillion in December, when it became clear the CEO would become the president-elect’s right hand man. Since that moment, the company’s value has fallen by more than $600 million, effectively erasing the bump in Tesla’s market cap.
Still, Tesla — and Musk by extension — remains incredibly valuable. The carmaker’s true concern is that a big drop in sales could be a double-whammy for Tesla revenue. Recall that the company’s most reliable revenue stream is not really its sales of electric cars, but rather the carbon credits generated by those EVs under California’s auto emissions regulatory scheme, which it can sell to other automakers who’ve yet to meet their emissions targets. Even as Tesla’s reputation foundered in 2024, its revenue stream from selling credits reached $2.76 billion, up 50% from 2023.
That stream of free money helps to stabilize Tesla’s balance sheet in times of trouble. It is not inevitable. If automakers like Stellantis got their act together and started to sell a high volume of low-emissions vehicles, they’d need to buy fewer credits from Tesla. Tesla’s tumbling sales in the wake of Musk’s antics could reduce the amount of credits it could sell to others, since the credits are tied to sales of low-emissions vehicles. And it’s not out of the question that Musk’s political ally, President Trump, could attack the carbon market as part of his offensive against EVs, which could eliminate this revenue stream for Tesla. (If this seems unlikely, consider that Musk pursued this alliance knowing full well that Trump campaigned on eliminating federal tax credits for EVs that benefit Tesla buyers.)
Even with this dire financial picture, it’d be foolish to bet against Musk. The man has overcome more harrowing market conditions — and that was before America’s unelected chief consultant managed to entrench himself as Hand of the King. But seeing his supply of easy money wither because of his political stances might be just the thing to hit the man where it hurts.
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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.”