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If you care about decarbonization, Trump’s EV comedy routine is actually quite concerning.
“What do you think of electric cars?” It’s a question Donald Trump asks the audience at his rallies these days, and the inevitable response is a chorus of boos. The mini-rant about EVs that follows is now as much a feature of Trump speeches as complaints about immigration or the injustice of his criminal indictments. As he said recently in Dayton, Ohio, “They want to do this all-electric nonsense where the cars don’t go far, they cost too much, and they’re all made in China.”
When Trump chooses to elevate an issue, he inevitably infuses it with questions of identity, the divisions between us and them. He doesn’t just tell you what to believe, he tells you that this is what our kind of people believe, and believing the opposite would make you one of our enemies, contemptible and repugnant.
Of course, EVs were already a means of expressing identity long before Trump started talking about them. None of us, no matter what our political orientation or feelings about capitalism, are immune from the impulse to make a statement to the world about our selfhood and the groups we belong to through our consumer choices, whether it’s the clothes we wear or the phone we carry or the car we drive.
But if we’re ever going to reach the point where the overwhelming majority of vehicles on the road are electric — an indispensable part of reducing carbon emissions — we’ll have to divorce the fuel source that drives a car from those identity questions.
Trump will certainly do what he can to prevent that from happening, even if his position on EVs is less than coherent. “The electric cars, automatically, are going to be made in China,” he says, yet he offers this as a reason to oppose policies that would encourage domestic production of EVs. Part of his interest is surely just about adding EVs to the list of things he can criticize President Biden for. Early in his presidency, Biden set out a goal that by 2030, half of new cars sold in the U.S. would be zero-emission, and though new tailpipe regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency push that goal back by two years, the rules give it teeth in the form of fines if car companies don’t meet the target.
It helps Trump that the target is optimistic, to say the least; only 7.6% of new car sales in 2023 were EVs. And Republicans delight in mocking the slow progress on building a nationwide network of charging stations, presenting it as a case study in both government inefficiency and the folly of taking action on climate change. The clear message to conservative voters is that buying an EV would violate their sense of self in a profound way, putting them on the side of Joe Biden and all those woke enviro-hippies.
From their earliest modern iterations, EVs and hybrids were indeed a statement of identity for liberals: Driving one said that you cared about pollution and climate change, and were willing to sacrifice a certain amount of convenience to lower your personal negative impact on the environment. In the right circles, a Prius could be a kind of status symbol despite its relatively modest price. The reaction from the right was contempt at anyone driving one, for the same reasons.
Though Tesla began to alter that image by marketing their EVs as stylish and technologically advanced, the political division on EVs has remained. According to a recent Gallup poll, 72% of liberals say they either have an EV or might buy one in the future, while an identical 72% of conservatives say they won’t ever buy one.
If you were a car company looking only to boost sales, that might not be too much of a problem, since in a market where around 15 million cars are sold every year, there’s plenty of room for identity segmentation. Auto companies can promote particular models to young people or suburban moms or even lesbians, and still make healthy profits. Everyone can find the car to express their identity; for instance, every year, the three best-selling vehicles in America are pickup trucks (the Ford F-series, the Ram, and the Chevy Silverado), and it isn’t because so many people need them for hauling and towing. It’s because the pickup is associated with a brand of rugged masculinity that millions of men want to present to the world, whether it’s really who they are or not.
But the goal isn’t getting some or even a lot of people to buy EVs, it’s to get nearly every car buyer to choose one. The paradox is that driving an EV may only cease to be a matter of identity when it becomes the default, and that can only happen when people of every partisan and political orientation start buying them.
We can see the glimmers of that transition in accelerating demand for hybrids. Hybrid sales grew an extraordinary 53% from 2022 to 2023, as more models — including low-priced ones — became available. You can even get a Ford Maverick Hybrid pickup, which is proving extremely popular, for under $25,000 (a MotorTrend article from last year was titled “We Bought a 2023 Ford Maverick Hybrid and It’s a Real F***ing Truck, Damn It!”). That greater variety of choices, combined with the increasing availability of EVs, may be depoliticizing hybrids, at least to a degree. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer said on a recent episode of Shift Key, “the presence of battery electric vehicles really defangs conventional hybrids because it is no longer the ‘lib car.’”
There are two critical impediments to a similar change happening for EVs: price and battery range. At the moment, going fully electric still means paying more up front compared to buying a comparable internal combustion vehicle, even if subsidies significantly lower that premium. But if getting an EV involved no extra initial cost, and charging stations were as common as gas stations, buying an EV wouldn’t say “I am willing to sacrifice to address climate change.” And it may be that the less your EV says about you — or at least, the less the fact that it’s an EV says about you — the better.
An increase in the number of EV models (which is already happening) will help too: If there are small and large EV pickups, EV sedans, EV sports cars, and critically, cheap EVs — which at the moment are only being manufactured in China — then there will be enough room to make a variety of identity statements with an EV that have nothing to do with its fuel source.
If he wins in November, Trump will probably try to reverse Biden’s tailpipe emission standards and roll back some of the EV subsidies that are now in place. But he may encounter more resistance than he thinks. Despite a recent slowdown in the growth rate of EV sales, the auto companies are still committed to transitioning to zero-emission fleets (even if they’d like to take their time getting there). And some red parts of the country are now deeply invested in EVs, especially in the “Battery Belt” in the Southeast, where EV technology companies are hiring thousands of workers and auto companies are opening EV plants.
One signal that mass adoption of EVs is imminent will be when car companies barely mention the fact that they’re electric in marketing them. When all the ads feature masculine men doing manly things with their manly electric trucks, hip and beautiful young people heading to the beach in their fun electric convertibles, and safety-conscious moms carpooling to soccer practice in their comfy electric SUVs, none of whom seem concerned about the climate, then we’ll know we’re on our way.
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It’s not perfect, but pretty soon, it’ll be available for under $30,000.
Here’s what you need to know about the rejuvenated Chevrolet Bolt: It’s back, it’s better, and it starts at under $30,000.
Although the revived 2027 Bolt doesn’t officially hit the market until January 2026, GM revealed the new version of the iconic affordable EV at a Wednesday evening event at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. The assembled Bolt owners and media members drove the new cars past Amity Island from Jaws and around the Old West and New York sets that have served as the backdrops of so many television shows and movies. It was star treatment for a car that, like its predecessor, isn’t the fanciest EV around. But given the giveaway patches that read “Chevy Bolt: Back by popular demand,” it’s clear that GM heard the cries of people who missed having the plucky electric hatchback on the market.
The Bolt died at the height of its powers. The original Bolt EV and Bolt EUV sold in big numbers in the late 2010s and early 2020s, powered by a surprisingly affordable price compared to competitor EVs and an interior that didn’t feel cramped despite its size as a smallish hatchback. In 2023, the year Chevy stopped selling it, the Bolt was the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s top two models.
Yet the original had a few major deficiencies that reflected the previous era of EVs. The most egregious of which was its charging speed that topped out at around 50 kilowatts. Given that today’s high-speed chargers can reach 250 to 350 kilowatts — and an even faster future could be on the way — the Bolt’s pit stops on a road trip were a slog that didn’t live up to its peppy name.
Thankfully, Chevy fixed it. Charging speed now reaches 150 kilowatts. While that figure isn’t anywhere near the 350 kilowatts that’s possible in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 9, it’s a threefold improvement for the Bolt that lets it go from 10% to 80% charged in a respectable 26 minutes. The engineers said they drove a quartet of the new cars down old Route 66 from the Kansas City area, where the Bolt is made, to Los Angeles to demonstrate that the EV was finally ready for such an adventure.
From the outside, the 2027 Bolt is virtually indistinguishable from the old car, but what’s inside is a welcome leap forward. New Bolt has a lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP battery that holds 65 kilowatt-hours of energy, but still delivers 255 miles of max range because of the EV’s relatively light weight. Whereas older EVs encourage drivers to stop refueling at around 80%, the LFP battery can be charged to 100% regularly without the worry of long-term damage to the battery.
The Bolt is GM’s first EV with the NACS charging standard, the former Tesla proprietary plug, which would allow the little Chevy to visit Tesla Superchargers without an adapter (though its port placement on the front of the driver’s side is backwards from the way older Supercharger stations are built). Now built on GM’s Ultium platform, the Bolt shares its 210-horsepower electric motor with the Chevy Equinox EV and gets vehicle-to-load capability, meaning you’ll be able to tap into its battery energy for other uses such as powering your home.
But it’s the price that’s the real wow factor. Bolt will launch with an RS version that gets the fancier visual accents and starts at $32,000. The Bolt LT that will be available a little later will eventually start as low as $28,995, a figure that includes the destination charge that’s typically slapped on top of a car’s price, to the tune of an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on delivery. Perhaps it’s no surprise that GM revealed this car just a week after the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases (and just a day after Tesla announced its budget versions of the Model Y and Model 3). Bringing in a pretty decent EV at under $30,000 without the help of a big tax break is a pretty big deal.
The car is not without compromises. Plenty of Bolt fans are aghast that Chevy abandoned the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations that worked with the first Bolt in favor of GM’s own built-in infotainment system as the only option. Although the new Bolt was based on the longer, “EUV” version of the original, this is still a pretty compact car without a ton of storage space behind the back seats. Still, for those who truly need a bigger vehicle, there’s the Chevy Equinox EV.
For as much time as I’ve spent clamoring for truly affordable EVs that could compete with entry-level gas cars on prices, the Bolt’s faults are minor. At $29,000 for an electric vehicle in the U.S., there is practically zero competition until the new Nissan Leaf arrives. The biggest threats to the Bolt are America’s aversion to small cars and the rapid rates of depreciation that could allow someone to buy a much larger, gently used EV for the price of the new Chevy. But the original Bolt found a steady footing among drivers who wanted that somewhat counter-cultural car — and this one is a lot better.
“Old economy” companies like Caterpillar and Williams are cashing in by selling smaller, less-efficient turbines to impatient developers.
From the perspective of the stock market, you’re either in the AI business or you’re not. If you build the large language models pushing out the frontiers of artificial intelligence, investors love it. If you rent out the chips the large language models train on, investors love it. If you supply the servers that go in the data centers that power the large language models, investors love it. And, of course, if you design the chips themselves, investors love it.
But companies far from the software and semiconductor industry are profiting from this boom as well. One example that’s caught the market’s fancy is Caterpillar, better known for its scale-defying mining and construction equipment, which has become a “secular winner” in the AI boom, writes Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal.
Typically construction businesses do well when the overall economy is doing well — that is, they don’t typically take off with a major technological shift like AI. Now, however, Caterpillar has joined the ranks of the “picks and shovels” businesses capitalizing on the AI boom thanks to its gas turbine business, which is helping power OpenAI’s Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas.
Just one link up the chain is another classic “old economy” business: Williams Companies, the natural gas infrastructure company that controls or has an interest in over 33,000 miles of pipeline and has been around in some form or another since the early 20th century.
Gas pipeline companies are not supposed to be particularly exciting, either. They build large-scale infrastructure. Their ratemaking is overseen by federal regulators. They pay dividends. The last gas pipeline company that got really into digital technology, well, uh, it was Enron.
But Williams’ shares are up around 28% in the past year — more than Caterpillar. That’s in part, due to its investing billions in powering data centers with behind the meter natural gas.
Last week, Williams announced that it would funnel over $3 billion into two data center projects, bringing its total investments in powering AI to $5 billion. This latest bet, the company said, is “to continue to deliver speed-to-market solutions in grid-constrained markets.”
If we stipulate that the turbines made by Caterpillar are powering the AI boom in a way analogous to the chips designed by Nvidia or AMD and fabricated by TSMC, then Williams, by developing behind the meter gas-fired power plants, is something more like a cloud computing provider or data center developer like CoreWeave, except that its facilities house gas turbines, not semiconductors.
The company has “seen the rapid emergence of the need for speed with respect to energy,” Williams Chief Executive Chad Zamarin said on an August earnings call.
And while Williams is not a traditional power plant developer or utility, it knows its way around natural gas. “We understand pipeline capacity,” Zamarin said on a May earnings call. “We obviously build a lot of pipeline and turbine facilities. And so, bringing all the different pieces together into a solution that is ready-made for a customer, I think, has been truly a differentiator.”
Williams is already behind the Socrates project for Meta in Ohio, described in a securities filing as a $1.6 billion project that will provide 400 megawatts of gas-fired power. That project has been “upsized” to $2 billion and 750 megawatts, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that “energy constraints” are a more pressing issue for artificial intelligence development than whether the marginal dollar invested is worth it. In other words, Zuckerberg expects to run out of energy before he runs out of projects that are worth pursuing.
That’s great news for anyone in the business of providing power to data centers quickly. The fact that developers seem to have found their answer in the Williamses and Caterpillars of the world, however, calls into question a key pillar of the renewable industry’s case for itself in a time of energy scarcity — that the fastest and cheapest way to get power for data centers is a mix of solar and batteries.
Just about every renewable developer or clean energy expert I’ve spoken to in the past year has pointed to renewables’ fast timeline and low cost to deploy compared to building new gas-fired, grid-scale generation as a reason why utilities and data centers should prefer them, even absent any concerns around greenhouse gas emissions.
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” Next Era chief executive John Ketchum said on an April earnings call. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.” Ketchum also said that the price of a gas-fired power plant had tripled, meanwhile lead times for turbines are stretching to the early 2030s.
The gas turbine shortage, however, is most severe for large turbines that are built into combined cycle systems for new power plants that serve the grid.
GE Vernova is discussing delivering turbines in 2029 and 2030. While one manufacturer of gas turbines, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has announced that it plans to expand its capacity, the industry overall remains capacity constrained.
But according to Morgan Stanley, Williams can set up behind the meter power plants in 18 months. xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis, which was initially powered by on-site gas turbines, went from signing a lease to training a large language model in about six months.
These behind the meter plants often rely on cheaper, smaller, simple cycle turbines, which generate electricity just from the burning of natural gas, compared to combined cycle systems, which use the waste heat from the gas turbines to run steam turbines and generate more energy. The GE Vernova 7HA combined cycle turbines that utility Duke Energy buys, for instance, range in output from 290 to 430 megawatts. The simple cycle turbines being placed in Ohio for the Meta data center range in output from about 14 megawatts to 23 megawatts.
Simple cycle turbines also tend to be less efficient than the large combined cycle system used for grid-scale natural gas, according to energy analysts at BloombergNEF. The BNEF analysts put the emissions difference at almost 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour for the single turbines, compared to just over 800 pounds for combined cycle.
Overall, Williams is under contract to install 6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power, to be completed by the first half of 2027, Morgan Stanley analysts write. By comparison, a joint venture between GE Vernova, the independent power producer NRG, and the construction company Kiewit to develop combined cycle gas-fired power plants has a timeline that could stretch into 2032.
The Williams projects will pencil out on their own, the company says, but they have an obvious auxiliary benefit: more demand for natural gas.
Williams’ former chief executive, Alan Armstrong, told investors in a May earnings call that he was “encouraged” by the “indirect business we are seeing on our gas transmission systems,” i.e. how increased natural gas consumption benefits the company’s traditional pipeline business.
Wall Street has duly rewarded Williams for its aggressive moves.
Morgan Stanley analysts boosted their price target for the stock from $70 to $83 after last week’s $3 billion announcement, saying in a note to clients that the company has “shifted from an underappreciated value (impaired terminal value of existing assets) to underappreciated growth (accelerating project pipeline) story.” Mizuho Securities also boosted its price target from $67 to $72, with analyst Gabriel Moreen telling clients that Williams “continues to raise the bar on the scope and potential benefits.”
But at the same time, Moreen notes, “the announcement also likely enhances some investor skepticism around WMB pushing further into direct power generation and, to a lesser extent, prioritizing growth (and growth capex) at the expense of near-term free cash flow and balance sheet.”
In other words, the pipeline business is just like everyone else — torn between prudence in a time of vertiginous economic shifts and wanting to go all-in on the AI boom.
Williams seems to have decided on the latter. “We will be a big beneficiary of the fast rising data center power load,” Armstrong said.
On billions for clean energy, Orsted layoffs, and public housing heat pumps
Current conditions: A tropical rainstorm is forming in the Atlantic that’s forecast to barrel along the East Coast through early next week, threatening major coastal flooding and power outages • Hurricane Priscilla is weakening as it tracks northward toward California • The Caucasus region is sweltering in summer-like heat, with the nation of Georgia enduring temperatures of up to 93 degrees Fahrenheit in October.
Base Power, the Texas power company that leases batteries to homeowners and taps the energy for the grid, on Tuesday announced a $1 billion financing round. The Series C funding is set to supercharge the Austin-based company’s meteoric growth. Since starting just two years ago, Base has deployed more than 100 megawatts of residential battery capacity, making it one of the fastest growing distributed energy companies in the nation. The company now plans to build a factory in the old headquarters of the Austin American-Statesman, the leading daily newspaper in the Texan capital. The funding round included major investors who are increasing their stakes, including Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, and at least nine new venture capital investors, including Lowercarbon, Avenir, and Positive Sum. “The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” Zach Dell, chief executive and co-founder of Base Power, said in a statement. “The challenge ahead requires the best engineers and operators to solve it and we’re scaling the team to make our abundant energy future a reality.”
The deal came a day after Brookfield Asset Management, the Canadian-American private equity giant, raised a record $23.5 billion for its clean energy fund. At least $5 billion has already been spent on investments such as the renewable power operator Neoen, the energy developer Geronimo Power, and the Indian wind and solar giant Evren. “Energy demand is growing fast, driven by the growth of artificial intelligence as well as electrification in industry and transportation,” Connor Teskey, Brookfield’s president and renewable power chief, said in a press release. “Against this backdrop we need an ‘any and all’ approach to energy investment that will continue to favor low carbon resources.”
Orsted has been facing down headwinds for months. The Danish offshore wind giant has absorbed the Trump administration’s wrath as the White House deployed multiple federal agencies to thwart progress on building seaward turbines in the Northeastern U.S. Then lower-than-forecast winds this year dinged Orsted’s projected earnings for 2025. When the company issued new stock to fund its efforts to fight back against Trump, the energy giant was forced to sell the shares at a steep discount, as I wrote in this newsletter last month. Despite all that, the company has managed to raise the money it needed. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Orsted had raised $9.4 billion. Existing shareholders subscribed for 99.3% of the new shares on offer, but demand for the remaining shares was “extraordinarily high,” the company said.
That wasn’t enough to stave off job cuts. Early Thursday morning, the company announced plans to lay off 2,000 employees between now and 2027. The cuts represented roughly one-quarter of the company’s 8,000-person global workforce. “This is a necessary consequence of our decision to focus our business and the fact that we'll be finalizing our large construction portfolio in the coming years — which is why we'll need fewer employees,” Rasmus Errboe, Orsted’s chief executive, said in a statement published on CNBC. "At the same time, we want to create a more efficient and flexible organization and a more competitive Orsted, ready to bid on new value-accretive offshore wind projects.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom. Mario Tama/Getty Images
California operates the world’s largest geothermal power station, The Geysers, and generates up to 5% of its power from the Earth’s heat. But the state is far behind its neighbors on developing new plants based on next-generation technology. Most of the startups racing to commercialize novel methods are headquartered or building pilot plants in states such as Utah, Nevada, and Texas. A pair of bills to make doing business in California easier for geothermal companies was supposed to change that. Yet while Governor Gavin Newsom signed one statute into law that makes it easier for state regulators to certify geothermal plants, he vetoed a permitting reform bill to which the industry had pegged its hopes. “Every geothermal developer and energy org I talked to was excited about this bill,” Thomas Hochman, who heads the energy program at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, wrote in a post on X. “The legislature did everything right, passing it unanimously. They even reworked it to accommodate certain classic California concerns, such as prevailing wage requirements.”
In a letter announcing his veto, the governor claimed that the law would have added new fees for geothermal projects. But an executive at Zanskar — the startup that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last month, is using new technology to locate and tap into conventional geothermal resources — called the governor’s argument “weak sauce.” Far from burdening the industry, Zanskar co-founder Joel Edwards said on X, “this was a clean shot to accelerate geothermal today, and he whiffed it.”
Last month, Generate Capital trumpeted the appointment of its first new chief executive in its 11-year history as the leading infrastructure investment firm sought to realign its approach to survive a tumultuous time in clean-energy financing. Less publicly, as Katie wrote in a scoop last night, it also kicked off company-wide job cuts. In an interview with Katie, Jonah Goldman, the firm’s head of external affairs, said the company “grew quickly and made some mistakes,” and now planned to lay off 50 people.
Generate once invested in “leading-edge technologies,” according to co-founder Jigar Shah, who left the firm to serve as the head of the Biden-era DOE Loan Programs Office. That included investments in projects involving fuel cells, anaerobic digesters, and battery storage. But from the outside, he said on the Open Circuits podcast he now co-hosts, the firm appears to have moved away from taking these riskier but potentially more lucrative bets. “They ended up with 38 people in their capital markets team, and their capital markets team went out to the marketplace and said, Hey, we have all this stuff to sell. And the people that they went to said, Well, that’s interesting, but what we really would love is boring community solar.”
Three of New England’s largest public housing agencies signed deals with the heat pump manufacturer Gradient to replace aging electric heaters and air conditioners with the company’s 120-volt, two-way units that provide both heating and cooling. The Boston Housing Authority, New England’s largest public housing agency, will kick off the deal by installing 100 all-weather, two-way units that both heat and cool at the Hassan Apartments, a complex for seniors and adults with disabilities in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. The housing authorities in neighboring Chelsea and Lynn — two formerly industrial, working-class cities just outside Boston — will follow the same approach.
Public housing agencies have long served a vital role in helping to popularize new, more efficient appliances. The New York City Housing Authority, for example, is credited with creating the market for efficient mini fridges in the 1990s. Last year, NYCHA — the nation’s largest public housing system — signed a similar deal with Gradient for heat pumps. Months later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo exclusively reported at the time, NYCHA picked a winner in its $32 million contest for an efficient new induction stove for its apartments.
Three chemists — Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi — won the Nobel Prize for “groundbreaking discoveries” that "may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges, from pollution to water scarcity.” Just a few grams of the so-called molecular organic frameworks the scientists pioneered could have as much surface area as a soccer field, which can be used to lock gas molecules in place in carbon capture or harvest freshwater from the atmosphere.