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Thanks to Hertz, another 20,000 choices just hit the market. (But be careful.)
The news that Hertz is selling off one-third of its electric vehicle fleet after limited demand and costly repairs means U.S. consumers just got 20,000 more choices when shopping for a used EV. And with prices continuing to fall, now may be one of the best times to snag a pre-owned electric at a nice discount. But buyer beware.
Last year, used car prices finally began to slip after pandemic-induced supply issues. EVs led the way, with pre-owned models down 22% from the previous year, according to Cox Automotive. Tesla saw the biggest price drops, specifically with the average Model 3 going for 21% less than the year before. Hertz’s liquidation of its EVs is certainly going to help keep used prices in check, particularly in oversaturated markets.
“EV inventory is already far outpacing current consumer demand,” says Pat Ryan, Founder and CEO of CoPilot, a AI-driven car shopping assistant. “Used EVs have a market days supply of 51, compared to 43 for used gas-powered cars and 44 for used hybrids.” And it’s even higher for new models.
Ryan suggests the reason for the glut comes down to a few issues: Early adopters and luxury buyers made the switch to electric a few years ago, limiting demand while also keeping a steady supply of pre-owned vehicles hitting the market. There’s also price, charging, and even a partisan divide. And with traditional automakers like GM and Ford overproducing EVs relative to demand (newcomers like Tesla aren’t necessarily seeing similar problems), there are a lot of new and used options to choose from.
But for EV shoppers that might be a “potential advantage,” says Ryan. “Now might be a good time to buy as some dealers will likely be hoping to make a deal in order to move inventory off their lots.”
What kind of deal is the real question. While a $21,500 Tesla Model 3 may seem enticing, the same issues that plagued Hertz – including the high cost of repairs – should give some buyers pause.
“If someone did want to buy a car from Hertz, buyers should be aware that most rental companies fix their vehicles in-house,” says Tom McParland, the owner of Automatch Consulting. “And if the car was involved in an accident that history may never appear on a Carfax.”
While fleet vehicles are relatively well-maintained to ensure they’re on the road and making money, anyone that’s regularly rented a car knows the wear and tear is substantial. The high-tech systems that power modern EVs are one thing, but the most costly item – the battery – is where buyers have to be the most vigilant.
“The big issue with used EVs is that it is currently difficult to accurately ascertain what the remaining battery life is," says McParland. Because of that, he says, “a lot of the higher-mile cars will end up wholesaled and picked up by those questionable used car lots with ‘guaranteed credit approval.’”
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The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.
It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.