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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Y and Model 3, the bronze medal finish went to the Chevrolet Bolt — an EV that’s generally excellent and affordable but outdated and soon to be discontinued.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.
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On Alaskan oil, CCS, and ‘zombie plants’
Current conditions: Flights have resumed to and from Sicily after Mt. Etna’s most powerful eruption in four years on Monday • There have already been almost half as many wildfire ignitions in the U.S. in 2025 as there were in all of 2024 • More than 700 people are feared dead in central Nigeria after heavy rains and flash floods.
USGS
The Department of the Interior announced Monday that it plans to rescind President Biden’s 2024 ban on drilling in more than half of the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The reserve holds an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but it is also some of the “last remaining pristine wilderness in the country,” The New York Times writes.
“Congress was clear: the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska was set aside to support America’s energy security through responsible development,” Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement announcing the proposed rule, further arguing that Biden’s ban had “ignored that mandate, prioritizing obstruction over production and undermining our ability to harness domestic resources at a time when American energy independence has never been more critical.” While the department’s announcement — which Burgum shared on Sunday at a heritage center in Utqiagvik, the largest city of the North Slope — was greeted with applause by attendees, Alaska’s senior manager for the Wilderness Society, Matt Jackson, said, “Everyone who cares about public lands and is concerned about the climate crisis should be outraged by this move to exploit America’s public lands for the benefit of corporations and the president’s wealthy donors.”
Applications for carbon capture and storage projects fell by 50% in the first quarter of the year as compared to last year, with no new permits having been approved since President Trump took office, the Financial Times reports. Industry experts blamed the uncertainty over the fate of federal grants and tax credits for the lowest application submissions since 2022 — a concern that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, since the Energy Department canceled nearly $4 billion in clean energy grants last week, including carbon capture and sequestration projects proposed by Heidelberg Materials and Calpine, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported. By BloombergNEF’s projections, an estimated 35% of the 152 million metric tons of announced carbon capture capacity expected to come online by 2035 will be canceled before then.
The Department of Energy has ordered Constellation Energy to continue operating its Eddystone power plant through the end of the summer to prevent potential electricity shortfalls on the mid-Atlantic grid, the Associated Press reports. The oil and gas plant, located south of Philadelphia, had been scheduled to shut down its last remaining units this weekend, before Constellation received the DOE’s emergency order.
Late last month, the DOE similarly ordered a coal-fired plant in Michigan to continue operating past its planned May 31 shutdown date, although the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission said at the time that no energy emergency existed, Bloomberg reports. By contrast, the decision to order Eddystone’s continued operation followed PJM Interconnection expressing concerns about summer grid reliability; the operator has since voiced support for the DOE’s order. But the move also has its critics: “The Department of Energy’s move to keep these zombie plants online will have significant public health impacts and increase electricity costs for people in Michigan and Pennsylvania,” argued Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The European Union’s climate science advisers have warned the bloc against softening its 2040 emission goals, arguing that such a move could “undermine domestic value creation by diverting resources from the necessary transformation of the EU’s economy.” The European Commission is set to propose a binding target for member nations to cut emissions by 90% by 2040 from 1990 levels, but it is also considering allowing countries to set lower targets for their domestic industries and make up the gap using carbon credits, Reuters reports. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which issued its warning against the carbon credit loophole on Monday, described the original 90% emission reduction goal as achievable and necessary for both the health of Europeans as well as improving security by limiting the bloc’s reliance on foreign fossil fuel sources.
Oregon-based battery energy storage system integrator Powin has filed a notice with the state warning that it could lay off 250 employees and shut down operations by the end of July. Per the notification, the layoffs would include the company’s chief executives, and “it is presently contemplated that the affected employees will be permanently terminated.”
Powin has the third most gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in the U.S. and the fourth most worldwide. Still, turbulence due to tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act incentives has reverberated through the industry, Latitude notes. In a statement provided to the publication, Powin described “navigating a period of significant financial challenge, reflective of ongoing headwinds in the broader energy storage industry.”
The partial shading of Colorado grasslands by solar arrays could decrease water stress and increase plant growth during dry years by 20% or more, a new study in Environmental Research Letters has found.
Or, why developers may be loading up on solar panels and transformers.
As the Senate gets to work on the budget reconciliation bill, renewables developers are staring down the extremely real possibility that the tax credits they’ve planned around may disappear sooner than expected. In the version of the bill that passed the House, most renewables projects would have to begin construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be “placed in service” — i.e. be up and running — by the end of 2028 to qualify for investment and production tax credits.
But that’s tax law language. The reconciliation bill will almost certainly mean grim tidings for the renewable industry, but it will be Christmas for the tax attorneys tasked with figuring out what it all means. They may be the only ones involved in the energy transition to come out ahead, David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright — “other than the lobbyists, of course,” he added with a laugh.
If the timeline restrictions on the investment and production tax credits make it to the final law, within 60 days after it’s enacted, developers will likely have to demonstrate that they’ve done some kind of physical work on a project — or spent a serious amount of money to advance it — in order to qualify for the tax credits.
The IRS has a couple of existing tests and guidelines: the 5% safe harbor and the physical work test.
The 5% harbor rule is the most common way to demonstrate a construction start, Burton told me. But it’s not cheap. That 5% refers to the total cost of a project, meaning that a company would have to shell out a lot of money very quickly to keep hold on those tax credits. For example, a 100-megawatt solar project that costs $1.25 per watt — about the average cost for a utility-scale project according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — would cost a developer $6.25 million in initial outlays just to prove they’ve started construction to the satisfaction of the IRS.
There are any number of things to spend that money on. “For solar, the most common thing is modules. But it could be inverters, it could be racking,” Burton said.
Right now there’s a particular rush to get transformers, the electrical equipment used to step up voltage for the transmission of electricity from a generator, Burton added. That’s because transformers also fall under the second construction guideline, the “physical work test.” Developers can say they’ve started construction “when physical work of a significant nature begins, provided that the taxpayer maintains a continuous program of construction,” according to the law firm Leo Berwick.
This “significant physical work” can be split into onsite and offsite work. The former is what one might logically think of as “construction” — something along the lines of pouring foundations for wind turbines or building a road to bring in equipment.
Then there’s offsite. Ordering equipment qualifies as offsite work, Burton explained. But it has to be something that’s not held in inventory — this is why modules for a solar project don’t qualify, Burton said — the equipment must be built to order. Transformers are custom designed for the specific project, and can run into the millions of dollars.
“The guidance says expressly that step-up transformers qualify for this,” Burton told me. “It’s the only thing that guidance expressly states qualifies.”
This all adds up to a likely rush for transformer orders, adding more pressure onto a sector that’s been chronically under-supplied.
“The transformer manufacturers’ phones are ringing off the hook,” Burton said. “If I were the CFO of a transformer manufacturer, I would be raising my prices.”
While these tax rules may seem bewildering to anyone not a lawyer, they’re hardly obscure to the industry, which is well aware of how developers might react and is positioning itself to take advantage of this likely rush to start projects.
PV Hardware, which makes a type of solar equipment called a tracker that allows solar panels to track the movement of the sun, sent out a press release last week letting the world know that “it has the capacity to immediately Safe Harbor 5GW of tracker product, offering solar developers a critical opportunity to preserve eligibility for current clean energy tax credits amid legislative uncertainty.” Its trackers, the release said, would help developers meet the “thresholds quickly, mitigating risk and preserving the long-term viability of their project.”
The prospect of tariffs has also been an impetus to get construction work started quickly, Mike Hall, chief executive of the solar and storage data company Anza, told Heatmap. “There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated, and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects,” Hall said.
But for projects that haven’t started, complying with the rules may be more tricky.
“For projects that are less far along in the pipeline and haven’t had any outlays or expenditures yet, those developers right now are scrambling,” Heather Cooper, a tax attorney at McDermott Will and Emery, told Heatmap. “I’ve gotten probably about 100 emails from my clients today asking me questions about what they can do to establish construction has begun on their project.”
And while developers of larger projects will literally have to do — or spend — more to qualify for tax credits under the new rule, they may still have an advantage.
“It’s increasingly clear to us that large-scale developers with the balance sheet and a pre-existing safe harbor program in place,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote to clients last week, “are easily best positioned to keep playing the game.”
Additional reporting by Jael Holzman
In defense of “everything bagel” policymaking.
Writers have likely spilled more ink on the word “abundance” in the past couple months than at any other point in the word’s history.
Beneath the hubbub, fed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling new book, lies a pressing question: What would it take to build things faster? Few climate advocates would deny the salience of the question, given the incontrovertible need to fix the sluggish pace of many clean energy projects.
A critical question demands an actionable answer. To date, many takes on various sides of the debate have focused more on high-level narrative than precise policy prescriptions. If we zoom in to look at the actual sources of delay in clean energy projects, what sorts of solutions would we come up with? What would a data-backed agenda for clean energy abundance look like?
The most glaring threat to clean energy deployment is, of course, the Republican Party’s plan to gut the Inflation Reduction Act. But “abundance” proponents posit that Democrats have imposed their own hurdles, in the form of well-intentioned policies that get in the way of government-backed building projects. According to some broad-brush recommendations, Democrats should adopt an abundance agenda focused on rolling back such policies.
But the reality for clean energy is more nuanced. At least as often, expediting clean energy projects will require more, not less, government intervention. So too will the task of ensuring those projects benefit workers and communities.
To craft a grounded agenda for clean energy abundance, we can start by taking stock of successes and gaps in implementing the IRA. The law’s core strategy was to unite climate, jobs, and justice goals. The IRA aims to use incentives to channel a wave of clean energy investments towards good union jobs and communities that have endured decades of divestment.
Klein and Thompson are wary that such “everything bagel” strategies try to do too much. Other “abundance” advocates explicitly support sidelining the IRA’s labor objectives to expedite clean energy buildout.
But here’s the thing about everything bagels: They taste good.
They taste good because they combine ingredients that go well together. The question — whether for bagels or policies — is, are we using congruent ingredients?
The data suggests that clean energy growth, union jobs, and equitable investments — like garlic, onion, and sesame seeds — can indeed pair well together. While we have a long way to go, early indicators show significant post-IRA progress on all three fronts: a nearly 100-gigawatt boom in clean energy installations, an historic high in clean energy union density, and outsized clean investments flowing to fossil fuel communities. If we can design policy to yield such a win-win-win, why would we choose otherwise?
Klein and Thompson are of course right that to realize the potential of the IRA, we must reduce the long lag time in building clean energy projects. That lag time does not stem from incentives for clean energy companies to provide quality jobs, negotiate Community Benefits Agreements, or invest in low-income communities. Such incentives did not deter clean energy companies from applying for IRA funding in droves. Programs that included all such incentives were typically oversubscribed, with companies applying for up to 10 times the amount of available funding.
If labor and equity incentives are not holding up clean energy deployment, what is? And what are the remedies?
Some of the biggest delays point not to an excess of policymaking — the concern of many “abundance” proponents — but an absence. Such gaps call for more market-shaping policies to expedite the clean energy transition.
Take, for example, the years-long queues for clean energy projects to connect to the electrical grid, which developers rank as one of the largest sources of delay. That wait stems from a piecemeal approach to transmission buildout — the result not of overregulation by progressive lawmakers, but rather the opposite: a hands-off mode of governance that has created vast inefficiencies. For years, grid operators have built transmission lines not according to a strategic plan, but in response to the requests of individual projects to connect to the grid. This reactive, haphazard approach requires a laborious battery of studies to determine the incremental transmission upgrades (and the associated costs) needed to connect each project. As a result, project developers face high cost uncertainty and a nearly five-year median wait time to finish the process, contributing to the withdrawal of about three of every four proposed projects.
The solution, according to clean energy developers, buyers, and analysts alike, is to fill the regulatory void that has enabled such a fragmentary system. Transmission experts have called for rules that require grid operators to proactively plan new transmission lines in anticipation of new clean energy generation and then charge a preestablished fee for projects to connect, yielding more strategic grid expansion, greater cost certainty for developers, fewer studies, and reduced wait times to connect to the grid. Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took a step in this direction by requiring grid operators to adopt regional transmission planning. Many energy analysts applauded the move and highlighted the need for additional policies to expedite transmission buildout.
Another source of delay that underscores policy gaps is the 137-week lag time to obtain a large power transformer, due to supply chain shortages. The United States imports four of every five large power transformers used on our electric grid. Amid the post-pandemic snarling of global supply chains, such high import dependency has created another bottleneck for building out the new transmission lines that clean energy projects demand. To stimulate domestic transformer production, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council — including representatives from major utilities — has proposed that the federal government establish new transformer manufacturing investments and create a public stockpiling system that stabilizes demand. That is, a clean energy abundance agenda also requires new industrial policies.
While such clean energy delays call for additional policymaking, “abundance” advocates are correct that other delays call for ending problematic policies. Rising local restrictions on clean energy development, for example, pose a major hurdle. However, the map of those restrictions, as tracked in an authoritative Columbia University report, does not support the notion that they stem primarily from Democrats’ penchant for overregulation. Of the 11 states with more than 10 such restrictions, six are red, three are purple, and two are blue — New York and Texas, Virginia and Kansas, Maine and Indiana, etc. To take on such restrictions, we shouldn’t let concern with progressive wish lists eclipse a focused challenge to old-fashioned, transpartisan NIMBYism.
“Abundance” proponents also focus their ire on permitting processes like those required by the National Environmental Policy Act, which the Supreme Court curtailed last week. Permitting needs mending, but with a chisel, not a Musk-esque chainsaw. The Biden administration produced a chisel last year: a NEPA reform to expedite clean energy projectsand support environmental justice. In February, the Trump administration tossed out that reform and nearly five decades of NEPA rules without offering a replacement — a chainsaw maneuver that has created more, not less, uncertainty for project developers. When the wreckage of this administration ends, we’ll need to fill the void with targeted permitting policies that streamline clean energy while protecting communities.
Finally, a clean energy abundance agenda should also welcome pro-worker, pro-equity incentives like those in the IRA “everything bagel.” Despite claims to the contrary, such policies can help to overcome additional sources of delay and facilitatebuildout.
For example, Community Benefits Agreements, which IRA programs encouraged, offer a distinct, pro-building advantage: a way to avoid the community opposition that has become a top-tier reason for delays and cancellations of wind and solar projects. CBAs give community and labor groups a tool to secure locally-defined economic, health, and environmental benefits from clean energy projects. For clean energy firms, they offer an opportunity to obtain explicit project support from community organizations. Three out of four wind and solar developers agree that increased community engagement reduces project cancellations, and more than 80% see it as at least somewhat “feasible” to offer benefits via CBAs. Indeed, developers and communities are increasingly using CBAs, from a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island to a solar park in California’s central valley, to deliver tangible benefits and completed projects — the ingredients of abundance.
A similar win-win can come from incentives for clean energy companies to pay construction workers decent wages, which the IRA included. Most peer-reviewed studies find that the impact of such standards on infrastructure construction costs is approximately zero. By contrast, wage standards can help to address a key constraint on clean energy buildout: companies’ struggle to recruit a skilled and stable workforce in a tight labor market. More than 80% of solar firms, for example, report difficulties in finding qualified workers. Wage standards offer a proven solution, helping companies attract and retain the workforce needed for on-time project completion.
In addition to labor standards and support for CBAs, a clean energy abundance agenda also should expand on the IRA’s incentives to invest in low-income communities. Such policies spur clean energy deployment in neighborhoods the market would otherwise deem unprofitable. Indeed, since enactment of the IRA, 75% of announced clean energy investments have been in low-income counties. That buildout is a deliberate outcome of the “everything bagel” approach. If we want clean energy abundance for all, not just the wealthy, we need to wield — not withdraw — such incentives.
Crafting an agenda for clean energy abundance requires precision, not abstraction. We need to add industrial policies that offer a foundation for clean energy growth. We need to end parochial policies that deter buildout on behalf of private interests. And we need to build on labor and equity policies that enable workers and communities to reap material rewards from clean energy expansion. Differentiating between those needs will be essential for Democrats to build a clean energy plan that actually delivers abundance.