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Bad news for Tesla drivers is great news for the energy transition.
It’s a strange sight: Ford F-150 Lightning trucks and Mustang Mach-E crossovers lined up at a Tesla Supercharger, plugged into the familiar red-and-white posts. After years of driving a Model 3, and greeting only other Teslas at our charging stops, I can’t quite get used to the visual. Yet I must, because a new phase of EV charging has arrived.
In the year-plus since Tesla transformed its proprietary plug into an open standard and invited the other automakers to adopt it, they did. Company after company pledged to adopt the renamed North American Charging Standard (which has since been given the technical name J3400) over the tech they’d been using, which would allow their EV customers to use Tesla’s bigger and more reliable network of fast chargers.
This week, Ford, the first company to go all-in with Tesla’s plug, gained access to the Supercharger network. Around 15,000 Tesla chargers will be compatible with Ford EVs and will show up as part of the BlueOval charging network that appears in the cars’ infotainment screens. The Detroit giant is helping out its early adopters by offering free adapters that would normally cost more than $200, at least for now. (Future Fords will be built with the NACS plug and require no dongle). With many more brands to follow Ford’s lead, we’re about to see Supercharger access change America’s charging dynamic in several ways.
For one thing, buying a non-Tesla EV just got more appealing. Loren McDonald, CEO of the analyst website EVAdoption, says horror stories about busted third-party chargers or the lack of sufficient plugs have dissuaded many on-the-fence drivers from going electric. When he asked his own brother-in-law, who wasn’t a total stranger to electrics, about switching to an EV, the reply was: So if I take that road trip across Idaho, I've heard there's no place to charge. And what if I run out of battery? “I think that was really eye-opening for me,” he says.
Tesla, meanwhile, has held a sales advantage thanks to the closed access of Superchargers. Lots of buyers, myself included, bought a Tesla over another EV because its network was vast, fast, and reliable, which made it possible to drive an electric vehicle as the primary or only car. Once Ford EVs (or Rivians, or Chevys, or Hyundais) can use the Tesla network, too, those cars suddenly become more viable options. Just look at Tesla’s updated website and check out all the Supercharger locations suddenly open to other cars with NACS plugs.
It might be annoying for Tesla drivers like me to give up our exclusivity; I’m sure I’ll mutter under my breath the first time I wait for an F-150 to finish charging. But it’s certainly good for electrification at large if expanded plug access gives more people the confidence to go electric.
Tesla, of course, isn’t opening its network out of the goodness of its heart. Even as the company loses its dominant market share in EVs, its triumph in the charging standard wars means that Elon Musk’s company gains new customers who’ll be paying Tesla for electricity. Ford sold more than 70,000 EVs in 2023, for example, all of whom became potential Supercharger users this week. With NACS having succeeded in becoming the industry standard, we’re talking about millions of vehicles around the world ready to buy Tesla’s power.
Those new customers might be paying extra, too. Electrek reports that Tesla is charging Ford drivers a 30% premium per kilowatt hour. Ford owners can get around that fee by purchasing a $12.99 per month Supercharger subscription that would see them pay the same kWh price as Tesla drivers. Of course, that model incentivizes those drivers to subscribe indefinitely and to maximize their investment by choosing Superchargers as often as possible.
Fortunately, the new charging paradigm could benefit those who don’t care to pay for yet another subscription. Ford’s electric drivers could get along just fine by doing nearly all their charging at home or at stations run by Electrify America or EVgo. Then, if they need a little juice somewhere with only a Tesla supercharger, they could pay a premium and be on their way.
On the other hand, Tesla’s new power in the charging market means it could go the other direction, too — say, by starting a price war like it did in the EV market, which kneecapped the profitability of EV efforts by traditional carmakers like Ford. Once again, it’s Tesla’s competitors who might be in trouble.
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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.”