You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Who needs new models when you have chargers and price cuts?
“It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning.”
I’m reluctant to call Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto one of the great philosophers of our time, but his line in the inaugural Fast & Furious movie is as true about street racing as it is about anything else. And in the current electric vehicle sales race, Tesla is the clear winner in mid-2023—this, despite an aging lineup of vehicles, tactics that make the rest of the car business nervous and a dependence on non-car products to entice buyers.
Things could’ve gone very differently this year. I certainly thought so about six months ago. This was supposed to be the year that Tesla’s slew of increasingly dated cars faced real, direct competition for the first time ever; when its CEO’s objectively disastrous foray into social media ownership took attention away from his core business; and when most other car companies got truly serious about creating a future without gasoline.
But now that we have insight into what EVs people bought — or didn’t buy — in the first and second quarters of this year, the numbers tell a different story. Tesla is still the clear leader in EV sales, moving almost half a million cars globally in just the past three months. The Model Y is the best-selling car in the world. The rest of the competition that was supposed to show up and eat Elon Musk’s lunch? Not even remotely close.
According to data from Automotive News, the rest of the EV landscape looks sad by comparison. After the Model Y and Model 3, the bronze medal finish went to the Chevrolet Bolt — an EV that’s generally excellent and affordable but outdated and soon to be discontinued. (By the way, Tesla sold almost six times as many Model Ys as Chevy sold Bolts.)
Right below the Bolt, there’s the expensive and also aging Model S, followed by the Volkswagen ID.4, finally hitting its stride somewhat due to EV tax incentives. After that, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which has had a slew of production problems this year; then the Hyundai Ioniq 5, a superb EV but one that does not qualify for any tax breaks unless it’s leased; and then Tesla’s own Model X, also long in the tooth.
Keep in mind that the freshest product in Tesla’s lineup these days is the Model Y, which went on sale in 2020, followed by the Model 3, which is now six years old — at the point when another car company would replace it with an entirely new model. The point is, the hottest-selling EVs in the world aren’t fresh, new products at all. (And to be fair, Tesla’s had its own share of headaches with the Cybertruck, which has been pushed back so much it’s starting to feel like the Half-Life 3 of cars.)
Finally, questions are arising about EV demand in general. Monday morning, Axios reported on “the growing mismatch between EV supply and demand,” meaning that while EV sales are steadily climbing and making up more and more of the U.S. market, those sales aren’t matching what car companies are actually building and putting up for sale. In fact, the time EVs spend sitting on dealer lots — a measurement of demand for a car, traditionally — is now nearly double the industry average, Axios reports. In other words, they’re sitting there, unpurchased, about twice as long as gasoline cars.
That’s disheartening news for the climate, especially given how palpably horrific the heat and weather events have been this summer. The world cannot wait for people to switch to electrified and lower-emission vehicles. But there are a lot of reasons this is happening, and the biggest factor is still cost.
With rising interest rates, an uncertain economy ahead and the average EV still costing almost $60,000 — which actually went up this year despite Tesla’s price cuts and all the new cars on the road — can you really blame buyers for sitting this out until things get cheaper?
Simply put, Tesla is offering the best deals right now. As old as the Model 3 and Model Y are, they’re still fun to drive, high-range EVs boasting the best charging network in the business (we’ll get to that in a bit.) They’re also still cutting-edge in most ways that count for EV newcomers; they just don’t look new and are beginning to lack key features offered by many new competitors like bidirectional charging or more predictable automated driving assistance.
This year, Tesla has dramatically slashed their prices and positioned them to take advantage of the full EV tax credits when other car companies cannot. Tesla’s lead remains a solid one in 2023; it has the experience, production capacity, and scale to slash prices on these cars while remaining profitable. Other automakers are sweating their ability to make money on EVs at all right now.
Generally, car companies are wary of slashing prices too much or relying too heavily on discounts. They tend to water down a brand’s image while cutting into profit margins, and the auto industry is very much a business of margins. Now, Tesla has taken a hit to its gross profit margins amid these price cuts, but it’s still doing well and Musk doesn’t seem to care. In the meantime, more than likely, a person’s first EV will be a Tesla.
And then there’s America’s new EV tax credit scheme, which may actually be backfiring to some degree right now.
In short, to get the full $7,500 tax credit on an EV, a car and its batteries must be now made in North America. On a long enough timeline that will help build a robust electric car and battery manufacturing infrastructure here, so that both aren’t dependent on China — exactly the goal of the law. The problem is, local battery factories alone will take years to set up; it’s going to be a long time before the majority of EVs Americans can buy meet both qualifications.
At the beginning of this year, EV demand seemed to be booming because those “buy local” rules hadn’t taken effect yet. Now, a bunch of automakers, including BMW, Volvo, and Hyundai, are left out of the credits because their EVs aren’t made here yet. While well-intentioned, the stringent rules of the tax credit scheme run the risk of dampening EV demand and killing the momentum the car industry had in January.
Finally, car companies now seem to be struggling to reconcile their big environmental promises — you know, vowing to go all-electric by 2035 — with the cold, hard realities of public-company capitalism.
Take General Motors, for example. While it’s made that all-electric commitment, its promised EV lineup has barely materialized yet; the Bolt is the best representation of this promise and it’s on the way out. The Cadillac Lyriq? MIA. The other EVs? Delayed. And the GMC Hummer EV is so environmentally unfriendly, they may as well have just given it a V8 engine. Speaking of, GM has said it’s committed to making gasoline heavy-duty trucks and SUVs for a long time to come; they’re far too profitable to phase out, planet be damned.
Or take the Volkswagen Group, the original “pivot to EVs” automaker in penance for its diesel-cheating sins. It’s dealt with a ton of delays, production problems, and software issues, and it too is reluctant to phase out its most profitable ICE vehicles. And both companies are due to have massive fights with their labor unions over EVs and jobs soon enough.
Essentially, pivoting to EVs is hard. It’s not just about making battery-powered cars. Automakers must retool how cars are designed, built, and sold while focusing on software and revamping their entire supply chains. Deep down, most auto executives would probably rather not do this. It will be an expensive, messy, and complicated process that runs counter to just making shareholders happy each quarter with the status quo until you comfortably retire.
And Tesla’s most powerful weapon keeps proving to be its charging network. There’s perhaps no greater signifier of car companies’ EV trepidation than their willingness to say “You know what? You deal with this” while handing the charging keys to Tesla. GM, Ford, Volvo, Rivian, Volvo, and now Mercedes-Benz have all said they’ll switch to Tesla’s charging standard in North America, giving EV buyers access to that network in the coming years. Perhaps that will drive up EV purchases and make buyers consider things that aren’t Teslas. I think that it probably will.
But in doing so, Tesla will reap significant income in public funding for EV charging stations made possible by the 2021 infrastructure law. It’s unclear whether doing that — and getting revenue from the charging itself — will outweigh potential lost future sales to Mercedes or Volvo or whoever, but one thing seems clear: the biggest winner of the Biden-era tax incentives so far is Tesla.
Short of dramatic price cuts — which are unlikely to happen because these things are so unprofitable as-is — or radically new cheaper battery technologies, it feels unlikely that Tesla will lose the lead in the electric drag race this year or anytime soon.
Who cares if it’s winning on price cuts and its charging network? Ask Dom; a win’s a win.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.