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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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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.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”