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C’mon Ford. Don’t let me down.
Automakers sit at the towering heights of global capitalism. Nearly every important industry or commodity — steel, rubber, chemicals, semiconductors, minerals, and, of course, oil — feeds into car-making. Car companies receive so much government support that their brands often come to symbolize the state itself: Volkswagen, Toyota, and Ford are arguably more tied up with their countries’ national histories than, say, currywurst, sushi, or cheeseburgers.
Undertaking the construction of a wholly new car is such an expensive and arduous challenge that multiple automakers will often collaborate on it, creating a “platform” that involves a shared chassis and a set of interlocking components.
So it would be folly — if not outright delusion — to look at one of these companies and tell them that they should make a car for no reason other than that you want them to. Surely Ford Motor Company has better things to do than read a column and decide to shift its product line accordingly.
But that is what I’m going to do.
Ford should take its compact Maverick pickup truck — the smallest truck in their fleet — and release it as a plug-in hybrid. Here are the seven reasons why.
I like little trucks. I realize this is a character deficiency, and a somewhat unusual vice for my demographic: I’m a city-dwelling climate-change reporter who has no particular love for the canyon-face monsters that make up most modern pickup lines. But it’s hopefully a forgivable one.
Forty years ago, if you wanted a compact pickup, you could have bought the trusty little Ford Ranger, a 15-foot bear cub of a truck that weighed a mere ton and could haul up to 1,600 pounds. The Ranger was a revolution, signaling that American automakers weren’t content to cede the compact pickup market to Japanese brands like Mazda and Toyota.
U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration via Wikimedia Commons.
Then compact pickups began to vanish. Toyota’s sprightly Tacoma, once a tail-wagger of a utility vehicle, slowly became super-sized. Ford stopped making the Ranger in 2012. By the middle of the 2010s, essentially no small trucks were available on the American market
Recently, compacts have started to come back. Ford brought back the Ranger, although the new model is as sleek and functional as a linebacker. Hyundai has released the Santa Cruz, the closest thing in America to the venerable Australian ute. Then in 2021, Ford started making the Maverick. At 16-feet long and 3,600 pounds, it’s bulkier and heavier — but not much bigger — than the chipper Rangers of yore. The Maverick is so popular that Ford had to stop taking orders for it last year. And while the Mav is currently offered as a hybrid … Ford could do better.
I take it as a given that Ford will eventually release an all-electric Maverick. But in the meantime, a plug-in hybrid would be potentially more useful. Here’s why.
A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, or PHEV, is just what it sounds like: a car or truck that has a gas tank and a battery that gets a little bit of range — maybe 30 miles. That larger battery differentiates a PHEV from a conventional hybrid, like the Prius (or the current Maverick hybrid), whose battery can only propel the car shorter distances or regenerate energy during braking.
PHEVs are more expensive than hybrids, and they have a reputation for being, well, the jazz choirs of power trains: By trying to do too much at once, they don’t do anything well.
Theoretically, you can use the gas tank in a PHEV as a backup power source, making short errands using only the battery. But a recent study from Transport & Environment, a European think tank, found that some PHEVs fell short of their advertised electric range, and therefore emitted five to seven times as much CO₂ in cities as claimed. And because of the weight of their batteries, PHEVs also require more gasoline than conventional hybrids.
But for all their downsides, PHEVs remain the best way for city-dwellers like me who don’t have EV chargers at home to take part in the EV revolution. I also only drive a few times a month — probably not often enough to justify locking up precious (and still scarce) EV metals in a vehicle that will mostly sit around on the street. Most of my trips are to the grocery store, which has charging in the parking lot. For a certain kind of consumer — i.e., me, the city-dwelling compact-pickup lover — a PHEV is ideal for right now.
According to MotorTrend, someone spotted a Ford Maverick last year with all-wheel drive and a PHEV power train. So it’s out there. It might be sitting in a Batcave-style basement somewhere in Michigan, but someone has done it.
“There’s no current need for a PHEV,” Mike Levine, a Ford spokesman, told me in an email, when I told him I was writing this story.
The “Maverick hybrid is incredibly efficient (40 mpg city) and affordable. The EPA estimates that Maverick hybrid’s total annual fuel cost is just $1,500,” he said. On top of that, Ford only sells one PHEV at the moment: a Ford Escape variant that goes for about $40,000. The Maverick, by comparison, starts at about $22,500.
Let’s stipulate a few things. The first is that even if the United States aggressively ramps up the rollout of electric vehicles, gasoline — which is a fossil fuel! — will be available for a long time. The Biden administration hopes that EVs will make up 50% of new car sales in 2030 and 66% of new sales in 2032. That means that gas-burning cars will by definition make up half of the new car fleet in 2030 and one-third of the fleet in 2032. Under the EPA’s current proposal, most new heavy-duty trucks sold in those years will burn gasoline or diesel, too.
A rollout that quick may be delusional — you can make a plausible case that the EV transition will go faster or slower than the government believes. But if we assume that it’s a plausible base case, then we can also conclude that gas-burning cars will remain on the road well into the late 2040s. They might be costly to run and face extremely high fees in some places; driving one may incur some social stigma, like smoking indoors today; gasoline itself may even become a specialty rural fuel. But without a mandatory federal buy-back program of internal-combustion cars, it will probably be no rarer to see a gas car in the year 2050 than it is to see, say, a Subaru Baja today.
And that will be bad. Fossil fuels cause climate change. We should aim to eliminate them from society as soon as possible. But if you are alive in the 2040s, God willing, then you probably won’t be running to the Wal-mazon Mart in a gas car. Most vehicle miles traveled in the year 2050 probably won’t involve gasoline or diesel.
But it’s plausible that you, you Aging Millennial, may — you just may — have a gas-powered truck in your garage, one that you almost never use but that reminds you of your younger, freer days. One that mostly sits there, smiling idly, til you take it out to give the grandkids a ride around the farm or haul the occasional stump. A trusty, plastic-cladded friend. A golden retriever of a vehicle.
A plug-in hybrid Ford Maverick.
Can you help your friend move with a Prius Prime? Can you carry some flat-packed bookshelves home from an Ikea run? Can you carry an unused mattress to the dump? Don’t answer that because you actually can do all three things with a Prius. But it would be way more fun to do it with a truck.
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On a second nuclear revival, a new fusion startup, and Africa’s solar boom
Current conditions: A large dust storm blew over the Phoenix area, causing damage and airport delays • Typhoon Kajiki made landfall in central Vietnam, leaving at least four dead in flooding as heavy rains deluged Laos and parts of Thailand • Florida faces increased risk of flooding as tropical thunderstorms gather over the Gulf of Mexico.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency suspended nearly 40 employees on Tuesday who signed a letter to Congress warning that the Trump administration’s cuts had damaged the nation’s ability to respond to extreme weather disasters. Of the 182 FEMA staffers who signed the letter, 36 attached their names. Those that did received emails Tuesday night saying they had been placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately, and continuing until further notice,” according to The New York Times.
The letter, sent Monday, came days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In it, staffers slammed President Donald Trump’s proposal to dramatically downsize FEMA, shifting more responsibility and cost for disaster response to the states. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office and our mission of helping people before, during and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the agency employees wrote.
Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the green light to restart a permanently shuttered nuclear plant for the first time in U.S. history, with plans to bring the Palisades atomic station in Michigan back online later this year. Now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has started the process to restart a second nuclear plant, the Duane Arnold station. The agency approved a waiver request on Monday that will allow utility NextEra Energy to restart the single-reactor nuclear plant in Iowa by the end of 2029.
NextEra closed down the plant in 2020 amid mounting financial challenges for the nuclear facility. But surging electricity demand and a newfound societal appreciation of the 24-hour, zero-carbon power atomic energy produces has put a new premium on keeping existing plants running, particularly given the high costs and long timelines associated with building new reactors. Last year, Microsoft agreed to spend $16 billion to reopen the idled reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to power its data centers. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote at the time of the deal, “The days of nuclear power plants shuttering not because of old age, safety concerns, or local opposition, but because of the economics of subsidized wind and solar and cheap natural gas, are likely over.” On Monday, the Palisades plant officially transitioned from decommissioning status back to operations status.
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Yet another startup is joining the race to develop power plants with nuclear fusion. Launched Wednesday morning, Inertia Enterprises aims to commercialize the technology that led to the breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022, when humanity successfully generated more energy from fusion than it took to ignite the reaction for the first time. While the vast majority of public funding into fusion energy research had gone into magnetic fusion, which depends on large doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors, the breakthrough came through inertial fusion, using lasers.
The company — founded by fusion scientist Andrea Kritcher, fusion power plant designer Mike Dunne, and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson — aims “to take the most direct, scientifically-proven path from what is working today at LLNL to commercial energy,” according to a press release. To do so, the company is developing “a new generation of mass-produced, low cost lasers and fuel targets that leverage the groundbreaking scientific result of fusion ignition,” and has licensed nearly 200 patents. “The goal of delivering limitless fusion energy has attracted tens of billions of dollars in government investment and decades of research, culminating in the achievement of ignition just a couple of years ago,” Lawson, who will serve as Inertia’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Standing on the shoulders of giants, we see a clear path from big science to commercial energy by scaling up the industrial base to the scale needed for laser inertial fusion.”.
Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup TerraPower signed an agreement with the Utah government on Monday to develop a potential atomic energy station using the company’s fourth-generation sodium-cooled reactor. As part of the deal, TerraPower will work with the Utah Office of Energy Development as part of Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s “Operation Gigawatt” program to build out transmission capacity and invest in clean-firm electricity sources such as nuclear power and geothermal energy. “Today marks an important step forward for energy in Utah,” Cox said in a statement. “Operation Gigawatt is about adding capacity from diverse sources — nuclear, natural gas, geothermal and more — so families and businesses have power that is affordable, reliable and clean.”
The move comes months after rival nuclear developer Holtec International inked a deal with the Utah government to establish a manufacturing and worker-training hub for its buildout of small modular reactors across the Mountain West in the Beehive State.
Solar imports are surging, especially in South Africa. Ember
Over the past 12 months, Africa’s imports of Chinese solar panels soared 60%, to more than 15 gigawatts, according to a report released Tuesday by the clean energy research firm Ember. In that same time period, 20 countries on the continent set new records for solar imports. If installed, the panels could radically upend power generation in some countries. Sierra Leone could generate volumes of electricity equivalent to 61% of its total output in 2023 just from the panels imported in the past year.
A chart showing solar imports in 20 African countriesEmber
“The take-off of solar in Africa is a pivotal moment,” Dave Jones, the chief analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “This report is a call to action, urging stronger research, analysis and reporting on solar’s rise — to ensure the world’s cheapest electricity source, fulfills its vast potential to transform the African continent.”
A team of astronomers detected for the first time a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of multi-ringed dust and gas. “Dozens of theory papers have been written about these observed disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” Laird Close, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a press release. He called the discovery a “big deal” because the absence of planet discoveries in places where they should be has prompted many in the scientific community to invoke alternative explanations for the ring-and-gap pattern found in many protoplanetary disks.
Rob and Jesse revisit the basics of the ultra-clogged electricity interconnection queue.
Shift Key is off for Labor Day, so we’re running this classic episode.
The power grid is straining as new data centers, factories, and electric vehicles come online. For the first time in 15 years, American electricity demand is rising again.
The easiest option is to meet that new demand with new supply — new power plants. But in many parts of the country, it can take years to hook up new wind, solar, and batteries to the grid. The reason why is a clogged and broken system called the interconnection queue.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, which first aired in 2024, Jesse and Rob speak with two experts about how to understand — and how to fix — what is perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid.
Tyler Norris is a doctoral student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He was formerly vice president of development at Cypress Creek Renewables, and he served on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper’s Carbon Policy Working Group. Claire Wayner is a senior associate at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program, where she works on the clean and competitive grids team.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So, Tyler, you’ve been proposing on Twitter — or on X, I suppose — kind of one weird trick that would improve the interconnection process and make us deploy a lot more clean energy faster and save people the billions of dollars we were just talking about.
What is it? Please enlighten us.
Tyler Norris: So as mentioned, Texas is adding clean electricity much faster than every other market — and not just clean electricity, every form of generation capacity you can imagine. And the reason they’re able to do that is because they’re not subjecting those generators to all those severe conditions that I mentioned earlier and then allocating the cost of upgrading the grid to those generators upfront.
Instead, they’re attempting to proactively plan the system in response to generators that show up and send that market signal regarding where there may be opportunities to upgrade the grid. And it works, of course, because Texas is an energy-only electricity market, so they’re not studying the projects for their capacity value, so there’s some simplifications that make it more viable.
That said, even outside ERCOT, there’s a lot we could do to make this what we call energy-only interconnection option more viable for generators, and I think it could offer a lot of benefits. It’s much lower cost. It’s much faster to get projects online. It can contribute to production cost savings. It also provides a reserve of generators that can be upgraded to capacity resources if and when network capacity becomes available. And it can actually contribute to reliability and reduce the risk of shedding load during reliability events, even though they’re not formally qualified as what we call capacity resources
Meyer: Can you give us an example of what you mean? What is ERCOT actually doing here?
Norris: So it means that the Texas grid operator is willing to curtail generators as necessary to avoid any reliability impacts on the system. And so they’re basically, they’re managing the system in real time. And this does lead to a higher rate of curtailment on average for especially some of these renewable generators. And so that’s an important dimension of it. But there’s a lot of nuance there, too. Even the capacity resources outside of Texas can be curtailed during congestion events.
So they’re not assigning grid upgrades to the projects upfront. They’re instead looking at where the generators show up and connect to the system and then identifying the most valuable grid upgrades from a cost and a reliability standpoint and prioritizing those.
Mentioned:
Tyler’s study on “energy only” interconnection rules
Matthew Zeitlin on the big problems with PJM — and on Tyler’s research into flexible loads
FERC Order 2023 on Improvements to Generator Interconnection Procedures and Agreements
Advanced Energy United report on “Unlocking America's Energy: How to Efficiently Connect New Generation to the Grid
NRDC: “PJM’s Capacity Auction: The Real Story”
Rob’s downshift; Jesse’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
On Trump’s latest wind target, new critical minerals, and methane maps
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Fernand is heading northward toward Bermuda • In the Pacific, Tropic Storm Juliette is active about 520 miles southwest of Baja California, with winds of up to 65 miles per hour • Temperatures are surging past 100 degrees Fahrenheit in South Korea.
Renewable investments dim in the U.S.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
In the United States, investments in renewable energy fell by 36% — equal to $20.5 billion — compared to the second half of last year, according to new data from the consultancy BloombergNEF. The drop “reflects a rush of construction toward the end of last year as developers sought to lock in lucrative tax credits, followed by a sharp drop this year as policy conditions worsened,” the report stated. The European Union, on the other hand, ratcheted up spending on renewables by 63% — or nearly $30 billion — in the first half of this year compared to the second half of 2024. Drawing an even sharper contrast, investments into both onshore and offshore wind made up the bulk of the growth in Europe as the Trump administration has placed the harshest restrictions on wind turbines of any other energy source.
Overall, global investment into clean energy rose 10% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. That included a worldwide increase in wind investments of 24% and a jump in new solar investment of 5%.
The U.S. Geological Survey released its latest list of critical minerals on Monday. The report highlights some shifts in U.S. production and concerns in Washington over potential supply disruptions from supposedly friendly powers. While the analysis identifies China as the biggest threat to the U.S. economy in 46 of the 84 commodities studied, “Canada and South Africa both show up as potential points of disruption across eight imports,” Farrell Gregory, a non-resident fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, wrote on X. “Interestingly, Canada is identified as having a high-risk for disruption, more than South Africa and Russia.”
There were new bright spots in the report. The USGS removed tellurium, a silvery brittle metal used in semiconductors, from the list of risk resources it was added to in 2022. That’s because a new Rio Tinto mine transformed the U.S. from an importer into a net exporter in recent years.
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
Gas power plants are booming in the U.S. as demand surges, but the growth doesn’t yet mark a fundamental shift away from renewables, clean-energy analyst Michael Thomas wrote in a post on his Substack newsletter, Distilled. “If there were to be an unprecedented pivot to gas, you’d expect Texas to be ground zero for it,” he said. “The state has done everything it can to prop up fossil fuel power in recent years. It’s also one of the most permissive when it comes to environmental regulations and permitting.” Despite major growth in the past year, he wrote, gas made up just 10% of proposed new project capacity in Texas so far this year. The remaining 90% of capacity came from solar, wind, and battery projects. Last year alone, renewable and storage developers proposed 100 gigawatts of clean capacity — seven times more than gas developers proposed.
A new map allowing users to track risks from natural gas super-emitters launched Tuesday from the independent energy science and policy institute PSE Healthy Energy. The Methane Risk Map is a web tool with clickable markers representing individual methane super-emitting events throughout the U.S. Selecting one, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “opens up a heatmap and information panel that shows the concentration of benzene, methane, and other pollutants present in that particular plume, the modeled distance each one traveled during the event, the demographics of the population exposed, and whether there were any sensitive facilities, such as schools or hospitals, in the exposure pathway.”
Though methane, the primary component of natural gas, is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and can pose an explosive risk at high concentrations, other components in unrefined natural gas present more direct public health risks. These include carcinogens like benzene and other health-harming substances, including toluene.
The grid-tech startup Splight has raised nearly $13 million to fund the commercial scaling of its breakthrough software. Unlike dynamic line rating, which uses weather and temperature data to open up more space on existing power lines to funnel as much as 30% more electricity, Splight claims its "dynamic congestion management” software can double the amount of room for electrons to flow without building new grid infrastructure.