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How electric vehicles and their infrastructure are vulnerable to bad actors
In February 2022, Tesla opened a new supercharging station in Oakhurst, California, a town on the scenic road up from Fresno to Yosemite National Park. It was wrecked the first night it was open. Thieves came in the night and cut the thick, black cables from all eight charging stalls that were tucked away in the back corner of a motel parking lot, presumably to steal and sell the copper inside.
Within days, Tesla not only fixed the cables but also installed a mechanical guardian: a solar-powered, camera-equipped “MacGuyver” robot to keep watch over the chargers. So far, the new security guard has thwarted subsequent raids. But the episode and other similar crimes at charging stations — like the time vandals stuffed ground meat into a charging port in Germany, for some reason — illustrate how electric vehicles and the infrastructure that supports them are vulnerable to sabotage and vandalism.
Gas stations see their share of crime, of course, but they have a few lines of defenses. There’s usually at least one attendant inside the booth or accompanying convenience store. Even if they close at night, stations are usually lit up and surveilled by cameras, and many are visible from the road in a way that inhibits theft and vandalism.
An EV fast-charging depot is a ghost town by comparison. Yes, there are some big stations with several dozen plugs that serve popular routes between major cities, and at these you’re liable to find humans around at just about any time of day. Many charging stops, though, are lonely outposts built to take advantage of America’s preponderance of parking spaces. They are collections of four or eight plugs at the periphery of an outlet mall, the top floor of a parking garage, or in a dark hotel lot.
During daylight hours, this setup means customers can charge while visiting stores at the mall or having a meal, but at night, these parking lots are deserted. A charging station does not need a human attendant, so the late-night EV traveler may find themselves alone. A midnight thief, meanwhile, might find the station unguarded. Last summer, Vice reports, bandits stole cords from chargers in Reno, Nevada, while cars were in the middle of charging. One happened at a hotel, another at a mall. In Los Angeles, a station saw all its wires cut on Earth Day last year.
Copper thieves, just like those who are stealing a rash of catalytic converters from gas and hybrid cars, have a clear economic motivation. But EVs are also vulnerable to attackers motivated by politics or spite. Tesla owners have used the car’s “Sentry Mode,” which records what the vehicle cameras are seeing, to catch a variety of vandals targeting the cars, some of whom seem driven by dislike of EVs or of Tesla and outspoken CEO Elon Musk. When a Florida couple saw their charging cable destroyed while their Chevy Bolt was plugged in at home — requiring them to buy a $450 replacement — they thought someone was trying to “send them a message.”
So far, vandalism incidents have been relatively rare. A spokesperson for Electrify America, for example, told me they account for less than 1 percent of the company’s charger repairs, and that it installed extra lighting and cameras in places with recurring issues. But that’s not the only concern. Charging stations are also linked to the internet in order to process payments and monitor their status, and anything that’s connected is inherently hackable. This January, someone had a laugh remotely hijacking the screens that control Electrify America chargers.
And many EV drivers are now personally familiar with “ICEing,” when internal combustion engine (ICE)-powered vehicles block or park in EV charging spaces and prevent electric vehicles from getting the juice they need. Many of these incidents can be blamed on ignorance or inattention, like when a car club in upstate New York caused a ruckus by blocking all the stalls at a Tesla supercharger, then pledged not to do it again. A few, though, appear to be driven by malevolence, with vehicles intentionally occupying charger stalls out of a loathing for electric vehicles or EV drivers.
It’s a tricky problem. Charging spaces are a common resource, and like all common resources, they’re susceptible to abuse. To enforce good charger etiquette, Tesla, for example, charges its drivers “idle fees” if they remain plugged in after their car is finished to motivate people to open up the plug for the next customer. But stopping bad-faith drivers from simply blocking spaces is a harder task. It requires either vigilant parking policing to ticket or tow offenders, or some kind of technological fix.
In China, Tesla is experimenting with one example. Its superchargers there include a kind of locking gate that prevents a non-Tesla from parking in the stall. However, North American superchargers don’t have this technology, in part because it interrupts the company’s mostly seamless charging process when drivers must download a third-party app just to pull into a space.
The next few years will tell us a lot about the future of anti-EV crimes. To date, most electric cars and EV chargers are found in the “blue” states and cities that are most friendly to the technology. In California, EVs made up 16 percent of new vehicle sales in 2022, far outpacing the rest of the country. The next step for the kind of widespread EV adoption the Biden administration is now pushing is to put many more electric vehicles and charging stations in other parts of the country — including those with a much less EV-friendly political climate.
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Here’s one federal climate program that’s still working — for now.
The first two weeks of the Trump administration have been chaotic for the clean energy industry, to say the least. Offshore wind permitting is on hold and state governments are canceling plans to sign new contracts. Trump’s federal funding freeze was on, then off-but-actually-still-on, and then technically off again. Despite a court injunction on the pause, many grant recipients still seem to be locked out of their funding portals.
But one climate initiative that’s also one of the president’s biggest bugbears has escaped his meddling thus far: The federal tax credit for electric vehicles is still functioning normally.
Former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created a tax credit of up to $7,500 for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for used vehicles. As of January of this year, about 16 EV and plug-in hybrid models were eligible for the new vehicle credit, which is limited to models that are assembled in North America and meet certain battery sourcing requirements. A loophole in the rules also allows dealers to apply the tax credit to any electric vehicle lease, meaning dealers can offer lessees a discount on a much wider range of options.
Trump attacked the subsidy on the campaign trail, and his transition team was reportedly planning to kill it. One of his first executive orders took aim at a number of electric vehicle-related programs, ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke waivers that allow California and other states to pass stronger emissions standards for vehicles than the federal government’s. His funding review and freeze specifically called out the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a $5 billion program to fund EV charging infrastructure. But even though EV charger grantees couldn’t access their funding, car dealerships around the country did not have any trouble getting into the Internal Revenue Service’s portal to log their electric vehicle sales and file for reimbursement for the tax credit.
When someone purchases an eligible electric vehicle, the buyer can either claim the tax credit on their own tax return or they can “transfer” it to their dealership, allowing the dealer to take the credit amount off the sale price. Dealers can then file for a direct reimbursement from the Internal Revenue Service.
I reached out to the National Automobile Dealers Association, which represents new car dealers, to ask if they had heard from any of their members about issues with the advanced payment program for the EV tax credit. “We checked into this earlier in the week, both on the dealer end and with Treasury,” Jared Allen, the vice president for public affairs told me on Friday. “Nothing has changed with the availability of advanced payments to dealers for EV tax credits.”
The president does not have the authority to end the EV tax credit program on his own — changes would have to come through Congress. Before Trump’s inauguration, Republicans on the House Budget Committee circulated a long list of potential cost-cutting measures that included eliminating many Inflation Reduction Act programs. One menu item recommended cutting all clean energy tax credits, but a separate proposal explicitly suggested keeping the EV tax credit and closing the leasing loophole. The Committee is aiming to present a first draft of a budget reconciliation bill by the end of this week, according to E&E News, at which point we’ll see what made the cut.
Rob and Jesse talk with former Ford economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick.
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. automaking industry has transformed how it builds cars and trucks, constructing a continent-sized network of factories, machine shops, and warehouses that some call “Factory North America.” President Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports will disrupt and transform those supply chains. What will that mean for the automaking industry and the transition to EVs?
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick is the former chief economist at Ford Motor Company, where she worked from 1996 to 2014, as well as the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She is now a senior visiting fellow at Third Way and a senior advisor at MacroPolicy Perspective LLC.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Ellen about how automakers build cars today, why this system isn’t built for trade barriers, and whether Trump’s tariffs could counterintuitively help electric vehicles. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: I hear often that we’re also sending parts back and forth as well — that particularly near the border with Canada, we have manufacturing parts suppliers on both sides of the border. So it’s not just the final car, it’s also pieces of the car going back and forth. How does stuff move around in this sort of complicated trade network between, Canada, the U.S., and Mexico?
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick: There is a lot of back and forth, and as you mentioned, a lot of the automotive analysts track the travel of not just the vehicles, but the parts. And the latest estimates show that in some cases, we’re going back and forth across the Ambassador Bridge here in Detroit, you know, six, eight times.
So when you say all of a sudden, as of tomorrow, I’m going to put a 25% tariff on that — I mean, that basically shutters businesses. You can’t absorb a 25% hit, especially if it’s a part or an assembled vehicle. Part of that 25% you could probably absorb, but for the thin margins that parts suppliers work for day in and day out, I mean, there’s just no way. You’re better off shuttering your business. I hate to say that, but you know, you just can’t make the equation work, with a 25% hit.
Jenkins: So this is hypothetical structure, I don’t know if this is exactly right, but so you might have engine parts manufactured in Michigan being sent to Windsor, Ontario to assemble an internal combustion engine. And then it goes back to a plant somewhere else in the U.S. to be assembled into a vehicle. Maybe you get the glass from somewhere for the windows, you know, these are all moving back and forth on a regular basis after so many years of free trade agreements between the two countries, or the three.
Hughes-Cromwick: That’s right. That’s right. And again, coming back to Michigan, because we’re so close to the suppliers in Canada, and we have the lion’s share of automotive suppliers, especially small and mid-size suppliers — so the tier two, tier three. They’re supplying to a tier one big supplier like Magna or Borg.
So you’ve got a lot of these tier two, tier three suppliers in Michigan. Well, why? Because they’re getting a part from a Canadian supplier, putting it into theirs. And maybe that’s a component that goes into an internal combustion engine that’s being produced.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Download Heatmap Labs and Hydrostor’s free report to discover the crucial role of long duration energy storage in ensuring a reliable, clean future and stable grid. Learn more about Hydrostor here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
For now at least, USAID’s future looks — literally — dark.
Elon Musk has put the U.S. Agency for International Development through the woodchipper of his de facto department this week in the name of “efficiency.” The move — which began with a Day One executive order by President Trump demanding a review of all U.S. foreign aid that was subsequently handed off to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — has resulted in the layoff or furloughing of hundreds of USAID employees, as well as imperiled the health of babies and toddlers receiving medical care in Sudan, the operations of independent media outlets working in or near despotic regimes, and longtime AIDS and malaria prevention campaigns credited with saving some 35 million lives. (The State Department, which has assumed control of the formerly independent agency, has since announced a “confounding waiver process … [to] get lifesaving programs back online,” ProPublica reports.) Chaos and panic reign among USAID employees and the agency’s partner organizations around the globe.
The alarming shifts have also cast enormous uncertainty over the future of USAID’s many clean energy programs, threatening to leave U.S. allies quite literally in the dark. “There are other sources of foreign assistance — the State Department and the Defense Department have different programs — but USAID, this is what they do,” Tom Ellison, the deputy director for the Center for Climate and Security, a nonpartisan think tank, told me. “It is central and not easily replaced.”
In addition to “saving and improving lives around the world in an altruistic sense,” USAID has “a lot of benefits for U.S. national interests and national security,” Ellison went on. Though USAID dates back to the Cold War, its Power Africa initiative launched under President Barack Obama in 2013, and energy investment projects around the world followed. Of its $42.8 billion budget request for 2025, the agency had earmarked $4.1 billion for global infrastructure and investment programs, including energy security and excluding its additional targeted energy investment in Ukraine.
Some of these benefits are immediate and obvious. For example, USAID invested $422 million in new energy infrastructure in Ukraine, including more than a thousand generators and a solar and battery storage project, all to brace against Russia’s weaponized flow of fossil fuels. (USAID was also reviewing the deployment of Musk’s Starlink Satellite Terminals to the Ukrainian government prior to his gutting of the agency, per The Lever.)
But USAID is in the power business for other strategic reasons, too. USAID initiatives such as assisting Georgia and Kosovo in running their first renewable energy auctions help to secure energy stability and independence among countries where Russia is trying to gain sway. By the same token, rural electrification efforts in Africa help the U.S. remain a leader on the continent even as China is looking to make inroads. “China’s infrastructure and assistance programs around the world, like the Belt and Road Initiative — they consider that very explicitly a lever to peel U.S. allies away,” Ellison said. “Russian propagandists are already cheering the potential shutdown of USAID or a cut to their programs, for those reasons.”
Likewise, USAID has also rolled out energy projects in Indonesia, helping to deploy rooftop solar plants at airports and investing $200 million into a geothermal plant and two hydropower plants. Such efforts in the Indo-Pacific “pay dividends in strengthening relationships with allies and partners critical to that competition with China,” the Council on Strategic Risks, the parent institute of the Center for Climate and Security, wrote in a memo Tuesday.
That’s part of what makes the USAID whiplash so severe. Not only is the concern and uncertainty of the agency’s shutdown in complete opposition to the administration’s purported goal of “efficiency,” but Trump’s knee-jerk reaction to anything that suggests the idea of a U.S. handout — much less one that includes programs explicitly addressing “climate change” — runs counter to his stated goals of protecting U.S. troops and national security interests. USAID programs “are very cost-effective investments in terms of being a cent or less on the U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Ellison told me. “They’re paying for themselves over and over again in terms of humanitarian or military spending averted in the future.”