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Money is pouring in — and deadlines are approaching fast.
There’s no quick fix for decarbonizing medium- and long-distance flights. Batteries are typically too heavy, and hydrogen fuel takes up too much space to offer a practical solution, leaving sustainable aviation fuels made from plants and other biomass, recycled carbon, or captured carbon as the primary options. Traditionally, this fuel is much more expensive — and the feedstocks for it much more scarce — than conventional petroleum-based jet fuel. But companies are now racing to overcome these barriers, as recent months have seen backers throw hundreds of millions behind a series of emergent, but promising solutions.
Today, most SAF is made of feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal fats, from companies such as Neste and Montana Renewables. But this supply is limited by, well, the amount of cooking oil or fats restaurants and food processing facilities generate, and is thus projected to meet only about 10% of total SAF demand by 2050, according to a 2022 report by the Mission Possible Partnership. Beyond that, companies would have to start growing new crops just to make into fuel.
That creates an opportunity for developers of second-generation SAF technologies, which involve making jet fuel out of captured carbon or alternate biomass sources, such as forest waste. These methods are not yet mature enough to make a significant dent in 2030 targets, such as the EU's mandate to use 6% SAF and the U.S. government’s goal of producing 3 billion gallons of SAF per year domestically. But this tech will need to be a big part of the equation in order to meet the aviation sector’s overall goal of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as the EU’s sustainable fuels mandate, which increases to 20% by 2035 and 70% by 2050 for all flights originating in the bloc.
“That’s going to be a massive jump because currently, SAF uptake is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told me. The head of the airline industry’s trade association, Willie Walsh, said in December at a media day event, "We’re not making as much progress as we’d hoped for, and we’re certainly not making as much progress as we need.” While global SAF production doubled to 1 million metric tons in 2024, that fell far below the trade group’s projection of 1.5 million metric tons, made at the end of 2023.
Producing SAF requires making hydrocarbons that mirror those used in traditional jet fuel. We know how to do that, but the processes required — electrolysis, gasification, and the series of chemical reactions known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis — are energy intensive. So finding a way to power all of this sustainably while simultaneously scaling to meet demand is a challenging and expensive task.
Aamir Shams, a senior associate at the energy think tank RMI whose work focuses on driving demand for SAF, told me that while sustainable fuel is undeniably more expensive than traditional fuel, airlines and corporations have so far been willing to pay the premium. “We feel that the lag is happening because we just don’t have the fuel today,” Shams said. “Whatever fuel shows up, it just flies off the shelves.”
Twelve, a Washington-based SAF producer, thinks its e-fuels can help make a dent. The company is looking to produce jet fuel initially by recycling the CO2 emitted from the ethanol, pulp, and paper industries. In September, the company raised $645 million to complete the buildout of its inaugural SAF facility in Washington state, support the development of future plants, and pursue further R&D. The funding includes $400 million in project equity from the impact fund TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing led by TPG, Capricorn Investment Group, and Pulse Fund, and $45 million in loans. The company has also previously partnered with the Air Force to explore producing fuel on demand in hard to reach areas.
Nicholas Flanders, Twelve’s CEO, told me that the company is starting with ethanol, pulp, and paper because the CO2 emissions from these facilities are relatively concentrated and thus cheaper to capture. And unlike, say, coal power plants, these industries aren’t going anywhere fast, making them a steady source of carbon. To turn the captured CO2 into sustainable fuel, the company needs just one more input — water. Renewable-powered electrolyzers then break apart the CO2 and H2O into their constituent parts, and the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen are combined to create a syngas. That then gets put through a chemical reaction known as “Fischer-Tropsch synthesis,” where the syngas reacts with catalysts to form hydrocarbons, which are then processed into sustainable jet fuel and ultimately blended with conventional fuel.
Twelve says its proprietary CO2 electrolyzer can break apart CO2 at much lower temperatures than would typically be required for this molecule, which simplifies the whole process, making it easier to ramp the electrolyzers up and down to match the output of intermittent renewables. (How does it do this? The company didn’t respond when I asked.) Twelve’s first plant, which sources carbon from a nearby ethanol facility, is set to come online next year, producing 50,000 gallons of SAF annually once it’s fully scaled, with electrolyzers that will run on hydropower.
While Europe may have stricter, actually enforceable SAF requirements than the U.S., Flanders told me there’s a lot of promise in domestic production. “I think the U.S. has an exciting combination of relatively low-cost green electricity, lots of biogenic CO2 sources, a lot of demand for the product we’re making, and then the inflation Reduction Act and state level incentives can further enhance the economics.” Currently, the IRA provides SAF producers with a baseline $1.25 tax credit per gallon produced, which gradually increases the greener the fuel gets. Of course, whether or not the next Congress will rescind this is anybody’s guess.
Down the line, incentives and mandates will end up mattering a whole lot. Making SAF simply costs a whole lot more than producing jet fuel the standard way, by refining crude oil. But in the meantime, Twelve is setting up cost-sharing partnerships between airlines that want to reduce their direct emissions (scope 1) and large corporations that want to reduce their indirect emissions (scope 3), which include employee business travel.
For example, Twelve has offtake agreements with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines and Microsoft for the fuel produced at its initial Washington plant. Microsoft, which aims to reduce emissions from its employees’ flights, will essentially cover the cost premium associated with Twelve’s more expensive SAF fuel, making it cost-effective for Alaska to use in its fleet. Twelve has a similar agreement with Boston Consulting Group and an unnamed airline
Eventually, Flanders told me, the company expects to source carbon via direct air capture, but doing so today would be prohibitively expensive. “If there were a customer who wanted to pay the additional amount to use DAC today, we'd be very happy to do that,” Flanders said. “But our perspective is it will maybe be another decade before that cost starts to converge.”
No sustainable fuel is even close to cost parity yet — Cerulli told me that it generally comes with a “roughly 250% to over 800%” cost premium over conventional jet fuel. So while voluntary uptake by companies such as Microsoft and BCG are helping drive the emergent market today, that won’t be near enough to decarbonize the industry. “At the simplest level, the cost of not using SAF has to be higher than using it,” Cerulli told me.
Pathway Energy thinks that by incorporating carbon sequestration into its process, it can help the world get there. The sustainable fuels company, which emerged from stealth just last month, is pursuing what CEO Steve Roberts told me is “probably the most cost-efficient long-term pathway from a decarbonization perspective.” The company is building a $2 billion SAF plant in Port Arthur, Texas designed to produce about 30 million gallons of jet fuel annually — enough to power about 5,000 carbon-neutral 10-hour flights — while also permanently sequestering more than 1.9 million tons of CO2.
Pathway, a subsidiary of the investment and advisory firm Nexus Holdings, has partnered with the UK-based renewable energy company Drax, which will supply the company with 1 million metric tons of wood pellets, to be turned into fuel using a series of well-established technologies. The first step is to gasify the biomass by heating the pellets to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to produce a syngas. Then, just as Twelve does, it puts the syngas through the Fischer-Tropsch process to form the hydrocarbons that become SAF.
The competitive advantage here is capturing the emissions from the fuel production process itself and storing them permanently underground. Since Pathway is burying CO2 that’s already been captured by the trees from which the wood pellets come, that would make Pathway’s SAF carbon-negative, in theory, while the best Twelve and similar companies can hope for is carbon neutrality, assuming all of their captured carbon is used to produce fuel.
The choice of Drax as a feedstock partner is not without controversy, however, as the BBC revealed that the company sources much of its wood from rare old-growth forests. Though this is technically legal, it’s also ecologically disruptive. Roberts told me Drax’s sourcing methodologies have been verified by third parties, and Pathway isn’t concerned. “I don't think any of that controversy has yielded any actually significant changes to their sourcing program at all, because we believe that they're compliant,” Roberts told me. “We are 100% certain that they’re meeting all the standards and expectations.”
Pathway has big growth plans, which depend on the legitimacy of its sustainability cred. Beyond the Port Arthur facility, which Roberts told me will begin production by the end of 2029 or early 2030, the company has a pipeline of additional facilities along the Gulf Coast in the works. It also has global ambitions. “When you have a fuel that is this negative, it really opens up a global market, because you can transport fuel out of Texas, whether that be into the EU, Africa, Asia, wherever it may be,” Roberts said, explaining that even substantial transportation-related emissions would be offset by the carbon-negativity of the fuel.
But alternative feedstocks such as forestry biomass are finite resources, too. That’s why many experts think that within the SAF sector, e-fuels such as Twelve’s that could one day source carbon via direct air capture and then electrolyze it have the greatest potential for growth. “It’s extremely dependent on getting sustainable CO2 and cheap electricity prices so that you can make cheap green hydrogen,” Shams told me. “But theoretically, it is unlimited in terms of what your total cap on production would be.”
In the meantime, airlines are focused on making their planes and engines more aerodynamic and efficient so that they don’t consume as much fuel in the first place. They’re also exploring other technical pathways to decarbonization — because after all, SAF will only be a portion of the solution, as many short and medium-length flights could likely be powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel. RMI forecasts that by 2050, 45% of global emissions reduction in the aviation sector will come from improvements in fuel efficiency, 37% will be due to SAF deployment, 7% will come from hydrogen, and 3.5% will come from electrification.
If you did the mental math, you’ll notice these numbers add up to 92.5% — not 100%. “What we have done is, let's look at what we are actually doing today and for the past three, four, five years, and let's see if we get to net zero or not. And the answer is, no. We don't get to net zero by 2050,” Shams told me. And while getting to 92.5% is nothing to scoff at, that means that the aviation sector would still be emitting about 700 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by that time.
So what’s to be done? “The financing sector needs to step up its game and take a little bit more of a risk than they are used to,” Shams told me, noting that one of RMI’s partners, the Mission Possible Partnership, estimates that getting the aviation sector to net zero will require an investment of around $170 billion per year, a total of about $4.5 trillion by 2050. These numbers take a variety of factors into account beyond strictly SAF production, such as airport infrastructure for new fuels, building out direct air capture plants, etc.
But any way you cut it, it’s a boatload of money that certainly puts Pathway’s $2 billion SAF facility and Twelve’s $645 million funding round in perspective. And it’s far from certain that we can get there. “Increasingly, that goal of the 2050 net-zero target looks really difficult to achieve,” Shams put it simply. “Commitments are always going up, but more can be done.”
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.