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America and the world have already decided that electric cars are the future.
Disgraced and multiply indicted former President Trump recently injected himself into the United Auto Workers’ ongoing strike against Ford, GM, and Stellantis. He went to a non-union parts company called Drake Enterprises at the invitation of its owner, where he criticized the decision to strike. “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think,” he said, because electric vehicles are a bigger threat than corporate executives to auto workers. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics … But you can’t really be loyal to both.” (He also threatened to destroy the UAW if they don’t endorse him in the 2024 campaign.)
It isn’t just Trump taking this line, either. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) recently claimed that the EV transition is harming the auto industry.
Not only is this argument a crock, it is the opposite of true. If Republicans repeal President Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the effects on the auto industry will be nothing short of catastrophic.
Let me start by admitting there is a small grain of truth in what Trump said. There are going to be some job losses as a result of the EV transition, especially in the parts supply chain and repair industry. The reason is that EVs, for all their whiz-bang technological sheen, are actually much easier to build and require far less maintenance than internal combustion vehicles.
The basic energy transfer system of a gas-powered car involves a vastly complex assemblage of valves, cams, fuel injectors, spark plugs, pistons, a crankshaft, a transmission, and a drive shaft. An electric car, by contrast, has a battery and motor. That means a lot of people who currently work producing or fixing all those finicky and breakage-prone parts are going to lose their jobs over the next 15-20 years. Now, it might even out in the aggregate, Carnegie Mellon researchers have suggested, because the batteries powering EVs are so complicated to construct. But it’s far from settled. (It’s also why job creation programs should prioritize places that have hitherto depended on carbon energy, but that’s a subject for another article).
The possibility that EVs will require less work is just one of several reasons why it’s vital for legacy American auto manufacturers to get ahead of the electric vehicle transition. The flip side of EV simplicity is better performance, cheaper operating costs, and greater theoretical reliability. Tesla might be notorious for manufacturing defects, but as I have previously written, that is just a reflection of Elon Musk’s terrible business management. As soon as the big traditional manufacturers (and possibly Tesla itself) get the kinks ironed out, EVs are going to be a breeze to own.
Performance is even more important. The first thing that anyone discovers when driving an EV for the first time is the rush of that instant surge of torque. Even the most powerful gas engines simply can’t react as quickly as electric current. I recently rented an EV myself for the first time, and even as a committed partisan insurgent in the war on cars, I must admit even the modest Chevy Bolt EUV is very fun.
Put simply, EVs are simply better than internal combustion cars, and their advantages are going to grow over time. Aside from reliability and performance, consider another Trump complaint: that today’s EVs can’t go far enough on a charge. After taking my first EV trip myself, I’m convinced the issue here is not range anxiety per se, but rather anxiety about the availability of chargers. After all, lots of people drive motorcycles with pitiful ranges — the Harley Sportster 883 can go only about 135 miles on a tank — but this is not a problem because gas stations are absolutely everywhere. Anyone who has taken a road trip in an EV recently, by contrast, has likely experienced crowded or broken public chargers, or struggled to get them to connect or deliver the advertised charge rate.
But this problem will certainly be solved over time. As compared to the vast apparatus to find, drill, refine, transport, store, and sell gasoline and diesel, which took decades to construct, virtually every single building in the country is already connected to the electric grid. It’s merely a question of building more and more reliable chargers, and adding a bit more generation capacity. Both of those things are already happening. (A simpler reform would be to just install RV hookups everywhere, as Kevin Williams argues here at Heatmap.)
These manifest advantages, together with the large subsidies for electric vehicles and battery investment in the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill, and CHIPS Act, are why all the Big Three American auto companies have already fully committed to the EV transition. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, they have already laid out some $143 billion in investment. New auto plants, battery factories, charging stations, and so on are being built by the hundreds. If Trump tears the guts out of the IRA, as he has promised to do, most of those will have to be abandoned, and he will have torn the guts out of the Big Three too.
Even if Republicans could somehow compensate for flushing tens of billions in investment down the toilet for no reason, that won’t change the fact that EVs are quite obviously the auto technology of the future, and the rest of the world is in a headlong race to get there. China as usual is way out ahead, with its national champion BYD already dominating the lower end of the world market. America is perhaps roughly equal with European and Korean manufacturers, and a bit ahead of Japanese ones. But the Big Three won’t be anymore if they are gutshot by Trump.
When an eviscerated Ford and GM can’t produce the cars that Americans of tomorrow want, they are going to look elsewhere. To try to stop the EV transition would be to hand the American driver to foreign manufacturers on a silver platter.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
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.