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The electric vehicle company Rivian is known for products that are, well, large: pickup trucks, SUVs, and delivery vans. But for the past three years, it has been stealthily designing the technology platform for a slew of much smaller, yet-to-be-revealed electric vehicles — think bikes, scooters, and golf carts. Today, Rivian officially spun off that project into its own company, called Also, while … also … announcing that the new venture had raised a $105 million Series B funding round.
The name Also, the company’s CEO Chris Yu told me, points to the idea that owning a car and owning a smaller EV are not mutually exclusive — rather, it’s about finding the right tool for the job. “If I’m taking my family to Yosemite on the weekend, I want to use my Rivian R1S, but for my daily school runs, probably not. That’s not the most efficient or enjoyable way to do it,” Yu told me. In the U.S. about 80% of all car trips are 15 miles or less, and over 50% of are less than six miles. The goal of Also, Yu said, is for smaller EV’s — or “micromobility solutions” — to replace cars for those shorter daily excursions.
Prior to his new role, Yu worked as vice president on Rivian’s “Future Programs” team, working to incubate Also alongside Rivian’s CEO RJ Scaringe, who will now serve as the new company’s board chair while continuing to lead Rivian. The incumbent EV-automaker participated in Also’s Series B alongside the lead investor, venture capital firm Eclipse, and will maintain a minority ownership stake in it.
Also’s flagship product is set to launch in the U.S. and Europe early next year, and will be followed by consumer and commercial products for the Asian and South American markets, though the company hasn’t yet said what these products will be. In the U.S., electric scooters and e-bikes have taken off in cities, while in some suburban areas, beach towns and retirement communities, golf carts are ubiquitous. Across much of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, three-wheelers such as rickshaws and mototaxis are everywhere, and are increasingly being electrified.
But there’s still a long way to go. “The rate of electrification for small vehicles across the world is far, far lower than cars, like low single digit percent,” Yu told me. He said that what will set Also apart from existing offerings — besides electrification, of course — is the scale the company aims to operate at and its intuitive technology platform.
Also is developing everything in-house, from the motors to the software, which Yu said will lead to the type of seamless, personalized user experiences that customers have come to expect from newer EVs such as Rivians or Teslas. Think “walking up to your vehicle and having it automatically know that it’s you and unlocking,” Yu told me, or “adjusting to your profiles, your media plays, what you were last playing, etc.” Making something like an e-bike or electric golf cart “smarter,” Yu explained, could also help with issues such as security — potentially making Also’s TBD products less vulnerable to theft — or safety, such as gauging if someone is riding at a dangerous speed for the area or in an inappropriate zone.
Even with this type of advanced technology integration, Yu claimed that the company’s products will be cost competitive with what’s on the market today due to the scale that Also aims to achieve. Yu’s hope is that taking advantage of Rivian’s existing technologies and retail footprint will help.
Whatever form factor Also’s small EVs take, Yu told me they will embody Rivian’s adventurous spirit, “weaving in some of what people aspire to do and look forward to doing, whether it’s on a weekend or summer vacations,” he explained. So will this look like an off-roading golf cart? A smarter electric mountain bike? A scooter that also rips on the backroads? We’ll have to wait until next year to see.
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The Esmeralda 7 project is another sign that Trump’s solar freeze is over.
The Esmeralda 7 solar project, a collection of proposed solar farms and batteries that would encompass tens of thousands of acres of federal public lands in western Nevada, appears to be moving towards the end of its federal permitting process.
The farms developed by NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and others together would add up to 6,200 megawatts of solar generation capacity, making it the largest solar project in already solar-rich Nevada.
To get a sense of the massive scale of the project, the two newly installed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are about 1,000 megawatts each and the Empire Wind offshore wind project that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered a halt to this week had a planned capacity of just over 800 megawatts.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management updated its website for the project, indicating that the final Environmental Impact Statement for the project would be published on April 25 and the record of decision would be published on July 18.
A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told me that the Bureau wouldn’t have anything new to share until the publication of the final environmental impact statement “in the coming days or week or so.”
Still, the fact that the BLM is making progress on a decision at all is yet another sign that the “freeze” on renewables projects put in place in the early days of the Trump administration has begun to thaw, at least for solar and transmission projects.
The new decision date is also consistent with the freeze being over. A timeline presented at a BLM meeting in September envisioned the final Environmental Impact Statement being issued sometime between the fall of last year and spring of this year, with a record of decision in April. The listed July date would roughly match with the project’s permitting being delayed by two months.
The 60-day renewable permitting pause was one of Trump’s first actions in office and the offshore wind industry especially has continued to bear the brunt of the administration’s anti-renewable wrath.
But solar and transmission appear to be a different story: a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told Heatmap in March that “there is currently no freeze on processing renewable applications for solar” or for “making authorization decisions.” Earlier that month, BLM had approved a transmission line for a solar project in Southern California saying that the project would “Unleash American Energy.”
Like many large scale Nevada solar projects, the Esmeralda 7 has attracted some opposition from some area residents and conservation groups. The transmission line necessary for the project, Greenlink West, was approved in September.
For the first time, his administration targets an offshore wind project already under construction.
The Trump administration will try to stop work on Empire Wind, an offshore wind project by Equinor south of Long Island that was going through active construction, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted to X on Wednesday.
Burgum announced that he directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to “halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
A memo to the agency, which was obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, references “revelations” of “serious deficiencies” in the approval process for Empire Wind. The reported memo does not provide any further description or evidence to back this claim. When we requested comment on the Free Beacon story, an Interior spokesperson simply pointed to Burgum’s short announcement.
Equinor provided a statement to Heatmap confirming after Burgum’s announcement that it “just received a notification from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) regarding our Empire Wind 1 project, which has been in construction since 2024.”
“We will engage directly with BOEM and the Department of Interior to understand the questions raised about the permits we have received from authorities,” Equinor spokesman David Schoetz said. “We will not comment about the potential consequences until we know more.”
This is the second fully permitted offshore wind project that the Trump administration has publicly targeted and attempted to stop.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, a wind farm under development off the coast of New Jersey, after anti-wind groups petitioned the agency to do so. The agency did not attempt to justify its decision other than to say that it gives the agency “the opportunity to reevaluate the Project and its environmental impacts in light of” Trump’s executive order requesting an assessment of the government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects.
A few days later, we were first to report that Representative Chris Smith — one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress — asked Burgum to halt work on Empire Wind, asserting that the environmental review process for the project was “completely inadequate.”
If Empire Wind is indeed halted, it would be the first offshore wind project under construction to be stopped by the Trump administration. Equinor disclosed in a project update that it started subsea rock installation last month, although the company’s statement to Heatmap indicates construction may have begun as early as last year. A halt to work on Empire Wind would cast a shadow over other offshore wind projects under construction, including Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia project, which we scooped could also wind up in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
Stopping Empire Wind would also mean a huge blow to New York State’s climate and clean energy goals.
After the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant closed in 2021, the population-dense metro area in and around New York City has mostly replaced that carbon-free source of energy with natural gas. Offshore wind was supposed to be a path to moving away from reliance on the fossil fuel. The state’s target of deploying 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 was already going to be nearly impossible due to Trump’s pause on new leases and permits. Without the 800 megawatt Empire Wind project, New York will only have 1 gigawatt in the pipeline.
This news has already sparked an aggressive response from the American Clean Power Association, the largest renewables trade association, which released a statement pleading for the administration to “quickly address perceived inadequacies in the prior permit approvals” and that “halting construction of fully permitted energy projects is the literal opposite of an energy abundance agenda.”
“With skyrocketing energy demand and increasing consumer prices, we need streamlined permitting for all domestic energy resources,” American Clean Power CEO Jason Grumet stated. “Doubling back to reconsider permits after projects are under construction sends a chilling signal to all energy investment.”
“NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind related actions.”
A group of Republican lawmakers were hoping a new report released Monday would give them fresh ammunition in their fight against offshore wind development. Instead, they got … pretty much nothing. But they’re milking it anyway.
The report in question originated with a spate of whale deaths in early 2023. Though the deaths had no known connection to the nascent industry, they fueled a GOP campaign to shut down the renewable energy revolution that was taking place up and down the East Coast. New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith joined with three of his colleagues to solicit the Government Accountability Office to launch an investigation into the impacts of offshore wind on the environment, maritime safety, military operations, commercial fishing, and other concerns.
The resulting document is more of an overview than an investigation, and its findings are far from the smoking gun Republicans were looking for. Its main message is that the government and developers should do a better job engaging with Tribes and the fishing industry. As for whales, it basically shrugs. “NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind related actions and has not recorded marine mammal deaths from offshore wind activities,” it says.
But Smith seized on other findings to declare that the report “gives credibility and vindication” to concerns he has raised about offshore wind, pointing specifically to a section about defense and radar systems. The steel in offshore wind turbines has “high electromagnetic reflectivity,” which can disrupt certain radar systems, the report says. In a short paragraph about strategies to mitigate the issue, it notes that the Department of Defense can request that certain areas be excluded from development — which it has already done — or curtail operations as needed.
Smith also highlighted a portion of the report that says “large shipping vessels may have trouble avoiding turbines in the event of a mechanical failure.” Most projects on the East Coast have proposed spacing turbines at least 1 nautical mile apart, but shipping vessels may need up to 2 nautical miles in the event they need to make a sharp turn. The report doesn’t make any specific recommendations, but notes that the BOEM can prohibit construction within a certain distance of shipping lanes and require developers to create a “lighting, marking, and signaling plan” to improve safety.
Smith recently joined anti-offshore wind activists calling on the government to halt work on Empire Wind 1, an offshore wind farm off the coast of New York and New Jersey developed by Equinor that started construction this month. In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, he wrote that the environmental review process under the Biden administration “was completely inadequate,” and that the Empire Wind project could thus be “catastrophic.”
The GAO report finds little fault in the previous administration’s environmental review process. It does, however, identify “gaps in Interior’s oversight of development.” For example, the BOEM has been inconsistent in the way it consults with Tribes to identify areas for wind development, as well as in how it considers or addresses the concerns Tribes raise. Part of the problem, per the report, is that Tribes have limited capacity to review documents and engage with the agency, and that government grants meant to address this gap are inaccessible because they require the Tribes to cover some of the costs. The report also finds that while the agency has taken steps to incorporate the fishing industry’s concerns into developing new lease areas, it hasn’t adequately communicated those steps to the industry. In addition, while the agency has called for a compensation mechanism to reimburse fishing companies for losses related to offshore wind, it has not yet established one.
The five recommendations the GAO makes in light of its findings are all related to boosting agency capacity for engagement and information sharing. Far from building up the office, however, the Trump administration has laid off more than 2,000 interior department employees, including eight of the roughly 80 staffers who worked on planning and permitting offshore wind.
Smith is taking the report’s findings — including a note that there are still unknowns about offshore wind’s impacts — as proof that development should be shut down. “Ocean wind energy development is an egregiously flawed and dangerous initiative and must be stopped,” he said in a press release Monday.