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The electric car market is still young and volatile, and there’s no reason to commit if you don’t have to.
Four years ago I drove my beloved brown dog home from the high desert beagle rescue in our little red EV. She sat silently in my wife’s lap, wondering what this new life might entail, and spent the ensuing months shedding stabby hairs on the seat cover and slobbering on the back windows as we drove back and forth to the mountains above Los Angeles to hike our way through the darkest days of COVID. Now, she has lost exclusive access to the back seat. Two weeks ago, white-knuckled and nervous, I drove my newborn daughter home from the hospital.
These are the moments that transfigure a hunk of metal into the family car, a thing made of remembrance as much as nuts and bolts. It is a process possible only when you own a vehicle long enough for the good stuff of life to seep into the carpets and scratch up the upholstery. In this way, it matters to me that my Model 3 is our car.
However, after four-plus years of electric vehicle ownership, I am here to tell you: If you’re thinking of getting a new EV this holiday season, then you should probably lease, not buy.
I don’t say this lightly. The idea of leasing sits uneasy with me now that we live in a subscription society where everything is rented and nothing is ours. Leasing, though, could be an ideal solution for those who want to try out the electric life but have reservations about going all-in. And at this moment in the EV age, it’s hard to argue with leasing logic.
For one thing, in terms of resale value, owning a used EV isn’t what it used to be. In 2021, during the chaos of peak pandemic, used car prices spiked to unprecedented levels. As those prices have begun to come down to Earth, EVs are reportedly depreciating at levels faster than gasoline cars, losing as much as half their value in three years, in part because of the price-cutting wars that slashed the cost of a new electric over the past year. As the cost of a new EV continues to fall, the value of owning an older one will wane.
Leasing, at least right now, is also a simpler and better way to shop for an EV. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported last week, the tax credits for buying electric are becoming an even more confusing mess in 2024 because Inflation Reduction Act rules mandate domestic manufacturing for pretty much all components of a qualifying car. But a buyer can skirt much of the red tape by leasing rather than buying. Quality but foreign-built EVs like the Hyundai Ioniqs, which don’t qualify for tax credits if you buy them, can qualify if you lease them, too.
Plus, after three years of driving an EV, you might be eager to start over. I bought a Tesla in 2019 when the most affordable Standard Range Plus version of the Model 3 came with an Environmental Protection Agency-estimated 240 miles of range. If I’d leased it, I could have returned the car by now and gotten into a new Model 3 or Y with at least 260 miles of range, a nice little quality-of-life bump. (Honestly, what’s more likely is that after years of living with the limitations of a shorter-range EV, I would have ponied up for a longer-range model on the second go-round.) Instead, I’m stuck with my slowly decaying battery for as long as I decide to hold onto this car.
The other perk of leasing is the freedom from long-term maintenance and other ownership issues. The EV revolution is still young enough that we don’t know how today’s EVs will age, or what particular problems Model 3s or Chevy Bolts or Ford F-150 Lightnings might encounter when they reach 10 or 12 or 15 years old. EV owners will face thorny questions about whether to replace a battery that’s lost much of its capacity, live with the depleted range, or get out from under the car. EV lessees won’t.
The most compelling reason not to buy an EV today, though, is that you don’t know what’s coming around the corner tomorrow. We’re on the cusp of seeing the carmakers produce fully electric versions of all sorts of iconic and beloved vehicles, from the Jeep Wrangler to the Chevy Corvette. Battery improvements will mean more cars on the market with longer ranges, making longer-distance travel less burdensome.
Think of an EV like a smartphone. Gas-powered cars are like the iPhones and Androids of today — a mature, honestly kind of boring technology that doesn’t change much from year to year. Electric cars are more like what smartphones were 10 years ago, when each passing year brought what felt like a major leap forward and your two- or three-year-old phone felt woefully out of date.
Years from now, when you know exactly what you’re getting into, you might feel more comfortable buying an EV to serve as the dutiful family car for a decade to come — the car that takes your son to second grade and the car he learns to drive in. But if you don’t want to be tied down by what’s on offer today, maybe you should just lease it until tomorrow rolls around.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.