You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
A small plurality of prospective EV buyers say Elon Musk has made them unlikely to buy or lease a Tesla.
Elon Musk’s recent behavior may be catching up to Tesla, as a small plurality of prospective electric-vehicle buyers now say they are less likely to buy one of the automaker’s cars because of its billionaire owner, according to the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, a scientific survey of 1,000 Americans conducted last month.
Some 36% of Americans who want to buy an EV in the future say Musk’s actions are making them less likely to get a Tesla, the poll finds. That’s slightly larger than the 31% of prospective EV buyers who say that Musk is making them more likely to purchase a Tesla. These numbers tighten marginally when people who already drive an EV, many of them presumably Tesla drivers, are included in the group.
Musk appears to be particularly damaging the automaker’s brand among Democrats, the new poll finds. Some 44% of Democrats and left-leaning independents say Musk has made them less likely to look at a Tesla, the new poll finds.
These new results come from the Heatmap Climate Poll, which queried American adults in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., during a five-day period last month. It was conducted by Heatmap News and the Benenson Strategy Group.
The poll adds to a growing sense that Musk’s extracurricular activities may be starting to backfire on the automaker, which he co-founded and where he remains CEO. A YouGov poll recently found that, for the first time on record, Tesla is no longer the top choice for EV buyers. At an investor event earlier this month, Tesla unveiled a team of 17 previously unknown corporate executives — none of whom were named “Musk” — in what was widely seen as an attempt to distinguish itself from its most famous face.
But the Heatmap poll did not have only bad news for Musk. Among all Americans, about a third say Musk’s actions haven’t changed their mind about Tesla at all.
Perhaps the brightest spot in the data for him is that among high-income Americans — defined as those who make more than $100,000 a year — slightly more say Musk has made them more likely to consider a Tesla than less likely.
Musk also seems to be successfully rallying Republicans to the brand. About a third of Republicans and conservative-leaning independents say Musk’s actions have made them more likely to get a Tesla.
This still suggests a looming problem for Tesla, however, because Democrats make up a larger share of the electric-vehicle market than Republicans or independents. According to the Heatmap poll, roughly half of Democrats — but only 27% of Republicans — say that they plan to buy or lease an EV in the future. Democrats are also turning on Musk much more aggressively than Republicans are embracing him. While 31% of Democrats said Musk’s behavior had made them “much less likely” to get a Tesla, only 17% of Republicans said Musk had made them “much more likely” to do so.
The finding comes as Tesla, which still makes up the largest share of Musk’s fortune, faces more and more competition from other automakers. Tesla’s stock, which is down 42% over the past 12 months, has fallen faster and more sharply than other electric automakers. Roughly 50 new electric vehicles will hit the market over the next two years, including new models from Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Kia, and Hyundai. Tesla has announced only one new model, the Cybertruck, which will enter production later this spring or summer, nearly four years after it was first announced.
The poll suggests that Musk’s recent embrace of right-wing politics and Republican politicians is beginning to shape — and, perhaps, narrow — his customer base. It also comes as the EV industry, flush with new subsidies, has hit a tipping point for mass adoption in the American market. About one of every seven new cars sold in the United States today is an electric vehicle.
Since Tesla made him a public figure, Musk has tried to avoid easy partisan categorization. His practical politics have resembled those of other tech billionaires — sometimes with a green twinge. A decade ago, he resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-immigration lobbying group because it donated to Republicans who supported the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, he described himself as “socially very liberal” but “economically right of center, maybe.” “To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year,” he tweeted in November.
But since the pandemic, Musk’s politics and public affiliations have veered right. In the run-up to the 2022 election, he recommended that his followers vote for Republican congressional candidates, and he has said he would support Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign.
Much of the change has been linked to Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter. In April, he promised to buy Twitter for 38% above its market value in part to end its content-moderation policies, which he saw as too friendly to the left.
Since buying the social network, he has laid off more than 75% of its employees and reactivated the accounts of former President Donald Trump and the rapper Ye, who was once known as Kanye West. (Trump has yet to tweet; Musk banned Ye again after he tweeted a swastika.)
From his account, Musk has also cheekily called for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci and linked to a conspiracy website that suggested Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a male prostitute. References to “the woke Stasi,” “the woke mind virus,” and the “elite” media now pepper his tweets.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.”