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Toyota’s electric Hilux prototype has debuted in Thailand. It would be a hit in the United States.
My wife drove one of the last great little trucks. The 2000 Toyota Tacoma had no extended cab and no frills, just a bench seat and a short bed to shuttle her stuff back and forth from L.A. to Berkeley. To no one’s surprise, it still runs. We just moved a loveseat in it this weekend.
That kind of two-door utilitarian pickup, which was commonplace in the heyday of the Chevy S-10 and Ford Ranger, is critically endangered in the era of supersized F-150s and Ram 1500s. And the new EVs in the truck space are predictably big. Toyota, though, just revealed an electrified version of the simple little truck: the Hilux REVO EV, an updated, modernized version of my wife’s classic two-door.
I want it. It is in Southeast Asia.
“Why can’t we have this in America” is a familiar refrain in the automotive world. It’s been especially fitting in the last couple of decades, as the American car market consolidated around big trucks and crossovers, the only vehicles that sell en masse. Other countries get station wagons, hatchbacks, tiny city cars, small pickup trucks, and other shapes that make enthusiasts swoon, but don’t reach the U.S. market because they don’t sell in high volume here. (You can’t just buy one and import it, either, because of the United States’s 25-year rule.)
The Hilux is a perfect example. Toyota’s global truck is the world’s workhorse, selling countless numbers in countries where a pickup is meant to be a beater, not a cushy family car that happens to have a bed in the back. The Hilux is notoriously dependable and serviceable. Parts are easy to find since so many of these things exist around the world. You just can’t buy one in the United States, where, since the 1990s, Toyota has sold the larger, comfier Tacoma to compete with the monster trucks on American roads.
Toyota showed off the Hilux REVO EV last month in Thailand, one of the biggest markets for the traditional gas-powered Hilux. The truck is a one-off concept that engineers from Toyota Thailand built using the brand’s EV parts. While the demo is far from becoming a production vehicle, it’s an interesting move by Toyota. The world’s largest automaker has been conspicuously slow in electrification, allowing the other legacy car companies to make their big EV splashes first. Toyota President Akio Toyoda has said more than once that the car industry has put the cart before the horse with electrification, and that Toyota will not race to produce EVs until it is confident the infrastructure those EVs need is in place.
When that infrastructure is in place, Toyota will be in position to offer the world the battery-powered small pickup of my dreams. Here in America, the brand’s eventual EV truck offering is liable to be a much bigger boy. But are we really sure a smaller EV truck can’t succeed here?
To American drivers lusting after the small trucks available overseas, the car companies had a ready-made reply: Sorry, but the numbers don’t lie. Full-size pickups are the best-selling vehicles in America. By comparison, compact trucks aren’t worth the effort. Ford’s mid-size Maverick is a success story, but its sales still can’t hold a candle to the more than 500,000 F-150s and Silverados sold in America each year.
The legacy carmakers thought they could replicate the same dynamic to spur America’s transition to EVs. The Ford F-150 Lightning is available, and the electrified Chevy, Ram, and GMC full-size trucks are coming soon to form the vanguard of Detroit’s big EV push. But it’s not clear the old rules hold true in the new world. Full-size truck owners say they are troublingly unwilling to consider buying an EV as their next pickup. The people who do buy EVs trend urban and Democratic, the kind of people more likely to drive a Honda Civic than a Ram 1500.
In other words, the EV market — at least for now — doesn’t look a lot like the overall American auto market. And maybe that’s an opportunity for the forsaken car shapes to stage a comeback. Chevrolet looked like it would kill off the plucky Bolt to make way for electrified SUVs and trucks. Amid steep headwinds in that effort, the brand says the Bolt is coming back.
A reasonably sized pickup truck could be just the ticket for the urban dwellers who are actually interested in buying EVs. The pickups available now, the Rivian R1T and Ford F-150 Lightning, are simply too much truck for a lot of people. Their huge batteries can deliver a ton of power — just ask actor Alan Ruck, who crashed his into a Hollywood pizzeria last week. As much as I lust after the Rivian when I see one around Los Angeles, I couldn’t get it into my parking space. You know what would fit in there? The Hilux EV.
My wish is that the EV revolution sets the pickup free. The sovereignty of the oversized truck is tied to its capability, sure, but also its status as a market of tribal membership. Country songs name-drop Chevy Silverados for a reason, and lots of people who wouldn’t dare get mud on their boots own a King Ranch. Given that trucks skew right, and EVs still skew left, the EV truck exists in a liminal political space. Perhaps that’s enough to redefine the form, and make the electrified pickup about practicality more than posturing.
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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.