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American electric vehicles are big because American cars are big.
The auto industry’s shiny electric future is beginning to look a lot like its bloated present.
This spring — around the same time the Tesla Model Y was becoming the world’s best-selling vehicle — General Motors announced the demise of the Chevy Bolt. The small EV with starting prices in the high $20,000s (even lower with tax breaks included) was the closest thing Americans car buyers had to an affordable electric vehicle. After 2023, however, GM will end Bolt production to make way for bigger, more expensive EVs. The automaker plans to retool its Michigan factory to crank out electric versions of the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, and promised its new Ultium electric vehicle platform would soon lead to the launches of the Blazer EV and Equinox EV crossovers.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2018, before the big car companies went seriously electric, Ford killed its trio of normal, everyday, affordable cars — the long-running Fiesta, Focus, and Fusion. The move was ostensibly made to cut costs, and came with token corporate quotes about simplifying the brand’s lineup. But the bigger reason for the move was that Ford could replace its cars with the crossovers, SUVs, and trucks that Americans wanted and were increasingly willing to overpay for.
Ford’s shift was one of the biggest in the auto industry’s decades-long march away from affordable car-shaped cars. Five years later, does the death of the Bolt signal that the electric car market is headed in the exact same direction?
To be fair, the Bolt was far from perfect. Most notably, a widespread battery problem forced a recall in 2021 of more than 100,000 Bolts in the U.S. and caused a long, revenue-draining production hiatus while GM fixed the problem. Nevertheless, Chevy sold lots of Bolts: more than 38,000 in 2022, trailing only Teslas and the Ford Mustang Mach-E on the list of top-selling electrics. The plucky EV and EUV proved Chevy’s electric business and carried GM to take second place in the American EV market behind Tesla.
Now that its electric effort is on surer footing, though, the automaker sees its future in bigger vehicles with bigger price tags. The EV versions of the Chevy Blazer and Silverado will start in the $40,000 range, at least ten grand more than the plucky Bolt. Don’t forget the company’s battery-powered GMC Hummer, an ostentatious assault vehicle whose price easily slips into six figures. That vehicle is perhaps the fullest realization of where the EV revolution had led: Heavy, powerful EVs sold on testosterone and sex appeal that have supplanted the little electric car built for the sensible shopper or environmentalist driver.
Without the Bolt, the options for those who want an affordable EV that isn’t a bloated crossover are a little slim. The Mini Cooper EV carries a sad 114-mile range, rendering it useless as anything but a cute city car, just like the electric Fiat 500 that came before it and then disappeared from American roads. (Better versions are coming. Mini promises a 200-mile EV for 2025; so does Fiat for a relaunched electric 500.)
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The second-generation Nissan Leaf is a prettier car than its potato predecessor, but one that has gotten stale since its launch in 2017. The BMW i3 rounded-cube-on-wheels has bitten the dust, replaced by big, pricier sedan EVs like the i4. Rumors continue to swirl over a possible Tesla “Model 2,” a compact EV that would presumably be smaller and cheaper than the Model 3. But with Elon Musk’s penchant for enjoying the whooshing sound that deadlines make as they fly by, that EV won’t happen soon, if at all.
Affordable electrics still can be found. However, they depend upon customers being savvy enough to navigate the shifting landscape of tax breaks. Tesla, like GM, at one point saw its federal incentives phased out. But now that all of its models qualify for President Biden’s $7,500 tax credit, the price of a new Model 3 can reach down into the low $30,000s — and even under $30k in states like Colorado that offer their own credits and rebates. Meanwhile, many bargain EV shoppers have turned to leasing, because a loophole in the Biden infrastructure law allows EVs that don’t qualify for a tax credit when purchased outright — like Hyundai’s excellent Ioniq series — to qualify for the $7,500 benefit when they’re leased.
The supersizing of the American EV was unavoidable, since it stems from the confluence of a few factors. New electric startups like Rivian or Lucid need to make lots of revenue right away, so they start their business with expensive, large luxury models. Americans in general have shown they want bigger vehicles of every kind, and are willing to pay for them, a fact that has incentivized bloated vehicle sizes and motivated car companies to sacrifice economy models to make way for SUVs and trucks. With electric vehicles, there are physical limitations at work, too. It’s easier to put a giant battery with more range in a big vehicle; and only so much battery you can cram into a Mini Cooper.
Even so, the trend lines are troubling. If the only goal of electrification is to move all Americans from gasoline to EV, then selling electrified copies of what people already buy is no problem. It’s probably smart, in fact, since plenty of people who wouldn't buy a Nissan Leaf would buy an electric truck.
But it’s not that simple. A 3,000-pound EV is better for the world than a 6,000-pound one: It uses less energy, it’s easier on our roads and highways, and it’s a lot less likely to kill a pedestrian or another driver in an accident. EVs already tend to be heavy because of the giant battery they carry around; selling Americans nothing but a new generation of EV tanks exacerbates our growing problem of growing vehicles.
The small EV is not necessarily doomed. Battery advances should make it possible to store more energy in smaller spaces, improving the driving ranges of smaller electric cars. When the time comes that most Americans are buying electric, there could be space in the market for smaller EVs that don’t generate as much profit per vehicle as, say, a $100,000 Hummer.
In the meantime, the future looks a little grim. Having killed its budget EV, GM will offer as its entry-level EV the electrified Chevy Equinox — a crossover that’s heavier, longer, and several thousand dollars more expensive than the Bolt. While EVs may have started as pure green machines for the eco-minded, then morphed into Silicon Valley’s idea of a spaceship, they are about to complete their final evolution.
For better and worse, the new crop of electric vehicles may be just as dull, unremarkable, and needlessly overpriced as the rest of the silver SUVs currently clogging American roads.
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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.