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If you want to road trip, spring for the bigger battery.
The Ford Mustang Mach-E, the electrified version of the iconic brand, starts with an EPA estimated range of 230 miles. The cheapest Chevy Bolt EUV promises 247. The Tesla Model 3, Audi E-Tron, and Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck say they’ll deliver 272, 226, and 230 respectively, in their least expensive versions.
Perhaps you’ve noticed a pattern. Most electric vehicles on the market in 2023 offer an entry-level version with a range in the 200s, with an upgrade to 300 miles or more available — if you’re willing to kick in several thousand dollars more for the big battery. Buyers may want to spend the money if they can, though. A battery range in the 300s may be the key to delivering the road trip experience Americans have come to expect from their gas-burning cars.
The ranges touted in TV commercials may not reflect how far electric cars will actually travel — especially on the highway — for a variety of reasons. Vehicles use up a lot more energy per mile to travel 75 miles per hour compared to 50, for one thing. (That’s why, if your battery starts to get dangerously low, your Tesla will warn you to slow down.) How an EV’s true range on the highway compares to its official EPA range can vary wildly depending on the brand, according to testing by InsideEVs, but most cars underperform.
For another, long-haul drivers aren’t filling up to 100%. Charging may be lightning fast when the battery is near empty, but it slows dramatically when it approaches full. For the sake of making good time, you’re better off getting only as much juice as you need to reach the next stop rather than trying to top off entirely. EV marketing tends to skirt this fact by advertising how quickly the car regains most of its charge, up to about 80% or so, neglecting the fact that charging only to 80% lops off a lot of possible miles (almost 50 in the case of the base Bolt EUV). Lastly, there just aren’t enough fast-chargers yet for electric drivers to simply pull off the freeway when the battery drops close to E. This limits your ability to drive as far as the battery charge will take you.
The confluence of all these facts can be dramatic. For example, when I bought the basic Standard Range Plus version of the Tesla Model 3 in 2019, it carried an advertised EPA range of 240 miles. That sounded pretty promising, as it was essentially enough miles to drive from our home in Los Angeles to Las Vegas in one full charge, or to make the drive to San Francisco with just a single pit stop in the middle, just like my wife used to do in her trusty Toyota Tacoma.
It didn’t work out that way. A few weeks ago, I completed the familiar journey down Interstate 5 by stopping after 116 miles, then another 60, then another 92. Charging three times between SF and LA has become the standard in my little EV, which, with about 50,000 miles under its belt, now reports a maximum range of about 211 miles. I could bring the journey down to two stops by taking the extra time at each for a full battery charge, but the car’s guidance system insists it’s actually less time-consuming to pull off, charge as long as it takes to get to the next pit stop, and carry on.
Now, an additional stop or even two on a six-hour journey is a mild annoyance, no different than driving with a kid who needs ample bathroom breaks. But picture trying to travel a great distance across America in an EV with a promised range only in the 200s. I have done this, driving electric halfway across the country and back. When you have to stop for juice every 100-150 real-world miles to account for limited charging stations and that 80% battery mark, the extra time drags out long-distance travel interminably.
As EV batteries are rated at 300 miles or more, however, the game changes. More national parks and other places located far from major highways, and their accompanying fast-charging stations, become accessible. Those who are simply zooming down the interstate from one city to another have to stop only every 200 to 250 actual miles — about as long as many people would even want to drive without a bathroom break or a coffee refill.
Luckily, batteries are changing fast. It wasn’t so long ago that the few EVs available in America, like the Volkswagen e-Golf and original Nissan Leaf, had stated ranges around 100 miles, adequate for most everyday drives, particularly around cities, but lousy for even a modest road trip. The 200-some-mile range of today’s electrics make it possible for them to go many places an internal-combustion engine could go (depending upon which state you live in), though requiring more stops along the way.
As ranges reach 300 miles or more, the experience starts to approach the freedom we know from decades of gasoline engines: just drive as many hours as you can, then pull over for a refill.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.