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The Chinese EV giant doesn’t sell cars in the U.S., but it does sell buses.
The Biden administration continued its crackdown on carbon pollution from the transportation sector on Friday, finalizing tough new limits on tailpipe emissions from heavy-duty trucks and buses.
The new rules, which the Environmental Protection Agency projects will keep a billion tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, could push more trucks and buses to use electric motors or experiment with alternative fuels. They apply to a plethora of big vehicles — delivery vans, trash trucks, city and school buses, even 18-wheelers — and go into effect starting in model year 2027.
As Camila Domonoske writes for NPR, these new rules are contentious — far more divisive than the new EPA limits on light-duty car and truck pollution that were unveiled earlier this month. While public-health groups such as the American Lung Association have celebrated the rules, citing their more than $13 billion in net benefits for the public, fossil-fuel trade groups and truckers’ lobbyists have said that they will be expensive to comply with and a “forced march toward electric vehicles.”
Of course, it was never going to be simple to fix the environmental problem posed by America’s heavy-duty vehicle fleet. The transportation sector now produces 29% of America’s carbon pollution, more than any other part of the economy. Heavy-duty trucks and buses are responsible for about a quarter of that pollution, making them second only to passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs as a driver of transportation-related emissions.
Given all the attention on these rules, I wanted to highlight two very different companies that will be affected by them. One is an automaker that is increasingly synonymous with China’s goals of creating a new global mass market for clean vehicles. The other is an all-American electric truck maker that is a particular favorite of upscale Millennial and Gen X dads.
The first is BYD, the Chinese automaker that last year surpassed Tesla as the world’s No. 1 producer of electric and plug-in vehicles. Here in America, most of the attention paid to BYD recently has focused on its zippy, unbelievably affordable electric cars, such as the $9,000 BYD Seagull.
Of course, some of that hand wringing is premature: BYD doesn’t even sell cars in the United States yet, and it’s only begun to push operations into our neighboring market of Mexico. But what BYD does sell in the U.S. is buses — a lot of them. Over the past decade, transit agencies and airports across North America have ordered more than 1,000 buses from BYD, the company says; it cites customers in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, and Louisiana. From an American perspective, BYD is and remains a bus company: It operates an electric-bus factory in Los Angeles County, California, that has been described as the largest in North America, and it recently opened bus-repair centers in New Jersey and Indiana so it could service East Coast and Midwest clients.
BYD, I should add, is not the only electric-bus maker in North America. Nova Bus, a Canadian company owned by the Volvo Group, just received the largest electric bus order in the continent’s history. The Volvo Group also recently bought part of Proterra, an American electric-bus maker that went bankrupt last year. (Somewhat confusingly, the Volvo Group, which is headquartered in Sweden, is a different company from Volvo Cars, which is owned by the Chinese automaker Geely.) Thomas Built, the iconic American maker of yellow school buses, has also unveiled a single electric model, the C2 Jouley. (Fun fact: Even though it makes an icon of Americana, Thomas Built is owned by Daimler.)
Even if BYD reaps some business from the EPA rule, it will be somewhat limited in doing so. In 2021, the Biden administration said that transit agencies could not spend federal money on manufacturers linked to China.
But BYD isn’t the only company that could stand to benefit from these new EPA rules. Another is much closer to home: the electric-truck maker, Rivian.
Although most readers will know Rivian for its rugged and neotenous electric trucks, it also makes delivery trucks and work vans. These vans were initially designed to be sold to Amazon, which owns roughly 16% of Rivian, but they have since blossomed into their own product line. Companies can now buy a Rivian Delivery 500, a chipper work van with 500 cubic feet of cargo space and 160 miles of range, for $83,000 or more.
When I’ve analyzed Rivian’s financial future recently, I haven’t focused as much on its delivery vans in part because that business seemed to be decelerating. Amazon bought fewer delivery vans in the fourth quarter of 2023 than it did in the third quarter, and while Rivian’s executives have blamed that pause on Amazon’s busy holiday-shopping season, it seemed prudent for those of us outside the company to wait and see what will happen to it more broadly. As I’ve written, Rivian needs all the cash it can muster to cross the so-called EV valley of death and survive until early 2026, when it will begin selling its affordable R2 SUV.
But perhaps these EPA rules will generate more demand for electric delivery vans than Rivian might project. If that happens, then other American automakers will be happy, too — such as Ford, whose $46,000 electric E-Transit cargo van could also help companies meet the new rules.
And automakers won’t be the only American companies who benefit. The EPA projects that the new rule’s biggest winner might be the heavy-duty trucking and cargo industry itself — truck owners and fleet operators will save $3.5 billion in fuel costs each year because of the rule, the agency says. But to conserve that money, they might have to shell out a little more at the outset for slightly more expensive vehicles. If that’s true, then the rule seems prudent, almost thrifty. After all, nobody ever said saving money would be cheap.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify limitations on the use of federal funds by transit agencies, as well as the ownership of Proterra and Thomas Built.
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A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.
Along with Senator John Curtis of Utah, the Iowa senator is aiming to preserve the definition of “begin construction” as it applies to tax credits.
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley wants “begin construction” to mean what it means.
To that end, Grassley has placed a “hold” on three nominees to the Treasury Department, the agency tasked with writing the rules and guidance for implementing the tax provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, many of which depend on that all-important definition.
Grassley and other Republican senators had negotiated a “glidepath for the orderly phaseout” of tax credits for renewables, the senator in a statement announcing the hold, giving developers until July 2026 to start construction on projects (or complete the projects and have them operating by the end of 2027) to qualify for tax credits.
Days after signing the law, however, President Trump signed an executive order calling for new guidance on what exactly starting construction means. The title of that order, “Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable, Foreign Controlled Energy Sources,” has generated understandable concern within the renewables industry that, as part of a deal to get conservative House members to support the bill, the Treasury Department will write new guidance making it much more difficult for wind and solar projects to qualify for tax credits.
“What it means for a project to ‘begin construction'’ has been well established by Treasury guidance for more than a decade,” Grassley said. Under these longstanding definitions, “beginning construction” can mean undertaking “physical work of a significant nature,” which can include or buying certain long-lead equipment or components like transformers. Another way to qualify for the credits is to spend 5% of the total cost of the project.
A more restrictive interpretation of “begin construction,” however, could turn the tax credit language into a dead letter, especially when combined with the rest of the administration’s full-spectrum legal assault on renewable energy.
Grassley said that new guidance is expected within two weeks, and that “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent, I intend to continue to object to the consideration of these Treasury nominees.”Grassley has a long history with production tax credits for wind energy, playing a pivotal role in their extension in 2015. “As the father of the first wind energy tax credit in 1992, I can say that the tax credit was never meant to be permanent,” Grassley said at the time. “The five-year extension for wind energy brings about the best possible long-term outcome that provides certainty, predictability and a responsible phase-down of a tax incentive for a renewable energy source.”
Almost 60% of Iowa’s electricity is generated by wind turbines, the highest proportion of any state, according to Energy Information Administration data.
Utah Senator John Curtis has joined Grassley in placing a hold on nominees, delaying their vote before the whole Senate, according to Politico’s Joshua Siegel. Grassley and Curtis, alongside Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, were unable to get a meeting with the Treasury Department to discuss the guidance, Siegel reported.