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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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Though high costs have become central to the upcoming election, they’re mostly out of the state’s control.
New Jersey suffers from some of the highest and fastest-rising retail electricity prices in the nation, according to Energy Information Administration data. From July 2024 to this year, retail prices exploded by more than 20%. Now, energy policy is at the forefront of the state’s gubernatorial election, in which Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill has promised to cap electricity rate increases in the course of fighting off a strong challenge from Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
So what did the Garden State do to deserve this? “The short answer is that it’s a variety of factors, including transmission and distribution costs and higher capacity prices, largely driven by data centers,” Abraham Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins and former New Jersey utility regulator, told me.
New Jersey is a microcosm of how and why electricity prices are rising faster than inflation. The system is expensive to maintain and operate. It exists within an electricity market that has seen some of the fastest data center growth in the country. And it has struggled to bring on new supply quickly.
A lot of this comes down to the electricity market the state is in — PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest grid operator. Over the past two years, the cost of guaranteeing that the grid will be able to meet peak demand has skyrocketed to $16.1 billion, from just $2.2 billion in 2023.
These prices are set at auction, in which generators tell the market how much they’d need to be paid to be around in times when the grid is most in need. “PJM’s capacity market — its primary means of incenting investment in new power plants — has not worked as designed since 2018,”, Silverman testified before the New Jersey legislature in March. (The auctions are supposed to be held annually, but were delayed several times toward the end of the last decade as PJM and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reviewed proposed rule changes.)
In February, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities said that its own auction to procure services from PJM, which follows the prices set in the PJM auction, would result in roughly 20% increases in retail electricity bills. “PJM’s recent capacity auction results are the main driver of these increases,” Christine Guhl-Sadovy, the board’s president said in a statement. In practical terms, that’s about a $20 increase per residential electricity bill on average, according to the non-profit urban planning group the Regional Plan Association.
When Silverman analyzed the components of New Jersey’s electricity price increases, he identified an 8.5% increase in energy prices paid through PJM from 2023 to 2024, a five-fold increase in capacity prices, and transmission costs that had doubled over the previous decade, including a 9% increase in just the previous year.
As for what’s behind those skyrocketing capacity price increases, I’ll give you one guess.
“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” PJM’s independent market monitor said in a report on the 2024 capacity auction, attributing over $9 billion of the increase to the demands on the grid due to data centers.
While much of that data center demand has been in other PJM states like Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, within the service territory for New Jersey’s largest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, “interconnection inquiries from data centers and other large customers have increased dramatically, from 400 megawatts a year ago to 4,700 megawatts today,” PJM official Jason Stanek said in testimony before the New Jersey State Senate in March. He also referred to “a shrinking supply of energy and capacity,” which was a polite way of saying that PJM has failed to get new resources through its interconnection queue at a pace that matches planned retirements of older, fossil fuel-fired resources. That, “combined with increasing demand, will result in upward pressure on wholesale and retail prices,” Stanek said.
For years, PJM’s auctions, when they happened, were arguably delivering prices that were too low, leaving the market short of capacity as data center construction and interconnection requests boomed, leading prices to shoot up dramatically, shouldering retail ratepayers with rising bills but not quickly resolving the system’s potential reliability issues.
Still, New Jersey is one of 13 states in PJM, but it has seen some of the sharpest electricity increases among that group. In neighboring Pennsylvania, for instance, electricity prices are about a fifth lower and have only risen around 12%.
A major study of recent electricity price increases by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group identified New Jersey as an especially severe case — the worst, in fact — even within the dramatic price increases throughout PJM. “New Jersey is experiencing some of the highest price increases of all PJM states in summer of 2025,” the study found.
New Jersey is also exceptionally exposed to natural gas prices. About 60% of its electricity generation comes from natural gas — although that explains more of the price increases in the years immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and less of the recent price hikes, according to the Lawrence Berkeley and Brattle Group researchers.
New Jersey is the nation’s most population-dense state, but it is also at the mercy of national markets and other states for its power, explained Kyle Mason, an associate planner at the Regional Plan Association.
“A major New Jersey factor is that it’s a net importer,” Mason told me, meaning that the state can’t always satisfy its own demands with home-grown power. “So in times of peak demand, they have to import energy from other states within PJM, and that makes them more reliant on PJM markets, particularly their capacity market,” Mason said.
New Jersey has been working to maintain and expand its existing clean energy generation, including subsidizing nuclear power plants when prices were low and investing in distributed solar power.
But it could do more. Silverman pointed to this in his testimony when he said that “a number of New Jersey-based storage projects have already survived the interconnection gauntlet and could be deployed quickly with the right incentives” — that is, they’ve been approved by PJM but have yet to be built.
New Jersey's offshore wind efforts — which would have provided large amounts of in-state clean generation — have been stymied by a combination of supply chain challenges and Donald Trump. Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor, has said he would ban offshore wind, while both he and Sherrill support more nuclear power.
But even the governor of New Jersey can only do so much. “They are at the mercy of the federal government and the larger PJM body,” Mason said.
It’s an electric vehicle success story, but based on its new future guidance for investors, GM is still getting hammered by the shift in federal policy.
General Motors is on a hot streak with its electric cars. The Chevrolet Equinox EV topped 25,000 in sales during the third quarter of this year, becoming America’s best-selling electric vehicle that’s not a Tesla. The revived Chevy Bolt is due to arrive just after the new year at a starting price under $30,000, and the company promises that more low-cost EVs are on the way. And a variety of new electric offerings have, at the very least, breathed new life and intrigue into the struggling Cadillac brand.
With its Ultium platform helping GM to scale up production of these battery-powered cars, the Detroit giant seems well-positioned among the legacy carmakers to find success in the EV era. Yet last week, GM put out information for investors that predicted a loss of $1.6 billion compared to its previous outlook on the EV market.
Blame chaos. Automakers crave the boring and the predictable. It can take years to tweak the looks or the specs of an existing vehicle, to say nothing of the half-decade or more required to design and build a new car from scratch. With so much time and money on the line, car companies want to know what kind of world will greet their new creations.
But because of the shifting political winds in America, predictability has been hard to come by. Automakers planned and publicized big pushes into electric cars on the assumption that federal policy would continue to move the nation in that direction. They started to move manufacturing into the U.S. to satisfy Biden-era rules for tax credit eligibility. Then they were jerked in the opposite direction by a Trump administration that killed those federal incentives, slapped on haphazard new tariffs that penalize EVs, and got rid of the pollution penalties that nudged carmakers toward a cleaner future.
GM says its newly gloomy outlook is based partly on a decrease in predicted demand. In the absence of federal tax credits that made it more affordable for drivers to choose EVs (gone as of October 1), GM revised down the number of electric cars it expected Americans to buy. As the car market abruptly changes direction — again — GM must change plans to keep up, which means retooling factories to produce fewer EVs and more still-profitable ICE vehicles.
As GM says in its official investor release: “Following recent U.S. government policy changes, including the termination of certain consumer tax incentives for EV purchases and the reduction in the stringency of emissions regulations, we expect the adoption rate of EVs to slow. These charges include non-cash impairment and other charges of $1.2 billion as a result of adjustments to our EV capacity.” Another $400 million in estimated losses come from “contract cancellation fees and commercial settlements associated with EV-related investments,” which is how they arrive at the total of $1.6 billion.
The conglomerate says that this bit of bad news won’t affect its current lineups. But its predicament is emblematic of how the car giants find themselves stuck between the past and the future. In China and other nations around the world, EV adoption continues apace, but the established big automakers simply can’t compete there with the rock-bottom prices of Chinese-made EVs. In the West, meanwhile, the new wave of EV antagonism is pushing the industry back toward the fossil fuels that provided their profits in the past — despite the billions they’ve already invested in electrification.
GM is not alone in this, of course. Ford has gone through several rounds of whiplash during its electrification process — first losing billions on its early EVs, then slowing its EV development plans to retreat toward the easy profitability of combustion, before recently unveiling a different vision to make its EVs scalable and affordable. Companies like Hyundai, which tried to win the EV race, find themselves penalized for trying to qualify for the now-dead Biden tax incentives. Those that dragged their feet, like Toyota, are well-positioned to keep making money in this weird moment.
The end result is that for the sake of survival, companies like GM find themselves talking out of both sides of their mouth. At the end of the previous decade, when it looked as though the 2020s would be the era of EVs, GM pledged itself to a zero-emissions future. And while GM has been an EV success story of late, the Detroit giant also has spent enormous amounts to lobby the federal government against clean air regulations whose disappearance would make its combustion sector more profitable.
If there’s a positive sign from GM’s sour note, it is the statement from James Cain, executive director for finance and sales communications, that, regarding its stable of current EVs, “we will build them to demand.” In other words, it’s not as though GM is throwing in the towel — if Americans keep buying electric Cadillacs and Chevys despite the mess of a market, it’ll keep making them. Even if that means changing plans and retooling factories again.
On Interior’s permitting upset, a nuclear restart milestone, and destroying ‘superpollutants’
A tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean is likely to strengthen into a named storm in the coming days, bringing deadly flooding and powerful winds | Tropical storm Fengshen has killed at least eight in the Philippines as it barrels toward Vietnam and Laos | In Australia, record heat in the eastern Outback hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
Late last month, the Department of Energy clawed back $7.5 billion from 321 separate grants to clean energy projects. A week later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo extensively reported, a list that included three times as many grants, including those that had already been canceled, began circulating. When the agency declined to confirm that the second list as real, speculation mounted that it was either an old document that the Trump administration was using as a threat for political leverage in ongoing negotiations over the government shutdown, or that the White House was staying mum to avoid conflicts over cuts in red districts. Recent events, however, seem to confirm that the longer kill list is precisely what it appears to be. On Monday, the Energy Department told E&E News that it had canceled $700 million in battery manufacturing projects, the first grants off the second list the agency confirmed were on the chopping block. The awards had gone to companies including Ascend Elements, American Battery Technology Co., Anovion, and ICL Specialty Products, as well as the glass manufacturer LuxWall.
Just because the U.S. is pulling back support for the production of batteries doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of purchasers. On Monday, BloombergNEF estimated that global energy storage additions are set to reach 92 gigawatts this year, up 23% from last year, according to the consultancy’s market forecast for the second half of 2025. Utility-scale projects made up 84% of the annual growth, and the U.S. market kept expanding despite federal funding cuts. BloombergNEF also said U.S. buyers were looking for more domestic manufacturers to weather rising tariffs, which might be tricky given recent trends in the space.

Despite the Trump administration’s promises to speed up permitting for energy projects, the Department of the Interior plans to fire more than 200 workers in state offices that manage federal licensing in key regions for fossil fuel, geothermal, and mining development. In a court filing Monday, the agency said it would cut as much as 12% of the staff at its Bureau of Land Management office in Utah, 9% in the California outpost, and 6% in Colorado. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s regional office for the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, was set to lose 5% of its employees. And those are just the local offices I found in the 35-page document that explicitly handled energy permitting. The cuts are part of a plan to “imminently” axe at least 2,000 jobs from the Interior Department overall, including — as NOTUS first reported — hundreds of National Park Service employees.
The administration’s tightened grip over the BLM office in Utah has already caused some headaches for next-generation geothermal companies, according to industry sources I spoke to earlier this year, as local officials who once had the autonomy to greenlight incremental permits for drilling exploration suddenly needed to report back to political officials in Washington. The Interior Department ultimately eased the issue, but the example illustrates what’s at stake when a state office that’s tasked with doing more as new projects proliferate has fewer people and resources.
A month after federal officers raided Hyundai Motor Group’s $26 billion factory in Ellabell, Georgia, shackling more than 300 South Korean workers the Trump administration accused of violating visa rules, the carmaker remains focused on expanding its U.S. production. Facing growing competition from Chinese cars in other markets, the Korean auto giant still sees the U.S. as its best market for growth, The New York Times reported Monday. “My top three priorities are U-S-A,” José Muñoz, chief executive of Hyundai Motor Company, the car-making subsidiary, said at the company’s annual investor gathering, reportedly pausing for effect after each letter. “If we do well here, it’s very good for Korea. It’s very good for the company.”
The chance to reap the fruits of what Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman called Hyundai’s “incredible timing” may be too tempting to pass up, even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid sparked a diplomatic crisis involving South Korea’s foreign minister. The company spent three years working on the 2,900-acre campus near Savannah, and sought to make a public statement about its support for President Donald Trump’s re-industrialization plans by naming the facility Metaplant America. With tariffs now coming into force, Andrew argued, Hyundai is better positioned than most to supply the domestic market.
The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan received fresh nuclear fuel on Monday in what the facility’s owner called “a major milestone on the path to restarting” a permanently shuttered atomic station for the first time in the U.S. As I reported in this newsletter at the time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Holtec International the green light to restart the facility in July, setting a new precedent for reauthorizing operations at a plant that was already slated for decommissioning. The project faced some local opposition from not-in-my-backyard types backed by the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear. But the Trump administration stood behind the project. The $1.5 billion loan granted by the Biden-era Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office to Holtec to fund the reopening was the only financing deal the agency maintained without any interruption through the change in leadership.
Aside from the 68 fuel assemblies arriving, Holtec said “major equipment restoration work is progressing,” including the reassembly of the main turbine generator and the chemical cleaning of the steam generators. Once complete, the work will remake Holtec — until now primarily a manufacturer of casks to store nuclear waste and a decommissioning company — into an operator of an active power plant. In a press release, Holtec CEO Kris Singh called the “esprit de corps of our tirelessly toiling worker force” a “testament to the national consensus and our collective will to harness nuclear energy to meet the galloping demand for power in our country.”
Isometric bills itself as the world’s leading carbon registry, providing what it calls “scientifically rigorous carbon removal credits so companies can reliably meet their climate commitments.” Now the British company is expanding its operations to cover two climate superpollutants: landfill methane and hydrofluorocarbons. The startup plans to develop protocols for eliminating emissions of both superheating gases with its in-house science team and network of more than 300 outside researchers. Among its partners will be Recoolit, a company that collects and destroys refrigerants and previously partnered with Google to destroy the carbon dioxide equivalent of 250,000 metric tons of superpollutants. Another is Cool Effect, a California-based nonprofit that sells carbon credits for landfill gas collection projects. It worked with Google earlier this year to support the installation of methane destruction equipment at a landfill in Cuiabá, Brazil. “Superpollutants are responsible for nearly half of global warming,” Eamon Jubbawy, Isometric’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Isometric is entering this market to bring the scientific rigour needed to help this crucial climate solution scale, using the same transparent approach that is building the trust needed to scale the carbon removal market.”
Call the paradox of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Overall, it’s a disaster. But the mass melting is fueling the engine of Arctic food chains: algae. A new study led by the University of Copenhagen suggests there will be more food for future marine life than previously thought. That will also improve the ocean’s carbon dioxide uptake, which the researchers said was “likely good news” for the climate. “But biological systems are very complex, so it is hard to make firm predictions, because other mechanisms may pull in the opposite direction,” Lasse Riemann, professor at the Department of Biology and senior author of the study, said in a press release. “We do not yet know whether the net effect will be beneficial for the climate.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Cool Effect’s role in capturing landfill methane.