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So far, no one’s really picking up the slack.
I resent my go-to charging depot.
Don’t get me wrong: I was psyched when Tesla opened a Supercharger in the parking lot of a nearby In-N-Out burger. The other local Supercharger is located in a garage that charges for parking by the hour. Plus, it’s fun to grab a neapolitan shake while your vehicle gets juice. The problem is that everybody in Southern California loves In-N-Out, so reaching the chargers at dinnertime means navigating through the unruly drive-thru line. This sucks, especially when the battery is nearly depleted and the burger faithful won’t get out of the way.
More than a year ago, salvation was promised in the form of a new Supercharger at a nearby mall, one where I already frequent the Petco. But construction has mysteriously stalled. I stare at the charging map and repeatedly refresh, waiting for the station to come online.
I shouldn’t be surprised at Supercharger deployment being stuck, of course. Earlier this year, in a move nominally intended to keep Tesla nimble and innovative, Elon Musk laid off the team responsible for the Supercharger network at a moment when they were perhaps the most useful people at the company.
While the rest of Tesla sputtered with the rollout of the Cybertruck and reversed course on what to do next, the Supercharger team was preparing for a future in which drivers in EVs from basically all the other car brands could stop at Tesla’s fast-chargers and give the company their money. Instead of leaning into this advantage, Tesla has done the opposite. The Supercharger network is growing, but deployment has proceeded at a slower pace than during the same period in 2023. Before the mass layoff, Tesla was opening more than 30 new Supercharger sites per week; that number dipped to about 15 afterward.
The slowdown matters to a lot of people on the road. Despite Tesla’s recent sales slowdown, its cars make up the vast majority of EVs in America. Deprioritizing the Supercharger network is an annoyance for all those drivers, who may have a harder time taking a road trip to Big Bend National Park, Branson, or Aunt Betty’s house in the boondocks if promised charging depots stay in limbo.
Fewer new Superchargers will make existing stations more congested, too, and that’s before vehicles from other car companies begin to arrive en masse. On a road trip to Lake Tahoe last week I saw my first Rivian plugged into a Tesla station. Ford EVs are starting to get their adapters. Next year, carmakers will begin to build their EVs with Tesla’s North American Charging Standard plug, which will greatly increase congestion at existing Superchargers, especially on popular highway routes.
Whether future EV road trips are convenient or frustrating depends in large part on whether the rest of the industry can pick up the slack should Tesla continue to slow down Supercharger deployment. The track record of competitors like Electrify America and EVgo isn’t inspiring, as their stations have, to date, tended to be rarer, smaller, and more prone to mechanical failure.
Other car companies have pledged to build their own charging depots, which would ease some of the strain. Hope for a better charging future, however, lies largely with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which came out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and allocated $5 billion to build fast-charging stations along designated highway corridors across the country — see a map of them here.
That money is slowly rolling out in tranches to the states, which had the responsibility of putting forth plans for where they’d build plugs with the money. The result is a patchwork, state-by-state agenda for upgrading the American charging network, but the work is underway. Ohio began construction of the first NEVI-funded charger last October, and you can see where Alabama and Virginia, for example, plan to put theirs. Crucially, much of the funding has already been dispersed. If an EV-unfriendly new president takes office in January, the ball is already rolling.
What’s unclear is whether all these charging depots can match the standard of excellence the Supercharger team created before Musk blew it to bits. Take Alabama’s chargers, which will mostly be built at existing Love’s gas stations. The new stations meet the bare minimum required for NEVI, which is that they have four plugs each capable of delivering 150 kilowatts of power. Tesla’s newest batch of Superchargers deliver 250 kilowatts; Electrify America has some that reach 350. The 20-odd Superchargers already in Alabama offer at least six to eight plugs, with many stations hosting 12 or 16.
Every plug counts. Every time a new station fills in a spot on the nation’s charging map, drivers will be a little more confident that an EV will be able to take them anywhere they need to go. But if the Biden dollars dispersed through NEVI are going to take the place of Tesla’s Supercharger outfit, then the states need to do more than the bare minimum.
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In the closing minutes of the first presidential debate tonight, Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris took an odd, highly specific, and highly Teutonic turn. It might not have made sense to many viewers, but it fit into the overall debate’s unusually substantive focus on energy policy.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
What is he talking about? Let’s start by stipulating that Harris has renounced her previous support for banning fracking. During the debate, she bragged that the United States has hit an all-time high for oil and gas production during her vice presidency.
But why bring Germany into it? At the risk of sane-washing the former president, Trump appears to be referencing what German politicians call the Energiewiende, or energy turnaround. Since 2010, Germany has sought to transition from its largest historic energy sources, including coal and nuclear energy, to renewables and hydropower.
The Energiewiende is often discussed inside and outside of Germany as a climate policy, and it has helped achieve global climate goals by, say, helping to push down the global price of solar panels. But as an observant reader might have already noticed, its goals are not entirely emissions-related: Its leaders have also hoped to use the Energiewiende to phase out nuclear power, which is unpopular in Germany but which does not produce carbon emissions.
The transition has accomplished some of its goals: The country says that it is on target to meet its 2030 climate targets. But it ran into trouble after Russia invaded Ukraine, because Germany obtained more than half of its natural gas, and much of its oil and coal besides, from Russia. Germany turned back on some of its nuclear plants — it has since shut them off again — and increased its coal consumption. It also began importing fossil fuels from other countries.
In order to shore up its energy supply, Germany is also planning to build 10 gigawatts of new natural gas plants by 2030, although it says that these facilities will be “hydrogen ready,” meaning that they could theoretically run on the zero-carbon fuel hydrogen. German automakers, who have lagged at building electric vehicles, have also pushed for policies that support “e-fuels,” or low-carbon liquid fuels. These fuels would — again, theoretically — allow German firms to keep building internal combustion engines.
So perhaps that’s not exactly what Trump said, to put it mildly — but it is true that to cope with the Ukraine war and the loss of nuclear power, Germany has had to fall back on fossil fuels. Of course, at the same time, more than 30% of German electricity now comes from wind and solar energy. In other words, in Germany, renewables are just another kind of “normal energy plant.”
Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.
Well, it happened — over an hour into the debate, but it happened: the presidential candidates were asked directly about climate change. ABC News anchor Linsey Davis put the question to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their respective answers were both surprising and totally not.
Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.
The vice president immediately followed this up, however, by pointing out that gas production has also increased to “historic levels,” under the Biden-Harris administration. This framing, highlighting an all-of-the-above approach to energy, is consistent with Harris’s comments earlier in the debate, whenshe claimed to support fracking and investing in “diverse sources of energy.” Harris went on to reiterate the biggest wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, namely, “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” and shouted out her endorsement from the United Auto Workers and its President Shawn Fain.
Trump, who earlier in the debate called himself “a big fan of solar” before questioning the amount of land it takes up, started off his response by once again claiming that the Biden-Harris administration is building Chinese-owned EV plants in Mexico (they are not). Then Trump veered completely off topic and rounded out his answer by ranting about Biden (both Joe and Hunter). “You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because, supposedly, China paid him millions of dollars,” Trump noted. “He’s afraid to do it between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine.”
Trump’s answer included no reference to climate or clean energy — but it did include a shout out to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” so there’s that.
Is that a problem? Let’s do the math.
Former President Donald Trump has been warming up to the idea of electric vehicles in recent months, and he used the debate podium on Tuesday night to announce that “I’m a big fan of solar.” But don’t get too excited: He apparently can’t name three of their albums.
During a heated back-and-forth over Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on fracking, Trump started to get worked up about what will happen if Democrats win the election. “They’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead,” he warned. “We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant?”
Trump went on: “By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”
Trump has a history of exaggeration, but this is neither particularly hyperbolic nor as concerning as Trump would have you believe. About 34,000 acres of public land are currently devoted to solar energy, and a common estimate is that the U.S. would need to expand solar to an additional 700,000 acres to meet 2035 renewable energy goals. That’s about 1,100 square miles, or 1,555 Trump-sized solar farms (or 0.031115% of the entire United States, per Clean Technica).
And while it’s true that most utility-scale solar photovoltaic facilities are only a handful of acres, it only takes about five to seven acres to generate a megawatt — so a project of Trump’s reckoning would generate about 65 megawatts, which, as Mads Rønne Almassalkhi, an associate professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at the University of Vermont, pointed out, isn’t all that shabby:
The U.S. government also recently determined that some 31 million acres of public land in just 11 states are not on “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat” and are close to transmission lines or “previously disturbed lands,” and therefore hypothetically suitable for solar development. To put it in simpler terms, solar takes up a fair bit of land but: Desert big.
To be sure, there are absolutely valid concerns and debates to be had over siting and the environmental impact of solar farms in America, regardless of how small their ultimate relative footprint will be. And Trump could have raised those arguments. But from what he showed us on Tuesday, he doesn’t make a very convincing fan.