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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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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.