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Topics Discussed:

• No one cares about panel gaps
• We need to shut up about deeply technical aspects of EVs when the average consumer literally doesn't know or care about them
• We need to stop making such a (public) deal about battery chemistries
• No one cares about megacastings
• Solid state batteries will not save us
• Education isn't a significant barrier to electric vehicle adoption
• EV weight is and isn't an issue 
• Tesla charger shouldn't become the standard
• Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G)
• Battery recycling
• Sedans!
• Return-on-Investment (ROI) doesn't mean anything to most individuals when making vehicle purchasing decisions
• Autonomous driving
• Hydrogen makes zero sense for passenger vehicles and never will
• Other alternative fuel industries have absolutely shot themselves in the foot and it's hard to imagine them recovering in the long term
• The term "zero emission" needs to be abolished
• We both should and shouldn't care so much about public transit in decarbonization efforts
• Marine and rail are important, but not the most pressing need

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Vehicles:

Toyota is apparently planning on rolling out their first dedicated EV platform in 2027 or 2028, "when demand will justify the investment".

Toyota has replaced its CEO, allegedly in order to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

• I'll believe it when I see it.

Hyundai is refreshing the Kona to be EV-first instead of a weird three-drivetrain thing, and they're changing the design to be more in-line with the Ioniq series.

The Hyundai Ioniq 6 has official EPA range numbers, getting up to 361 miles.

We have a small amount of info about the upcoming 2024 Ram 1500 electric truck, which will also have a plug-in hybrid version.

• Apparently one version will be called the "Range Electric Paradigm Breaker" which will have a lot of range or something. This was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, so . . . Yeah
• And more info about interior and such here

The Chevy Bolt received a small-ish price increase of around $900.

The VW ID4 had a $1,500 price increase for the 2023 model, even for existing reservation-holders.

• They cite battery cost increases as the reason.

The Ford F-150 Lightning has increased in price by at least $15k to $55k starting.

The Porsche Taycan now has an upgrade available that upgrades the onboard charger to accept 19.2kW.

• For home charging, this would require a pretty beefy circuit capable of 100A, which is . . . a lot
• This is probably more relevant for public charging because of that current requirement
• The upgrade costs $1,850 in hardware, plus labor

General Motors is getting a $2.5b loan from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to build a battery plant in support of its electric vehicle production.

• GM claims it will be able to produce 1 million EVs per year by the middle of the decade

Rivian has increased the range of its vehicles a small amount through an over-the-air update and added a snow mode for better traction in snowy conditions as well as remote pre-conditioning.

The automotive supplier ZF revealed a heated seatbelt at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) meant to improve electric vehicle efficiency in cold weather.

• They say that the product is production-ready, though they do not have customers yet.
• The marginal cost is around that of heated steering wheels.
• They claim up to 15% range increase while using the seatbelt instead of traditional cabin heating.

Not terribly surprising, but a new report found that cold weather results in more charging of EVs, not less driving.

• Basically, people aren't driving less as a result of less range, they're just charging their vehicles more often.

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company, is planning to build a $3.5b plant in South Carolina, which will employ 1,500 people.

• Redwood is making serious moves in the battery recycling world, this is awesome news.

The Environmental Protection Agency has released new, more stringent emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks, but they're still less aggressive than California's.

• California still needs a waiver from the EPA to set its own standards for the more stringent standards.
• The EPA's are still fairly aggressive.
• These new standards take into effect in 2027.

Infrastructure:

Electrify America has increased its prices by $0.05/kWh across the board.

AAA is launching a pilot to provide free mobile charging to members who drive EVs in several cities across the country.

• The initial 14 cities are:

Sandia National Labs just published a paper looking into the issue of cybersecurity and electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

• Link to the full paper.
• The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program places a lot of emphasis on cybersecurity and chargers, but there hasn't been much actual guidance about how security should be maintained with this infrastructure.
• The paper is a pretty thorough look at the whole issue.
• The paper does claim that more damaging types of attacks would be very difficult, but it's still an issue that needs to be addressed.

Nikola is planning to have a mobile fueling truck to deliver hydrogen to customers without a standalone hydrogen station.

• This sort of technology has been used for natural gas and propane vehicles in the past, so there is precedent, though it hasn't been very widely used in general.
• Hydrogen is already trucked to stations (they rarely, if ever, use pipeline hydrogen), so this isn't too large a leap.
• I think this is putting the cart before the horse.

Deployment:

Ford is going to deliver 2,000 electric delivery vans to shipper, DHL, by the end of 2023.

• This also comes with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to purchase more vehicles in the future.
• DHL will also use Ford's Ford Pro software to manage the vehicles.
• DHL operates a total of around 27,000 delivery vans, for context.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has, again, changed its EV plans.

• The current plan moves their EV targets up to over 50% of their new fleet.
• They now plan to only by EVs from 2026 on.
• $3b of the funding to make this happen will come from the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act.

Air Canada has purchased 30 electric-hybrid airplanes from Heart Aerospace.

• These are both battery electric and have more traditional powertrains to increase range, from what I can find online.
• Air Canada is also acquiring a $5m stake in the company.

Energy:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that renewable energy will make up over 25% of the U.S. grid mix by 2024!

• This is an incredible milestone!

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EPA Clean School Bus Rebate Program awards

Tesla opens up their charging standard

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My guest appearance on Talk on the Wild Side!

Document Notes:

• Quarterly data submissions (p.7 and p.43/44; Section 680.112(b))
  • Charging station use
    • Charging session metrics
    • Energy dispensed per port
  • Reliability, maintenance, and installation cost 
    • Charging station uptime
    • Total monthly cost of electricity paid to operate the station
      • Demand charges
      • Energy charges ($/kWh)
      • Fixed charges
      • Taxes
      • Other fees
    • Monthly maintenance and repair costs per port
  • Construction and installation data
    • Detailed costs such as:
      • Installation costs
      • Distributed energy resource acquisition and installation
      • Grid connection and upgrade costs (paid for by charger operator)
• Annual data submissions (p.7 and p.44/45; Section 680.112(c))
  • Identifying information about organizations operating, maintaining, or installing EVSE
    • Whether these organizations participate in State or local business opportunity certification programs such as programs for minority-owned businesses, Veteran-owned businesses, woman-owned businesses, and/or businesses owned by economically disadvantaged individuals for private entities
  • Information about any certifications of these entities
• Annual report (p.7 and p.45; Section 680.112(d))
  • Description of community engagement activities conducted in accordance with their approved State EV Infrastructure Deployment Plans
• With regard to data requirements: Will this data collection place undue burden on states? (p.7/8)
• Charging station networking requirements (p.8; p.46/47/48; Section 680.114)
  • Must be able to communicate through the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) in tandem with ISO 15118
    • This is meant to help with cybersecurity concerns and;
    • Reduce the risk of stranded assets in the event that an operator abandons a station
  • Must be capable of “Plug and Charge”
  • Must be capable of “smart charge management”
  • FHWA recognizes that these requirements (Plug and Charge; smart charge management) are fairly new, hence the requirement of OPCC communications instead of requiring the use of those capabilities outright
  • Chargers don’t need to use those capabilities, but they must be capable of it
  • “FHWA proposes to include a requirement in Section 680.114(b) that, where credential-based electric charge initiation or payment is implemented, charging networks be capable of communicating with other charging networks to enable customers to use a single credential regardless of the charging network responsible for a charging station.” (p. 48)
  • Charging networks must be capable of communication with electric utilities and energy providers, or local energy management systems (p.48)
• Charging stations need to provide real-time status information through a freely accessible API to all third-party software developers (p.8)
  • Location
  • Connector type
  • Power level
  • Status
    • Number of ports accessible to persons with disabilities (p.51; Section 680.116)
  • Pricing
  • Chargers would be required to display the price of charging in $/kWh
    • In states where “charge for charge” is not allowed, FHWA requests comment on how to best require the display of price on these chargers
    • Should it be $/mi, $/minute, or some other metric?
• Price transparency (p.27/28)
  • Public disclosure for the documents concerning the operations of the EV charging stations where price setting is involved, including the procurement process used, the number of bids received, the identification of the awardee, the proposed contract with the awardee, and, in accordance with State law, the financial summary of contract payments (including the price and cost data), and any information describing how prices for EV charging are to be set under the contract.
• States are subject to 23 U.S.C. 112 and any State procurement policies and procedures per 2 CFR 200.217 (p.28)
• Level 2 chargers may be eligible for NEVI funds after corridors are fully built out (p.31)
  • J1772 would be the required connector for a Level 2 charger
• Non-CCS plugs at DCFC sites (p.31)
  • “Section 680.106(c) would further provide for additional flexibility for the provision of charging ports after the aforementioned CCS requirement has been met. This includes adding permanently attached proprietary connectors to DCFCs. In addition, specific to the use of FY22 NEVI Formula Program funds, DCFCs may include permanently attached CHAdeMO connectors for one or more DCFC charging port.”
    • It is not clear to me if “CCS requirement has been met” refers to “fully built-out” or just the 4 plugs per site requirement.
• Station power level (p.32)
  • Chargers with higher power levels are encouraged “where appropriate to support industry efforts to ensure a consumer’s time to charge is at least comparable to filling a gas tank”.
  • “The inclusion of a requirement that each DCFC charging port must be at or above 150kW would benefit the charging industry primarily in communicating standards with individual utilities that may not be accustomed to EV industry preferences.”
  • Level 2 chargers (if funded) would need to deliver at least 6kW per port simultaneously across all ports.
• Charger availability (p.32 and p.50; Section 680.116(b))
  • Stations must be available for public use 24/7 with minor exception
  • Isolated or temporary interruption due to maintenance or repairs would not violate this requirement
  • Stations must have an uptime greater than 97%
  • Uptime must be submitted quarterly and retained for quarterly review
    • Uptime calculation:
    • Mu = ((8760 – (T_outage – T_excluded))/8760) X 100
    • Mu = port uptime percentage
    • T_outage = total hours of outage in previous year
    • T_ excluded = total hours of outage in previous year for reasons outside operator’s control
  • The FHWA requests specific comment on what additional considerations should be contemplated to ensure EVSE resilience/reliability in floodplains and during natural disasters
• Payment systems (p.34)
  • Stations cannot require memberships for access
  • Payment options must include contactless payment methods from all major debit/credit card providers
  • Access cannot be limited by payment type
  • Plug and Charge payment capabilities are required
  • Credit card is not required to be the only payment method to be mindful of the underbanked.
  • FHWA requires multilingual access and access for people with disabilities
• Efficiency certifications (p.35)
  • For Level 2 chargers, ENERGY STAR certification is required
  • For DCFC, ENERGY STAR certification is not currently required due to a lack of widespread availability
• Physical and Cybersecurity measures (p.35/36)
  • “Section 680.106(h) would require States to implement physical and cybersecurity strategies consistent with their State EV Infrastructure Deployment Plans. This section also includes options for both physical security, such as lighting, siting, driver and vehicle safety, fire prevention, tampering, charger locks, and illegal surveillance of payment devices, and cybersecurity strategies that may be addressed in order to mitigate charging infrastructure, grid, and consumer vulnerability associated with the operation of charging stations. The FHWA encourages States to implement policies to safeguard consumer privacy and requests comments on best practices available in the industry.”
• Operational period (p.36)
  • Charging infrastructure must operate for at least 5 years (Section 680.106(i))
  • 5 years was chosen to provide a reasonable useful life while providing sensitivity to the changing landscape of charging standards/expectations and tech developments
• Workforce concerns (p.36/37/38)
  • Installation and maintenance must be done safely by a skilled workforce with appropriate licensing, certification, and training.
  • Workforce used should be diverse.
  • With exception of apprentices, all electricians installing, maintaining, and operating EVSE must be certified through the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program (EVITP)
    • The participant in the program must provide documentation of a minimum of 8,000 hours of hands-on electric construction experience
    • https://evitp.org/
    • FHWA is aware of industry concerns with EVITP:
      • It being the sole provider might serve to privatize the licensing process or impose a hurdle to obtaining electricians
      • To address this, States can meet this requirement through another Registered Electrical Apprenticeship program that includes EVSE-specific training
    • For projects with more than one electrician, at least one must be an apprentice in a registered electrical apprenticeship program – Section 680.106(j)
  • “FHWA recommends that States take proactive steps to work with training providers, workforce boards, labor unions, and other worker organizations, community-based organizations, and non-profits to build a local workforce that will support the EV network”
  • Funding sources for such programs can be found at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/alternative_fuel_corridors/resources/ev_funding_report_2021.pdf
  • States should also consider how disadvantaged communities will benefit from added job growth
• Station customer feedback requirements (p.39)
  • Stations must allow for customers to report outages, malfunctions, and other issues
  • These reporting mechanisms must be accessible and equitable in accordance with ADA
  • FHWA requests comments on customer service strategies to enter issues as part of the real-time status data outlined in Section 680.116(c)
• Traffic control devices and signage (p.42)
  • Requirements are set by existing regulations in 23 CFR part 655 and 23 CFR part 750 for NEVI Formula Program projects
  • Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is currently being updated (updates due in September, 2022?)
  • Section 680.110

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My guest appearance on Talk on the Wild Side!

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Interchange Podcast episode about Power Purchase Agreements.

Vehicles:

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 has achieved the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) Top Safety Pick+ list.

The federal electric vehicle tax credit is going to begin phasing out for Toyota and Lexus starting in October of 2022.

• This means it will drop down from $7,500 to $3,750 until April 1, 2023,      then phase out entirely in October 2023.
• Here is a page with the tax credit status by automaker/vehicle.

Not a surprise, but the F-150 Lightning's vehicle-to-home system will require additional hardware that may cost around $4k, maybe more depending on the home.

• This is in addition to needing Ford's Level 2 charger, which costs $1,310.

The Chevy Bolt received a massive price cut across the board, now starting at $26,595.

• GM is also giving retroactive discounts to Bolts bought new in 2022.

Hyundai is discontinuing the Hyundai Ioniq hybrid and plug-in hybrid, after already cancelling the fully electric Ioniq.

• This mostly makes sense, since they're properly moving towards electrification with the Ioniq name.
• This is a shame, though, since the Hyundai Ioniq hybrid was the most efficient gas car on the market for several years.

We now have pricing for the Mercedes-Benz EQB, which will start at $55,550.

Nissan and Wallbox (the charging company) are partnering to offer at-home charging to Nissan customers.

• Nissan owners will be able to purchase a level 2 Wallbox charger and schedule its installation through Nissan, all in one process on the Nissan website.
• Owners will also receive a rebate of an unknown amount when going through their website.

Stellantis is testing under-road wireless charging in their Fiat 500 with a system that is capable of up to 20kW.

Ford is going to assemble its "next generation" EV platform in Valencia, Spain, and is moving forward with converting its Cologne, Germany facility to produce EVs.

• The site in Spain would begin production at the end of the decade.
• The Germany site's conversion is a $2b project.

BMW is opening its own battery production facility in late 2022, not to produce its own batteries at a large scale, but to develop specifications for other battery manufacturers to meet.

• The idea is that learning more about battery manufacturing will allow them to set higher quality technical standards for their suppliers to meet.
• This facility will also do battery research to develop new batteries that meet their performance goals.
• This is a 130m Euro investment.

LG Chem and Korean Energy Materials are partnering to build a $160m battery precursor factory in South Korea.

Stellantis and Samsung are partnering to build a battery plant in Kokomo, Indiana.

• It will have an initial capacity of 23GWh/year and will ramp up to 33GWh over a few years.
• Production is to begin in 2025.
• This is a $2.5b investment.
• It will create 1,400 jobs.

Toyota is now also partnering with Redwood Materials to develop a "closed-loop" battery market.

• Redwood Materials is a company that does battery recycling and is partnering with Ford and Volvo already.
• Redwood Materials is already processing 6GWh of batteries annually with the goal of ramping up to 100GWh by 2025.

Electrify America has set up a Virtual Power Purchase Agreement with Terra-Gen to take advantage of 75MW of solar power with an annual electricity production of 225TWh.

• That is enough electricity to drive roughly 675m miles or 1b km.
• Operations of that solar facility in the Mojave are expected to begin in Summer of 2023.

The EV charging company, FreeWire Technologies, has opened a new headquarters in Newark, California and raised $125m in additional funding for scaling up.

• FreeWire is definitely gearing up to take advantage of Infrastructure Bill funding.
• Their charger uses a large battery to lessen the grid-connection requirements at their chargers.

Deployment:

The charging company FreeWire and Phillips 66 have signed a letter of intent to partner on installing FreeWire chargers at Phillips 66 fuel stations across the U.S.

• There are unfortunately no details available about the number of planned sites, timeline, etc.
• It's worth noting that "letters of intent" are usually not binding.

Seattle is offering (a limited number of) free curbside Level 2 chargers to property owners who don’t have a way of installing EV chargers at their sites.

• The chargers would have a flat rate to charge, but would be free to install.

Rivian has installed its first two WayPoint Level 2 chargers in Michigan at the Holland State Park on Lake Michigan.

The United Kingdom's Department for Transportation has announced more than £200 million of new funding for demonstration projects for hydrogen and electric heavy duty trucks.

• This will be a 3yr project.

Milan's transit system has ordered 75 more electric transit buses from Solaris to go into service in late 2022.

• This brings their total order up to 215, out of 250 included in their original deal with Solaris.
• They intend to completely phase diesel out by 2030.

Los Angeles has deployed its first electric fire truck in Hollywood.

• It only has a 132kWh battery pack, which can allow for about 2 hours of pump operation.
• It has a "range extender" 6-cylinder diesel engine that can operate the pumps for an additional 6 hours.
• This vehicle will not be a full replacement for traditional fire trucks, which may need to operate for well over a dozen hours continuously.

Energy:

Grand Rapids, Michigan is hoping to reach 100% renewable power by 2025 and just launched a 0.9MW solar facility to help power its water filtration plant.

Nebraska Public Power District held a ribbon cutting for a new solar facility in Norfolk that produces 8.5MW of solar power with 1MW of battery storage.

The Sandy Creek Solar Power Plant in Bay County, Florida is now online, producing 74.9MW of power.

Entergy has completed a 100MW solar facility in Mississippi.

The French Road Solar project in Burlington, Indiana has officially come online with 2.8MW of solar power.

The DeCordova Energy Storage Facility by Vistra in Granbury, Texas is now online with 260MW of battery storage, which makes it the largest storage facility in Texas.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers have developed a record-breaking solar panel that is 39.5% efficient.

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Notes:

Amogy's website

The roundtrip efficiency of such an ammonia system is between 15-25% based on the following sources:

• An ammonia energy group.
• A study under the American Chemical Society.

On Density: ammonia holds approximately 5 times the amount of hydrogen per unit volume compared to gaseous hydrogen used in a traditional fuel cell vehicle.

Paper from the Department of Energy (2006) about ammonia as a hydrogen carrier.

There are approximately 5,000km of ammonia pipeline in the U.S.

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The Environmental Protection Agency's page for the program.

The program guidelines.

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Vehicles:

Electric vehicles had record sales in Q1 of 2022 by a significant margin.

• There's some interesting data in the article, with the most interesting thing being the chart of EV sales over the last decade, the chart looks pretty exponential.

Around half of the higher-risk Chevy Bolts included in the battery recall have been fixed.

This article discusses whether or not chasing 350kW chargers for an EV that can accept that speed of charging, and the complexity of the article is a clear example of why we really need to find a better way to discuss charging speeds.

• The main point of the article is that, since there aren't many 350kW chargers out there, planning a trip around hitting those chargers won't save you time over simply going to slightly slower (150kW) chargers that are closer to your planned route.
• The article is more interesting in its discussion around the actual charge rates the author saw while testing the Ioniq 5 and EV6, which were all over the place compared to the stated power of the chargers.

Lucid has increased prices across the board by up to $15,000 for their vehicles effective June 1, 2022, but will honor the prices of current reservation holders.

• This puts the starting price of a Lucid Air at $88,900.
• They still expect to hit their target of 12-14k vehicles produced by the end of the year.

Volvo's entire 2023 lineup of vehicles will be, at minimum, hybrids.

• This is awesome.

We now have a full review by Green Car Reports of the Genesis GV60, which is basically a luxury version of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 that starts at $59,980.

We also now have pricing information for the Cadillac Lyriq, which will start at $62,990.

Freightliner is slated to begin production of their eCascadia electric semi by the end of the year.

• The semi will have up to 230mi/370km of range, which is quite close to the number that fleets were asking for at ACT Expo (around 250mi/400km).
• It will have up to a 438kWh battery pack.

Both Kia and Tesla have stopped included Level 1 (120V) chargers with their electric vehicles.

• They claim usage is very low, which may be true, but it's still absolutely asinine to sell a vehicle without a way to charge the vehicle included in the purchase.
• Level 1 charging is a crucial emergency feature that is very low cost on the side of the automaker.
• Maybe in 5-10 years this will make sense, but given how immature the market is, this is an absolutely obscene decision.

Lordstown Motors says that they need an additional $150m to get production rolling.

Lordstown Motors has completed the sale of its factory to Foxconn, who will do the actual manufacturing of Lordstown's trucks.

• This comes with a $100m investment by Foxconn in a joint venture to engineer new EVs.
• They still claim to be on track to begin production in the third quarter of 2022.

Ford has sold more of its shares in Rivian, bringing its investment from 12% to 10% of Rivian's value.

The Rocky Mountain Institute argues that time-of-use charging and smart charging programs can decrease the carbon impact of EVs by up to 18%.

• They basically argue that EVs won't increase electricity's carbon impact because smart charging can take advantage of lower carbon electricity at the right times, but this isn't really a guarantee.

Deployment:

Westerville, Ohio has deployed 16 new Level 2 chargers across the city.

The Swedish company, Volta, is planning on bringing 100 electric trucks to the U.S. to be used as a pilot for their "truck as a service" business model, and eventually begin manufacturing trucks in the U.S. by 2025.

• These initial trucks will be Class 7 trucks with a range around 100mi (160km).

Chatham Area Transit in Georgia has deployed 6 electric transit buses into their fleet of 62 buses.

The University of Virginia is getting 4 electric transit buses from Proterra, adding to its fleet of about 40 buses.

• This is part of a strategy to become carbon-neutral by 2030 and fossil-fuel free by 2050.

Charlotte, North Carolina is piloting light pole-mounted EV chargers that focus on usage data collection and sharing, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy.

• The first charger is being used approximately once per day.
• Four more of these chargers will be installed by the end of the year.

Energy:

Rivian has financed 1 MW of solar power at the Paris Solar Farm in Tennessee to provide electricity for its Waypoint network in Tennessee's state parks.

• The solar farm is still in construction and should begin operations by the end of 2022.
• It will produce a total of 6.75MW.

SpaceX is expanding its solar farm in Boca Chica, Texas by about 30%, adding around 750kW of solar power.

The bank OZK has completed construction of a 4.8MW solar plant that will produce enough power to supply 40 of its locations as well as their headquarters.

Houston County, Texas now has 68MW of additional solar power.

The city of Urbana, Illinois has a new 5.2MW solar farm installed on an old landfill.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce has opened a grant program called Solar for Schools which will award grants of up to 95% of project costs for schools to install solar power.

• There is $7.5m available through this program.
• Each school district can install up to 80kW of solar.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) issued a finding of no significant impact for the Humboldt Wind Energy Area off the coast of California, which allows a lease sale to move forward for the region.

• The area has the capacity for around 1.6GW of wind production. 
• This is an early step towards leasing the area for development, but it's a very significant one.

The company RiverCap Ventures plans to recycle 200 old wind turbine blades to make benches, planters, tables, and other outdoor equipment.

• They begin production in August 2022.
• It's apparently hard to grind the fiberglass blades for use in cement and such, so they're avoiding that by simply cutting the blades and utilizing their structural integrity.
• They are building two more facilities in the U.S. to do this sort of recycling, which is around a $10m investment.

A seven-year study found that the Block Island Wind Farm did not negatively impact fish habitats.

• The study was funded by the wind industry, so some skepticism is prudent.
• A link to the study.

The U.S. federal government has announced a plan to use over $12b to modernize Puerto Rico's grid, focusing on renewable energy and resiliency.

Policy:

The U.S. Department of Energy has officially opened up a notice of intent for the $2.5b of funding for grid transmission through the Infrastructure Bill.

• This sort of "notice of intent" is important for gathering industry feedback and the allow the industry time to plan for how to take advantage of the funding (such as beginning partnerships, raising capital, etc.).

The U.S. General Service Administration (GSA) has issued new standards requiring lower-carbon cement and asphalt to be used in all GSA projects.

• This should result in a 20% reduction in carbon emissions associated with concrete and asphalt for GSA construction projects.

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Stats from the upcoming warehouse build by Prologis Ventures:

Power Output: 2.5 MW

Annual Energy Output: 4 GWh

Class 8 Trucks Supported: 22

Annual Miles/Kilometers Supported: 1,760,000 miles | 2,800,000 km

Annual Greenhouse Gas Reductions: 5,695 tons

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Find and review this podcast on Podchaser!

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Find and review this podcast on Podchaser!

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Find and review this podcast on Podchaser!

NOTES:

Industry-wide:

• Daimler:
  • 300,000,000,000 miles (482b km) of trucking annually in the U.S.
  • Full electrification of trucking would increase electricity usage by 20%
• GNA:
  • Around $3b annually is spent on incentives for alt fuels, but expecting $20b/year with Infrastructure Bill Funds.

Batteries:

• Cost:
  • 70% of a pack's cost is in the cells themselves
  • 30% is in the packaging, battery management system (BMS), thermal control, etc. (the pack stuff, basically)
• Manufacturing:
  • Battery Manufacturing apparently costs $65m/GWh of production rate to build a factory.
• Second-Life and Recycling:
  • The cost of breaking down and separating components of used batteries, plus the cost of reprogramming and repackaging them means that used batteries are nearly as expensive for grid storage and second life solutions than brand new batteries.
    • This implies that battery swap is a boon to second-life applications.
  • Italy has mandated that anyone bringing a battery into the country must have a plan for disposing of that battery (they own the value chain).
• Weight and Efficiency:
  • There was a resounding sigh when someone asked about getting battery weight down. The long and short of it is that it doesn't seem likely, according to all the panelists.
  • Battery packs get about 60% packing efficiency (60% of the pack is the cells, 40% is the housing and such). They hope to optimistically get towards 80% one day.
  • Cells have increased in energy density by 4x over the last 2 decades, but has stalled since 2017.
  • New form factors improve pack density, not energy density of the cells.
• Solid state:
  • Not in the next decade. Manufacturing ramp-up will take forever and they are too far behind traditional batteries. Will come to wearables and consumer electronics first.

Surprises:

• Romeo Power claims to have a battery that did 1000 cycles from 10-80% state-of-charge at 1MW of charging power, and the pack still has over 85% of its health.
• GNA said CNG and Propane no longer need incentives for adoption.
  • I think this is *maybe* true for Propane, very much not true for CNG.
• Refuse trucks (trash trucks) use around 50kWh of energy for trash compaction alone in a day's work.

Not Surprises:

• Shell says they really believe in hydrogen.
• The conference has, so far, been heavily focused on the California Market.
• There were lots of buzz words and often very little substance.

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Electric Vehicles:

Tesla will no longer allow for the purchase of their vehicles at the end of lease.

Green Car Reports has a preview of the Mercedes EQS if you're interested in such things.

We now have a price for the 2023 Subaru Solterra, Subaru's first EV at $46,220.

• It will allegedly be available in all 50 states.
• Not much other info is available.

Kia has updated its specs for the Niro hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric models for 2023, with decent spec upgrades across the board.

The 2023 Nissan Leaf has also been updated with some slight changes, though it still uses CHadEMO charging.

Ford has officially launched "full production" of its F-150 Lightning!

• Ford will also apparently have another electric truck launch in 2024, not based on the F-150.
• Ford said they will not have any dealer stock until later model years, since they have such a long backlog of reservations.

Honda has released a bit of a roadmap towards electrification, including a promise of devoting around $40b over the next 10 years to the effort.

• They mention swappable batteries as a tech option.
• 2 EVs in the US in 2024.
• There's a lot in the press release, but it's kinda a lot of big words and no real substance of interest.

CATL, the battery manufacturer, is launching a battery-swapping service in China.

• The service is focused on folks who can't charge their EVs at home.
• 30 stations are planned in Xiamen by the end of 2022.
• In that city, drivers will never by more than 1.8mi (2.9km) from a station.
• The service will be called Evogo.
• They claim the service is compatible with 80% of EVs on the road.
• They expect to charge around $61/mo for the service.

GM has confirmed they'll use heat pumps in all of their electric vehicles.

Mack now has a Range Calculator for their electric vehicles so that fleets can determine whether electrification will work for them on a particular route.

GM has signed a deal with MP Materials to provide rare earth materials for GM's battery production, and those materials will be mined and manufactured in Texas.

The battery recycling company, Lithion, has received $22.5m from the Canadian government to help build out their facilities to begin dismantling and recycling used EV batteries.

Japanese manufacturer, Envision AESC, will invest $2b to build a 30GWh battery factory in Kentucky.

• They will receive $116.8m in state incentives, as well as a $5m grant for skills training.
• This is expected to create 2,000 jobs.
• They will power the factory by 100% renewable energy through both on-site generation and a partnership with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
• Full production is expected by 2027.

Wallbox, a charging station manufacturer, has begun construction of a facility to build chargers in Texas.

• This is an initial investment of $11m for the construction.
• They plan to begin production by October, 2022.
• They intend to initially have 250k units of annual production, and 500k by 2025.
• They will produce by bi-directional Level 2 chargers and DC Fast Chargers.

Deployment:

WattEV, a "Truck-as-a-Service" company, has ordered 50 Volvo VNR Class 8 electric trucks for operation in California.

• This basically seems like a leasing model.

4 Gen Logistics, a drayage operator in California, has ordered 20 Kenworth T680E electric trucks.

• These have a 150mi (240km) range.

Penske has ordered 750 Ford E-Transit cargo vans which will be available for rental and leasing.

Maersk will add 300 electric trucks to its North American network between 2023 and 2025.

• The initial vehicles will be built by BYD.

Frito-Lay will deploy 40 Ford E-Transit trucks in Texas.

• They have already taken delivery of one truck, and the remaining trucks will be delivered by Summer 2022.

Hertz will purchase up to 65k Polestar electric vehicles.

• This purchase will be done over the next 5 years.

The Swiss transport company, Galliker, has deployed an all-electric truck for transporting EVs.

The Saudi Arabian government will purchase 50k Lucid EVs with the option to purchase 50k more.

• Deliveries start Q2 2023 and will happen over a 10 year period.

Pace Suburban Bus in Chicagoland has awarded $26.5m to Proterra for the purchase of 20 electric transit buses and 2 megawatt-scale chargers.

VW and BP will install up to 8k 150kW fast chargers across Europe using VW's Flexpole chargers, which can be installed on light poles.

• They expect to have the first 4k installed by 2024.
• These stations will include 2 chargers and a battery storage system.
• The VW Flexpole platform apparently doesn't require any voltage (transformer) upgrades at the site.

The UK energy company, Gridserve, has finished its overhaul of the 300 chargers that make up the Electric Highway in the UK.

• This replaced existing, slower chargers with 350kW chargers.
• These 300 chargers are at 130 sites.
• They were previously very unreliable, and were taken over by Gridserve around a year ago.

Tesco, a UK grocery chain, is installing free public chargers at 500 sites.

• This is a partnership between VW, Tesco, and Pod Point (the charger manufacturer).
• They are a mix of level 2 and DC Fast Chargers.
• They will use 100% renewable energy.

Rivian is funding 1MW of solar power to be built out in Tennessee to power its Waypoint chargers in the state.

Energy:

Burns and McDonnell has completed construction of 65MW of solar power in Texas.

Duke Energy just started operations at a new 22.6MW solar farm in North Carolina.

Duke Energy has announced that it will launch two landfill renewable natural gas projects in North Carolina.

• They will be operational in late 2022.
• They will produce enough gas to offset the natural gas usage of approximately 34k houses.

CLECO, a utility in Louisiana, has announced a $900m project to capture 95% of the CO2 from their largest coal plant and sequester it.

• The plant emits 4m tons of CO2 per year.

Georgia Power Co. has announced that it will shut down 9 coal plants and 3 oil-burning plants by 2028 (ahead of schedule), and add more natural gas and renewables.

• This shutdown would leave only two coal plants in their fleet, which would shut down by 2035.
• They will offset the lost generation with the purchase of 2.4GW of natural gas and 2.3GW of solar generation by 2029.
• They plan to hit 6GW of renewables by 2035.
• They also intend to add energy storage to the mix.

Origin Materials is building a facility that will manufacture plastic from wood residue in Ascension Parish, Louisiana.

• They claim this is a carbon-negative process.
• It will be a $750m project.
• Production will begin in 2025.
• They'll produce polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from wood residue sourced from timber mills and managed forests.
• The process will also result in "hydrothermal carbon", which can be used in fuel pellets.

Policy:

Louisiana's Governor, John Bel Edwards, has a press release about Louisiana's use of the Infrastructure Bill funding for electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

• This press release specifically mentions Louisiana Clean Fuels!
• The event he spoke at is a major expo that Louisiana Clean Fuels held in partnership with Louisiana's Department of Transportation and Development.

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Sources, Figures, and Calculations:

Hydrogen Station Cost Estimates - A study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory about the costs that go into building hydrogen fueling stations for vehicle use.

Electric vehicle charging station cost average comes from my personal experience working with several installers, utilities, and charging companies.

AFLEET - Tool by Argonne National Labs used for emissions and cost-of-ownership analysis for alternative fuel vehicles.

Cost per kilogram of CO2 reduced per day:

Hydrogen vehicle infrastructure: $194 / kg/day

Electric Vehicle infrastructure: $90.6 / kg/day

Cost per mile, per day:

Hydrogen vehicle infrastructure: $42.29 / mile/day

EV vehicle infrastructure: $19.84 / mile/day

CO2 emissions factors by fuel type:

Gasoline vehicle: 0.430 kg/mi

Hydrogen vehicle: 0.212 kg/mi

Electric vehicle (U.S. national grid average): 0.211 kg/mi

CO2 benefit per mile by fuel type (conventional fuel factor - alternative fuel factor):

Hydrogen vehicle: 0.218 kg/mi

Electric vehicle: 0.219 kg/mi

Hydrogen Calculations:

Station assumptions:

Total station cost: $5,050,000

Daily production rate: 1,500 kg/day

Cost per production rate: $3,370 / kg/day

Vehicle assumptions (used the Toyota Mirai as a baseline):

Efficiency: 0.01256 kg/mi

Miles supported per day of station production:

(1,500 kg/day) / (0.01256 kg/mi) = 119,426.75 mi/day

Cost per mile per day:

($5,050,000) / (119,426.75 mi/day) = $42.29 / mi/day

Cost effectiveness (cost per CO2 kilogram reduced per day):

($42.29 / mi/day) / (0.218 kg/mi) = $194 / kg/day

Electric Calculations:

Station assumptions:

Total station cost: $750,000

Power output: 600 kW

Load factor (percentage of time in use): 75%

Average output: 450 kW

Daily energy production (460 kW * 24 hr/day): 10,800 kWh/day

Cost per production rate: $69.44 / kg/day

Vehicle assumptions:

Efficiency: 3.5 mi/kWh

Miles supported per day of station production:

(10,800 kWh/day) * (3.5 mi/kWh) = 37,800 mi/day

Cost per mile per day:

($750,000) / (37,800 mi/day) = $19.84 / mi/day

Cost effectiveness (cost per CO2 kilogram reduced per day):

($19.84 / mi/day) / (0.219 kg/mi) = $90.60 / kg/day

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Vehicles:

Tesla had record sales in Q1 2022, selling over 300k vehicles, a 70% increase over Q1 2021.

Tesla has officially sold its first Model Ys from Gigafactory Berlin.

Rivian says that they're on track to sell their targeted 25k vehicles in 2022.

Maserati plans to offer all-electric versions of all of their vehicles by 2025 and be all-electric by 2030.

Porsche expects over 80% of their sales to be all-electric by 2030.

• For reference, they sold around 300k vehicles worldwide in 2021.

GM and Honda are partnering to produce EVs, an increase in scope of their existing partnership to develop hydrogen vehicles and EV batteries.

• This partnership will result in a line of "affordable" EVs by 2027.
• GM's press release.

The Ford F-150 Lightning has official EPA range estimates now.

• The range will be between 230 and 320 miles (368 to 512 km, respectively).

Toyota and ChargePoint have formed a partnership to provide ChargePoint charging to buyers of Toyota's upcoming bZ4X.

• This includes an option to buy a ChargePoint Level 2 charger for the home.
• Toyota will also have a feature in the Toyota app to help drivers find public ChargePoint chargers.

EVGo and Chase Bank are partnering to add fast charging at 50 Chase Bank locations in the U.S..

• Buildout should begin in Summer of 2022, all sites operational in 2023.
• All sites will be powered by 100% renewables, some with solar on-site.

The City of Boulder saved around $270/mo during an 11-month vehicle-to-grid project in partnership with Fermata Energy.

Both GM and Ford are partnering with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) on vehicle-to-grid pilots.

Proterra will provide batteries for Blue Arc electric delivery vans (made by Shyft Group), with production expected to start in 2023.

• These are class 3 vans.

The autonomous and electric delivery company, Gatik, is partnering with ChargePoint to charge their vehicles as they roll them out.

• Gatik is currently partnered with Walmart to test autonomous, electric delivery across their fleet.

LG Energy Solutions is partnering with Stellantis to create a $4.1b (USD) battery plant to begin operations in 2024.

• They plan to produce 45GWh of batteries annually.
• The plant will be in Windsor, Ontario.
• Stellantis is the company that owns Chrysler, Dodge, and others.

LG Energy Solutions is investing $1.7b in its battery facility in Holland, Michigan.

• This is expected to create 1,200 jobs.

Ford is hoping to open a 30-45GWh battery manufacturing plant in Turkey.

bp pulse is investing £1 billion over 10 years to build out a charging network in the UK.

Chick-fil-A is partnering with Darling, a renewable diesel, to produce renewable diesel from their used cooking oil in 47 states.

Deployment:

USPS has increased their initial order of electric mail carriers from 5,000 to 10,019.

• This is out of a total of 50,000 vehicles in this initial order.
• These vehicles will hit the road in 2023 (hopefully).

Madison, Wisconsin is getting 27 electric transit buses from New Flyer through a federal grant of $41.6m.

• Their contract with New Flyer has the option of buying 19 more electric transit buses in the future.

St. Louis, Missouri is deploying 18 New Flyer electric transit buses.

• For some God-forsaken reason, none of the press releases I read gave a deployment date.

Akron, Ohio's METRA RTA has deployed 2 new electric transit buses into its fleet.

• The majority of its existing fleet is currently compressed natural gas (CNG).
• They were able to purchase these buses through a grant that covered the cost.
• They expect to save $500/mo per bus in fuel costs.
• The buses cost $924,000 each.

Moreno Valley in California is getting 42 electric school buses from InCharge Energy.

Prague is deploying 20 bi-articulated Trollino electric trolleybuses.

Danish concrete company, Unicon, is ordering 11 Volvo FM Electric trucks to test as cement mixers.

Energy:

Texas now has 200MWh of additional battery storage on the grid, operated by Jupiter Power at their Flower Valley II site.

• The battery system can provide up to 100MW of electricity to the grid.
• This system is expected to be upgraded to 650MWh of capacity by summer of 2022.

The Traverse Wind Energy Center has official begun operations of its 998MW wind farm in Oklahoma.

• It's expected to generate 3.8 *million* MWh of electricity annually.

298MW of new wind power has gone online in at the Haystack wind park in Nebraska.

4MW of solar just went online in Sioux City, Iowa.

Shiawassee County, Michigan now has 200MW of new solar power online.

U.S. Department of Energy funding is bringing 3.3MW of solar power to 13 tribal communities.

Several GW of coal power is likely to retire in PJM's network over the next few years.

University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh will expand the use of renewable natural gas from food waste.

• They are adding a significant amount of heat capture to their current RNG electrical production to more effectively use their RNG.

Policy:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has finalized its new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

• The standards will require a corporate average fuel economy of 49mpg by 2025 across new light duty cars and trucks.
• This effectively requires automakers to begin producing electric vehicles or incredibly efficient hybrids.

NHTSA has also increased the penalty for automakers who fail to meet the standards.

• The penalty has increased from $5.5 to $14 per 0.1mpg they fail to meet the standards by.
• This increased penalty undoes the penalty reduction from the previous administration.

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Vehicles:

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy has a year-end report for 2021 about the EV industry in the Southeast U.S. and it has some pretty interesting stuff in it.

• The link above is for a 2-page infographic with some cool stats.
• EV sales more than doubled from 2020 to 2021 in the Southeast.
• 43% of the U.S.'s total announced investment in EV manufacturing and jobs were in the Southeast in 2021.

Tesla has once again increased prices.

Rivian increased the price of their vehicles by a lot, and kinda goofed in the process.

• They increased the price of their R1T truck by up to $12k in some cases, including increasing the price for existing reservation-holders.

We have a first drive review of the Subaru Solterra electric vehicle by Green Car Reports, but no release date apart from "in 2022" so far.

Porsche has announced plans to build a charging network beginning in 2023, but details are currently scant.

• They also upped their EV sales goals to 50% battery-electric by 2025 and 80% battery-electric by 2030.

Ford officially has pricing available for their bi-directional home chargers at $1,310.

• These chargers will be necessary for vehicle-to-grid functionality for the F-150 Lightning (unless some 3rd party chargers come along to offer that function).
• They are 80A chargers, so they can offer nearly 19.2kW of charging, which is super high.
• This price is high, but it's not exactly unreasonable, really. A ChargePoint home charger may cost around $600 on its own.
• These chargers will be built by Siemens. 

GM's Cadillac Lyriq EV will begin production on March 21, 2022, with preorders reopening in the coming months.

GM and the utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) are partnering on a pilot project looking at bidirectional charging and the grid.

GM has sold its stake of $75m (less than 5%) in Lordstown Motors.

Jaguar is using old I-Pace batteries to support operations for its Formula E program.

• These batteries power auxiliary and such where grid access is limited during Formula E testing.
• The batteries are charged by solar panels on-site. 
• It's not a huge thing, but it's pretty cool.

Ascend Elements (discussed briefly in Ep. 40) has been selected by SK Battery America to recycle their battery manufacturing scrap.

• “People often think lithium-ion battery recycling is just for end-of-life batteries, but waste from the battery cell manufacturing process is the biggest segment of the battery recycling market right now,” said Michael O’Kronley, CEO of Ascend Elements.

Mercedes-Benz is going to get into the battery recycling game, planning to open a pilot plant in 2023 at a site in Kuppenheim, Germany.

• This pilot plant will be able to process 2,500 tons of batteries per year.
• They have a goal of recycling over 96% of a battery.

A battery manufacturer startup, SPARKZ, is planning on building a battery factory in West Virginia in 2022 that will employ displaced coal miners.

• They are partnering with the United Mine Workers of America to recruit and train those displaced miners.
• The facility will employ around 350 workers.

Deployment:

Volvo and Momentum Dynamics are partnering to pilot wirelessly charging taxi vehicles in Gothenburg, Sweden.

• These wireless chargers will charge at 40kW.
• They will be used on a "small fleet" of XC40 Recharge EVs operated by Cabonline.

Volvo and Starbucks are teaming up to install DC Fast Chargers at Starbucks locations, initially on a route between Seattle, Washington and Denver, Colorado.

• This initial charging network will have up to 60 chargers along the 1,350mi route between those cities, with up to 15 locations selected around 100mi (160km) apart.
• These will be ChargePoint chargers.
• Drivers of Volvo vehicles will get either free or discounted charging at these locations.
• The installations are slated to be completed by the end of 2022.
• This may be a wider network in the future.

The companies Tritium and Wise EV are partnering to develop a national charging network in the U.S., starting with 25 locations in Florida.

• The press release doesn't say when the chargers will be built by.
• The release also mentions the Infrastructure Bill funding at length and it's not clear if they will build the network primarily through Infrastructure Bill funds or if they will foot the bill if they don't win funding.

IndianOil, a huge oil producer in India, has installed over 1,000 charging stations across India.

Florida's Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority has received $18.4m of federal funding to deploy 12 electric buses, 12 depot chargers, and 2 inductive wireless chargers.

Denver's transit agency has ordered 17 electric transit buses from New Flyer.

Energy:

Burlington, Vermont's electric utility is offering an incentive for multi-unit dwellings to install EV chargers.

• There is extra funding for sites that benefit lower-income communities.
• The funding can cover over 50% of the total cost of installation.

Early County, Georgia will get 70MW of new solar by the end of 2022, built by Infrastructure and Energy Alternatives.

Dominion Energy has received regulatory approval in Virginia to move forward with around 1GW of solar projects.

Duke and Dominion Energy will begin factoring in Scope 3 (supply chain and customer) emissions into their net zero goals.

• We will learn more about what actions they will take on this front in October.

Oak Ridge National Labs and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) will partner to explore different decarbonization technologies and strategies.

• They will explore:

Chevron has acquired Renewable Energy Group for $3.15b.

• Renewable Energy Group (REG) produces renewable and bio diesel.
• We should have more info about what this means for the future of the companies in the coming months.

A new report finds that coal mining releases more methane than venting and flaring from oil and gas wells.

• The report is by the Global Energy Monitor.
• This is pretty huge, considering how major methane emissions from oil and gas is.
• According to this report, each industries methane emissions are:
• The report says that these emissions are equal to the total greenhouse gas emissions from 1,100 coal-fired power plants in China.
• These numbers come from directly measuring methane emissions from around 2,300 coal mines globally.
• Full report.

Miscellaneous:

Big Storm Brewing Company in Florida captures CO2 from the brewing process and uses it to carbonate their own beer, and apparently saves money in the process.

• This is a cool story and it's super surprising that it's apparently profitable for them.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to find me on Twitter @archduketyler

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Vehicles:

Lordstown Motors maintains that it will manage to sell 500 of its Endurance electric trucks this year.

VW has increased the range of its ID4 EV by around 20mi in the long range version for the 2022 model through efficiency increases.

Toyota will offer 1 year of free fast charging at EVGo stations for buyers of their bZ4X electric vehicle, still slated for sale mid-2022.

• The article claims that it's interesting that they chose EVGo stations since there are "only" 800 stations across the country, but I think this is much more a "who can we make this deal with" situation than some clever demographic push.

Kia is offering 1000kWh of free charging at Electrify America stations for EV6 buyers.

• This is something like 3,500mi (5,500km) or so of charging.
• This is equivalent to about $430 worth of charging, since Electrify America charging costs $0.43/kWh.

Fisker has opened reservations for a $29,900 EV we have very little information about yet, for delivery in 2024.

• It'll be called the Pear.
• Reservations are $250.
• Fisker's Ocean EV is slated to begin production in late 2022.

Uber drivers with EVs will be able to get a discounted rate for Wallbox home chargers, but the discount rate is still  unannounced.

All 36 of Tesla's  Supercharging sites in the Netherlands are officially open to all EVs.

Tesla has officially produced its millionth large-format 4680 battery cell, which is a pretty decent milestone for a battery that is apparently difficult to manufacture.

• This is enough batteries to power about 1000 Model Y's.
• Ep. 2, 12, 36 all discuss this battery type in some detail.

Nissan is ending internal combustion engine development everywhere except for in the U.S, because of course.

Nissan is investing $500m in its Canton vehicle plant in Mississippi to produce two new EV models.

The Universal Technical Institute (UTI, seriously), a school in Phoenix, is adding EV training to its Ford training program in partnership with Ford.

• This is part of the Ford Accredited Credential Training program.
• Ford is plug-in hybrid vehicles to each campus to be used for the training program. 

Volvo is also collaborating with Redwood Materials, the battery recycler, on a pilot project.

• This is in addition to Ford working with Redwood Materials (Episode 28).
• The goal is to prove that a circular economy is possible with EV batteries.

The U.S. Department of Energy (through Infrastructure Bill funding) has announced $2.91b in funding for battery manufacturing, research, and recycling.

Deployment:

Rhode Island Public Transit Authority has purchased 14 New Flyer electric buses and chargers for its fleet.

New York City's Transit Authority has ordered 60 New Flyer electric buses, adding to their existing 15 New Flyer electric buses.

New Jersey has ordered 8 New Flyer electric buses with the option to buy up to 75 more over the next 5 years.

Norway's Postal Service has ordered a total of 32 electric and 13 biogas trucks from Volvo to be delivered in 2022.

• *that's how you do it, USPS*
• Norway has some pretty aggressive terrain and climate, so this is a great sign for electrification.

Daimler, NextEra Energy Resources, and BlackRock Renewable Power are forming a $650m joint venture to install EV charging across the U.S. for medium and heavy duty trucking.

• The article says both battery electric and fuel cell vehicles, which is interesting, though hydrogen support will "come later".
• The stations will also be available for light-duty vehicles.
• The first chargers will come in 2023.
• The three companies will be equal partners.

Florida is getting 200 fast chargers made by ADS-TEC Energy, deployed by Smart City Capital.

• These chargers have on-site battery storage and can supply up to 320kW of charging.
• Deployments start in late 2022.
• They intend to roll out such deployments across 13 states, though we don't know which states yet.

Energy:

Duke Energy is considering offering a flat-rate "all* you can charge" program for EV owners in North Carolina.

• It would cost $20/mo.
• In exchange, Duke Energy would get to control your charging to some degree for load-side demand response.
• Duke Energy would provide 12hr notice to customers before stopping the charging, and customers could opt out a limited number of times per month.
• Duke Energy could only halt 4hr of charging, 3 times per month.
• The break-even point for the $20 cost is around 170kWh or 600mi (1000km) of driving.
• Customers charging over 800kWh in a month may be removed from the program.

A blueberry farm in Maine is testing out a solar + agriculture setup for a 4-year research pilot.

• The project is in early days, so we don't know if it's successful or not so far. 

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has begun auctioning offshore areas off the New Jersey and New York coasts for wind generation.

• The area auctioned is large enough to produce upwards of 5GW of offshore wind power.
• Over $1.5b of bids came in for the auction, which is a record apparently.

Legislation is working its way to the Florida state Senate (having passed in the House) to develop a regulatory framework for floating solar installations.

• Floating solar is super cool:

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to find me on Twitter @archduketyler

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Some helpful links from the show:

National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) guidance document (32p).

How much funding each state will get through NEVI.

Alternative Fuel Corridor Requirements.

Clean School Bus Program Initial Implementation Plan.

My brief notes on the NEVI guidance:

• Renewable energy generation and storage can be funded if they lower overall operation and construction costs (p.12)
• The development of the State Plan is an eligible cost (p.12)
• Exceptions can be made to the Corridor-related requirements under rare circumstances on a site-by-site basis (p.17)
• Some site benefits specifically called out as focus areas include: access to affordable charging, charging infrastructure for transit and ride-share vehicles, and minimize gentrification-induced displacement due to new EV charging infrastructure (p.18)
• The new EV Charging Justice40 Mapping Tool is available for planning equitable infrastructure (p.18)
• The focus of the funds is for publicly accessible charging, but they can also be used for charging that will be available for at least 2 different companies (p.19)
• There are no deadlines for disbursing the money.
• Funding can cover operations/maintenance for up to five years, especially for low-utilization areas (p.19)
• Funding can cover site planning and installation costs (p.20)
• Funding can cover signage (p.20)
• Funding can cover Mapping and analysis related to forecasting infrastructure needs (basically our Master Plan, but more; p.20/21)
• Existing corridors that are designated but do not meet new corridor requirements don't need to be redesignated, but they can't be considered "fully built out" until they meet the new requirements at minimum (p.22)
• Charging costs at funded sites need to be comparable to market prices (p.22)
• States should work on developing permitting processes that support operation of charging infrastructure within 6mo of procurement (p.22/23)
• Sites should be developed such that they operate longer than the 5yr of operations/maintenance covered by the NEVI funds (p.24)
• Clean Cities callout on p.24 and p.30!!
• States should consider requiring project data sharing, including charging usage, cost, and reliability (p.29)

Some notes on the Clean School Bus program:

Key takeaways:

• $2.5b will be made available for zero-emission* school buses over five years;
• $2.5b will be made available for clean school buses** over five years;
• The first round of funding may be opened as early as April 2022;
• Funding may cover 100% of the cost of bus replacement and fueling for those buses;
• Further guidance will be available no later than March 15, 2022.

Goals of the funding:

• Replacing older diesel buses that do not meet current EPA emissions standards with newer, alternative fuel buses;
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of alternative fuels;
• Support the Federal Government’s Justice40 initiative by focusing on rural and underserved communities;
• Support domestic manufacturing and American jobs.

Below is a list of eligible recipients for funding:

• Government Entities that are responsible for:
  • Providing school bus service to public school systems; or
  • The purchase of school buses.
• Eligible Contractors, which can be for-profit or not-for-profit, that have the capacity to:
  • Sell eligible school buses or fueling infrastructure or maintain school buses;
  • Arrange financing for such a sale.
• Nonprofit School Transportation Associations
• Tribes, Tribal Organizations, and Tribally-controlled schools that are responsible for:
  • Providing school bus service to one or more Bureau-funded schools; or
  • The purchase of school buses.

The EPA may prioritize applications that serve:

• High-need local education agencies;
• Tribal schools;
• Rural or low-income areas; or
• Applications that provide cost share through public-private partnerships, grants from other entities, or school bonds.

The EPA will consider each of the following criteria equally when evaluating project proposals:

• Lowest cost of bus replacement;
• Local conditions, such as the length of bus routes and weather conditions;
• The impact on domestic manufacturing jobs, especially in underserved communities;
• Technologies that most reduce emissions;
• Whether technologies will bring new technologies to scale or promote cost parity between old technology and new technology, particularly for production in the United States.

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Vehicles:

GM is planning to restart production of the Chevy Bolt vehicles in the beginning of April.

Ford is planning on making constant, iterative improvements to the Mach-E instead of doing yearly updates.

• One reason cited for this decision is that it helps inform the production of other electric vehicles more quickly than yearly updates.

Green Car Reports has a first ride article for the F-150 Lightning - not much groundbreaking info, but the impressions are positive.

BMW will offer two years of free charging on Electrify America chargers for their customers.

• This is available for buyers of:
• They specify 30min charging sessions, but it's unclear if there is a limit on the number of sessions.

Jaguar is going to have a dedicated, ground-up EV platform called "Panthera".

• They still plan to sell 100% electric vehicles by 2030.

Lightning eMotors is now producing Class 3 through Class 6 vehicles through GM.

Airstream is toying with a concept trailer that would have large battery packs both for being off-grid while camping as well as for assisting the vehicle towing it.

• The off-grid part is simple enough, the battery can power all electronics and such while parked.
• The vehicle assist part is more complicated.

Toyota is investing $73m more into its plant in Buffalo, West Virginia for the purpose of producing more electric motors.

• Part of this investment goes to producing 120k rear motor stators per year.

Volvo and Northvolt are building a battery plant in Sweden that will produce up to 50GWh of batteries per year, opening in 2025.

The company, Ascend Elements, will open a battery recycling plant in Georgia by August 2022.

• They are investing $43m in the facility and will be able to recycle 30k metric tons of batteries.
• They also intend to build a facility to produce cathode materials in 2023.

Yet another company (Continental) is trying to offer automated charging, but this time through a physical connection instead of inductive.

• It's super unclear if the charger bit moves to meet the car, but it can apparently handle 30cm (12in) of deviance in parking.
• The article is funny, because it talks about an alleged benefit being energy efficiency, but mentions Oak Ridge National Labs' demonstration of high efficiency wireless charging.
• The article also mentions that this seems like a better solution than the Tesla snake robot, but I wholly disagree: the snake robot doesn't require a retrofit for the car, this solution does.
• They're aiming for full production in 2024.

Deployment:

Oslo's transit agency has ordered 183 Solaris electric transit buses!

• These are Urbino 18 buses.
• The deal is worth approximately €100m.
• They're expected to go into service in April, and these will replace older, non-electric, Solaris models.
• These buses have a 500kWh battery pack.

MetroLINK in Illinois has been awarded a $5m grant by Rebuild Illinois to build overhead chargers to support their growing electric transit bus fleet.

• They plan to grow their transit fleet to 30% electric.
• 70% of their fleet is currently compressed natural gas.

Energy:

The U.S. saw an increase of about 28GW of electricity generation in 2021, with over 75% being renewable.

• 40.8% wind
• 35.6% solar
• 18.8% natural gas

Cryptocurrency companies are arguing that they will strengthen Texas' grid because they can act as demand-side response.

• The linked Washington Post article talks about some of the problems with this statement, though I don't necessarily wholly support the article.
• One issue with the idea of cryptocurrency being good as demand response is the same argument against curtailed renewables for hydrogen: you need to over-build capacity in order to be demand response, and this decreases your uptime.

Duke Energy will shut down all coal generation by 2035 and will invest over $100b in "cleaner sources".

Clearway Energy Group has begun operations at a 115MW wind farm in West Virginia, which will provide power to Toyota and American Electric Power (AEP).

Saluda County, South Carolina is getting nearly 75MW of new solar power.

Policy:

There's funding available for Level 2 charging in the Jacksonville, Florida area through the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program.

• Deadline is March 30.
• Funding is up to $7,500 for equipment and installation.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to find me on Twitter @archduketyler

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

This episode is just a delight.  I absolutely loved this conversation with Vikram, we meandered around the topics of climate change's effects on agriculture, society's relationship with the natural world, equity and the food ecosystem, and everything else under the sun. I hope you enjoy this episode at least 1/4 as much as I enjoyed participating in this discussion, if so then you're in for a delightful time.

Vikram is an amazing podcast host who runs Planthropology, a podcast about plants, the natural world, humans, and the intersection of all those things. I think of it as a love letter to the natural world, a celebration of plants and nature, a conversation about the interconnectedness of all living things on our beautiful planet. As we discussed in the show, specific episodes you should check out as a first-time listener are linked directly below:

• 61. Foraged Foods, Mushrooms, and Comments Section Madness w/ Gabrielle Cerberville
• 20. Influencing Conservation, Finding Balance, and the Connectedness of Everything w/ Dr. Becky Bowling
• 65. Deep Dive- Tea and Crumbly Bits w/ Abby Morrison
• 68. The Power of Parks, Leaves on a Stream, and Mario Kart w/ Elana Gloger

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Vehicles:

Global EV sales doubled in volume from 2019 to 2020, but nearly quadrupled in their share of light-duty vehicle sales (to 8.6%).

• This is a massive increase in EV penetration!

Some Teslas were literally programmed to do rolling stops at stop signs when using Full Self Driving (beta).

• This is illegal, and Tesla will need to issue a software update to fix this.

Tesla is definitely not working on a $25k EV right now, Elon says it's not necessary to have cheap EVs if full autonomy happens.

GM is targeting 1m EVs sold annually by 2025, including 600k electric trucks.

• That's uhh, a big number.

GM and LG Chem are building a $2.1b battery plant, which will be their third joint plant.

• This is likely going to be built in Michigan, since GM also just announced a $7b investment in EV production in Michigan.

Ford expects to build 150k E-Transit vans annually starting in 2023.

• They believe the Ford E-Transit will generate $45b by 2025.

Foxconn claims that they are still on track to deliver Lordstown Motors trucks in the second half of 2022.

• I'm doubtful.

Proterra will provide batteries to yet another bus manufacturer, Vicinity Motor Company.

• Vicinity will also roll out Class 3 and 5 trucks that will be powered by these batteries.
• This agreement covers a minimum of 600 vehicles (not very many).

Firestone (auto care chain) will begin rolling out EV services, starting in Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California.

• This will also include charging stations at new locations, in partnership with Blink Charging.

Boeing is investing $450m in an autonomous, electric air taxi company called Wisk.

Deployment:

Proterra and Scale Microgrid Solutions are partnering to install a solar + storage + charging station for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.

• The project will come online in late 2023.
• It will have 1.5MW of solar power and 4MWh of battery storage.
• They will also install two 1.5MW chargers for their buses, though it's not clear if this is 1.5MW to a single bus, or in total.
• This will support their 34 electric transit buses.

The electric bus manufacturer, Gemilang, will deliver 140 electric school buses to districts in California.

Iowa City has deployed 4 new electric transit buses.

• They cost $4.5m in total, including charging equipment.
• The city has 23 diesel buses in total.

Union Pacific Railroad has purchased 20 battery-electric trains, to be deployed by 2024.

• They claim 8k tons of GHG reductions annually as a result.

A fully electric paving machine is now in service in the Netherlands.

• It has a 270kWh battery pack and can operate 10hr on a charge.
• It will save 150L (~40gal) of diesel per day.

Energy:

A wind farm company, Vattenfall, is painting one blade on seven of its turbines black to attempt to reduce bird strikes.

• A Norwegian study found that painting a single blade on a turbine black reduced bird strikes by 70%.
• This Dutch location will hopefully recreate these results.

Florida Power and Light started operations of a 75MW solar farm in McDavid.

LPL Solar is building a 345MW solar farm in Louisiana.

Searcy, Arkansas now has 100MW of solar generation, along with a 30MW battery storage facility.

Policy:

Buy-America requirements pose a pretty big issue for the Infrastructure Bill's EV infrastructure buildout.

• Very few EV charger brands meet these "Buy-America" requirements. 
• Buy-America requires that some percent of a product is produced in America.

Louisiana has officially agreed upon its Climate Action Plan.

• Executive Summary
• Full Plan
• The plan calls for 5GW of offshore wind power for Louisiana!

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to find me on Twitter @archduketyler

You can now support me on Patreon, if you so choose! Thank you so much for support in any way you provide it, whether that's via Patreon, sharing the podcast with friends and family, reviewing on your podcast platform of choice, or simply by listening to the show! 

Vehicles:

Green Car Reports compiled a list of all EVs we expect to debut in 2022.

• They have info about each EV in the article.
• Here are the cars:
  • Rivian R1S
  • Kia EV6
  • BMW i4
  • BMW iX
  • Nissan Ariya
  • Ford F-150 Lightning
  • Cadillac Lyriq
  • Mercedes-Benz EQB
  • Mercedes-Benz EQE
  • Toyota bZ4X
  • Lexus RZ 450e
  • Subaru Solterra
  • Genesis GV60
  • Genesis G80 Electrified
  • Polestar 3
  • Canoo Lifestyle Vehicle (lol)
  • Vinfast VF 8 and VF 9
  • Fisker Ocean

The GM Cadillac Lyriq is in pre-production at its old Saturn factory in Tennessee and they still expect to make first deliveries near Q1 of 2022.

Volvo has increased the range of its electric semi trucks by 85% and Kenworth has tripled its electric truck orders over the last 90 days (but we don't know how many orders that comes to).

Proterra and Nikola have signed a multi-year agreement for Proterra to supply Nikola with batteries for its Class 8 trucks.

• These batteries will be used both in Nikola's fuel cell vehicles and its fully electric vehicles.
• Nikola expects to begin production of trucks powered by Proterra batteries by the end of 2022.

A journalist tested "idling" in an EV for 12 hours in sub-freezing weather to see the effects on the remaining charge.

• You should read the story, it's not terribly long.
• After 12hr, the battery only lost about 25% of its range.

The North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) has released its Run On Less - Electric Report.

• The primary finding of the report is that for the following vehicle types, EV tech is mature enough to support fleets:

Lots of companies are developing mapping tools to increase freight efficiency and reduce freight's burden on disadvantaged communities.

• Mapping tools is becoming a whole industry on its own.
• Some of the tools are focused on increasing fuel efficiency, especially with an eye towards determining if an electric or hydrogen truck could run a given route.
• Some of the mapping tools focus on how to reduce emissions in traditionally disadvantaged communities.

Charging:

Rivian is installing its Waypoint (Level 2) chargers at Moab and Lake Powell in partnership with the hospitality company, Under Canvas.

• They expect the chargers to be installed before opening day of Moab and Lake Powell.

Deployment:

There are already over 1,700 electric school buses on the road in the U.S.

• This is way more than I would have expected, actually.
• There are about 480,000 school buses on the road in total.
• This is *excellent* that there are so many school buses deployed already, they'll provide a massive amount of data to guide future adoption.
• The three top states are:

Connecticut is using VW Settlement funds to replace 43 diesel school buses with electric buses.

• This is a $9.5m investment, and the grant covers 65% of the cost.
• This means school boards are paying around $115k/bus.
• A regular diesel bus costs closer to $85k.

Energy:

Great River Energy has reached an agreement to build a 400MW wind farm in North Dakota, slated to begin operations in 2025.

The company VERBIO opened a renewable natural gas (RNG) facility in December 2021 in Nevada that uses waste from corn production to produce methane.

• The plant uses corn stover, which is the left over stalks and such from corn farming, as a feedstock for RNG production.
• At the end of 2022, the facility will be able to produce 60m gallons of ethanol and 19m ethanol-gallon equivalents (EGE) of RNG.
• The process also produces organic waste that can be used as fertilizer.

A new study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) looks at how grid storage can be used to enable 100% renewable electricity.

• The most interesting result is that 12hr storage is incredibly complementary with generation from solar power.
• Wind generation is very weakly related to daily cycles and its cycles are much longer-term, happening over months, so grid storage isn't very useful for wind.
• Grid storage can also reduce burden on transmission lines by allowing for local overgeneration.

Policy:

The White House will direct $4.7b to plugging orphaned oil and gas wells across the U.S.

• There are approximately 130k wells that need to be plugged.
• They cost around $87k each.
• If the bill were to fund the closing of every well, it would only provide $36k per well.
• Louisiana is among the 26 states that has applied for federal funding to close its abandoned wells.

Electric Vehicles:

Yet another study shows that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to air pollution from transportation.

Volkswagen doubled EV deliveries in 2021, delivering 263k EVs worldwide.

• The most important thing in the article is a chart with their annual EV sales since 2019, showing a pretty solid trend.

A comparison between the electric Chevy Silverado and the F-150 Lightning.

Chevy has announced a $30k electric version of the Equinox for production in 2023, we have little detail apart from that.

GM has finally agreed to comply with California's emissions rules, which opens them up to being sold to government entities.

Walmart and FedEx have recently placed orders for electric delivery vans from GM's subsidiary, BrightDrop.

• Walmart reserved 5k vans to be delivered starting in 2023.
• FedEx increased its order from 500 to 2,000 with the plan to add up to 20,000 more in the future. 

The company EnPower will begin producing batteries at its Indianapolis facility starting in 2022, ramping up to 800MWh of annual production by the end of 2023.

The electric bus manufacturer, GreenPower Motor Company, signed a deal with West Virginia to build a manufacturing facility in the state.

• The company will employ 900 people.
• West Virginia agreed to purchase at least $15m worth of buses produced at the facility.

Volvo, Daimler, and Traton have agreed to build out a charging network across Europe to support heavy duty trucking.

• This is a combined €500 million investment.
• The goal is at least 1,700 charging ports within five years.
• The chargers will be accessible to any truck, not just manufactured by the three companies in this venture.

Adopt a Charger has announced a partnership with Rivian to add charging stations at Yosemite National Park and the Golden Gate National Recreational Area.

• Rivian will pay for the charging equipment as well as 10 years of operation and maintenance.
• 13 Level 2 chargers have been converted to Rivian chargers at Yosemite with two more to come.
• 12 Level 2 chargers are going to be built at the Golden Gate area.
• These will be part of the Rivian Waypoint network.

Tesla applied for Volkswagen Settlement funds in Texas for four new charging stations that would be required to include CCS plugs.

• CCS plugs are the SAE standard used across the industry by most modern EVs.
• They applied for between $375,000-$500,000.

BP says that fast chargers are nearly as profitable as gas pumps, which I have a lot of skepticism about.

• This is focusing purely on operational cost/revenue, so it's not completely impossible.

Energy:

Lightsource bp will build 135MW of solar in Arkansas and 345MW in Louisiana, with operations beginning in 2023.

Pattern Energy Group LP has started operation of a new, 1,050MW wind project in New Mexico!

The US Department of Energy has awarded $8.4m for four projects working to produce geothermal energy from abandoned oil and gas wells.

• The four projects are:

According to a new US Energy Information Administration (EIA) report, 85% of power generation expected to be retired in 2022 is coal power.

• 12.6GW of coal power is scheduled to be retired in 2022, out of the total of 14.9GW.

The EIA also projects that nearly half of new electricity generation will be solar power in 2022.

• 46% solar
• 21% natural gas
• 17% wind
• 11% batteries
• 5% nuclear
• 0.2% other

Policy:

The FAA has implemented a new rule that allows aircraft to use continuous descent profiles instead of stair-step profiles, which is more efficient and will reduce GHG emissions.

• The new rule is expected to save 40m pounds (18m kg) of GHG emissions annually.

Electric Vehicles:

There was a really interesting study released recently that looks at winter range loss for many EV models and compares them.

• There's a fantastic chart in there you should absolutely look at.

Tesla had an incredible year in 2021, selling over 930k vehicles.

Tesla is recalling around 475k Model S and Model 3 vehicles.

• 356k Model 3; 120k Model S
• The Model 3 recall is for the rearview camera, which has a possible wiring issue.
• The Model S recall is for the latch on the frunk which may release while driving.

Ford is once again increasing F-150 Lightning production targets, up to 150k annually.

• This is the second doubling we've seen since the announcement.

We now have official word that the electric Chevy Silverado won't be built until early 2023 at the earliest.

• The vehicle will apparently be unveiled at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) on January 5.
• A comparison between the F-150 specs and Silverado specs.

We officially have EPA range estimates for the Polestar 2 at 270mi (435km) for $47,200.

• This is a range bump over the expected range of 265mi (426km)

Rivian is still expected to start deliveries of the R1S (SUV) in January of 2022.

ABB's charging network now supports "Plug and Charge" tech, so you shouldn't need to use an app or anything to start charging.

The charging company Voltempo apparently has a charging product that can output 1,000kW (1MW) of power, which can be split over 24 individual plugs.

• No vehicles can remotely accept that much power, but it's cool that it's being worked on by a commercial entity.
• There is a demo version of this "HyperCharging" system in Birmingham, UK, with a commercial installation to be built in 2022.

Rivian is building a $5b manufacturing plant in Georgia.

• This will result in around 7,500 jobs.

Toyota will build a $1.29b battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina with production beginning in 2025 and produce 1.2m battery packs per year.

The electric bus manufacturer, Proterra, will build a battery manufacturing facility in South Carolina, a $76m investment.

• They expect to launch the plant in the second half of 2022.
• Target production is in the few GWh/year ballpark.
• This will be their third battery factory.

The American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) has been awarded $2m by the United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC) for the development of scaled recycling of batteries.

The company Compass Minerals has demonstrated the ability to produce battery-grade lithium from the Great Salt Lake.

• Most of their production will be using existing brine ponds.
• Commercial production is expected to begin in 2025.

The company VFlowTech out of Singapore has launched a pilot EV charging site that uses redox flow batteries to provide on-site energy storage.

GM has delivered its first electric delivery trucks (the BrightDrop EV600) to FedEx.

• No details on how many have been delivered and how many remain to be delivered.

The German commuter rail company, Deutsche Bahn, has ordered 44 battery-electric Flirt Akku trains, expected to go online in 2025.

• Each of these trains has a 325 passenger capacity and can travel at least 80km (50mi).

Daimler has delivered 20 electric buses with solid-state batteries to Bremen's transit system.

• They have ordered 15 more, as well.

A study looking at synthetic fuels finds that they emit just as much pollution as petroleum-based fuels.

• This is a perfect example of why we need to retire the words "clean" and "green" from the lexicon when it comes to talking about emissions.
• Yes, burning these fuels produces the same emissions as burning their fossil alternatives (well, nearly the same emissions).
• This is also a problem with biodiesel, renewable diesel, and renewable natural gas.
• This is especially an issue because tailpipe emissions disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
• There isn't really a good solution to this problem.

United Airlines flew a route between Chicago and Washington, D.C. with one engine running on 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

• SAF is basically renewable diesel, but for jet fuel.
• Since it's similar to renewable diesel, we can expect similar carbon reductions in the 60% region.
• Airlines are currently limited to 50% blends of SAF and fossil jet fuel.
• One engine ran on 100% SAF and the other engine ran on fossil jet fuel.
• This allowed them to compare performance directly, and they showed that differences are minimal.

Energy:

Amazon is ahead of schedule with their push to being 100% renewable, on track to hit that goal by 2025 as opposed to the previous goal of 2030.

• This includes a recent announcement of 18 new wind and solar projects.
• Their total renewable generation is now 12GW, which is 65% of their total usage.

Appalachian Power has announced that it will add 500MW of solar and wind by 2025.

• Their renewable portfolio is currently around 20% of their production.

Solar prices continued dropping in 2021, down by around 12% on average and storage costs dropped by around 10%.

Duke Energy in North Carolina has finalized a net metering agreement for residential solar.

• Credits for any net monthly exports at an annualized rate (weighted average rate for all hours assuming a fixed block of energy) for avoided energy cost
• A monthly grid access fee for solar facilities with a capacity greater than 15 kW
• A monthly minimum bill that ensures recovery of costs related to the distribution system
• Non-bypassable charges to recover all costs related to DSM/EE, storm cost recovery and cybersecurity
• Ability for customers who install net-metered generation prior to the implementation of new rates to elect to remain on their existing rates until January 1, 2027

A company called Monolith has conditional loan approval from the Department of Energy (DOE) to build a plant that will produce zero-carbon hydrogen and carbon black.

• This company makes hydrogen and carbon black from methane, apparently with no carbon emissions from exhaust.
• They use both fossil and renewable natural gas as a feedstock.

Policy:

The White House has announced a goal of going 100% electric for the Federal light-duty fleet by 2027.

A recent poll suggests that a slim majority (55%) of American voters support full transition to electric vehicles by 2030.

• It's always worth being skeptical of polls.
• The support for EVs is stronger in younger voters and minority voters.
• Air quality was the largest reason for support, followed by climate change.

Electric Vehicles:

GM is extending the production halt of the Chevy Bolt until February.

Green Car Reports now has a first drive article for the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and it looks pretty great.

Both the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Ford F-150 can charge other EVs, and this is pretty cool.

• Ford is actually using this as a big marketing point, which is smart.

Ford's MachE is getting a range bump to 314mi (505km) and Ford plans to triple production by 2023 to 200k vehicles per year.

• They're gonna triple production by 2023.

Tesla is now offering LFP (Lithium-Iron Phosphate) batteries in its Model 3s.

• They are less efficient than the previous batteries, but allow the owner to regularly charge to 100% without risking faster degradation.

Tesla has applied for regulatory approval to move forward with Gigafactory Texas, and they're on track to begin making vehicles in 2022.

• This factory will produce 500k Model Y's per year, as well as Cybertruck and Tesla Semi.

Nissan has announced an $18b investment in electrification, to be spent over the next 5 years.

• This includes a goal of 15 EVs on the market by 2030.
• They're also investing in their own battery production.

Mazda is selling their Mazda 2 hatchback as a "self-charging hybrid" in Europe, which is dumb.

• This is real similar to Toyota calling their hybrids "self-charging electric vehicles".
• Norway actually forced Lexus to change their language when they used that same marketing term back in 2019.

Audi may pursue "urban charging lounges" as a way to provide EV charging in a user-friendly way.

• The concept basically looks like a luxury lounge to hang out in while vehicles charge.

The charging network IONITY plans to increase its European charging network to 7,000 chargers by 2025 with a 700m Euro investment.

• Locations will have an average of between 6 and 12 charging ports.
• They currently operate over 1,500 charging points.

The charging provider HyperCharge and the parking company Target Park are partnering to install 2,500 public Level 2 chargers across North America, starting in Toronto.

• They will install these chargers over the next three years.

Electrify America has Tesla Powerpacks (batteries) at 140 stations around the US to avoid demand charges.

Energy:

Murray County, Oklahoma has a new operational wind farm that can produce 118MW of electricity.

The U.S.'s second offshore wind project has been approved, which will be a 132MW installation off the shore of New York.

• Operation is expected to begin in late 2023.
• This project is being built by Ørsted, a Danish company.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has finalized its environmental study of the potential impacts of offshore wind energy in the New York Bight area and found it will have minimal impact.

• This means we may soon see leases for offshore wind operators to begin developing offshore of New York and New Jersey.
• More than 7GW of electricity can be produced by offshore wind in this area.

Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has an open comment period (ending on Jan 7, 2022) to get feedback from offshore fishers about proposed offshore wind development.

• If this goes well, we may see continued push for offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico.

Policy:

The EPA has finalized its new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

• The long and short of it is that manufacturers will have to reach an average fuel economy of 55mpg by 2026.

A HUGE thanks to Zane Voss for appearing on the show! I absolutely loved making this episode and I'm very grateful for all of his time.

Links:

Car Shredding Machine

Video with dramatic music and awesome footage of an electric arc furnace.

Megawatt-Scale Electric Vehicle Charging Webinar

Interchange Podcast about Load Following with Renewables.

Some Definitions:

A Heat - A batch of liquid iron or steel produced from a blast furnace, basic oxygen furnace, or electric arc furnace. A heat size ranges from about 35 metric tons to over 300 metric tons.

Blast Furnace - A furnace used to melt iron ore that primarily uses coke for heat.

Direct Reduction of Iron (DRI) - A method for processing iron ore that does not melt the iron, instead using hydrogen, methane, and water to turn iron oxide into pure iron.

Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) - A method of processing iron or steel that uses an electrical arc to melt the metal.

Fines - Fine particulate that can clog the pores in the coke bed of a blast furnace; typically smaller than 6.3mm or 0.25in.

Ellingham Diagram - A diagram from showing the oxygen affinity of metals (how likely they are to oxidize).

Tuyere - A type of nozzle used in steelmaking.

Refractory - A material used for thermal protection, also known as "fire brick".

NAAQS - National Ambient Air Quality Standards; standards set by the EPA for local air quality.

Scope 1 Emissions - Direct greenhouse gas emissions from sources controlled or owned by an organization.

Scope 2 Emissions - Emissions that are indirectly associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling.

Scope 3 Emissions - Emissions associated with the use of the product, including transportation of the product by a third party.

Scope 1/2/3 Emissions EPA Link

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) - Electric utility in Tennessee.

A HUGE thanks to Zane Voss for appearing on the show! I absolutely loved making this episode and I'm very grateful for all of his time.

Links:

Car Shredding Machine

Video with dramatic music and awesome footage of an electric arc furnace.

Megawatt-Scale Electric Vehicle Charging Webinar

Interchange Podcast about Load Following with Renewables.

Some Definitions:

A Heat - A batch of liquid iron or steel produced from a blast furnace, basic oxygen furnace, or electric arc furnace. A heat size ranges from about 35 metric tons to over 300 metric tons.

Blast Furnace - A furnace used to melt iron ore that primarily uses coke for heat.

Direct Reduction of Iron (DRI) - A method for processing iron ore that does not melt the iron, instead using hydrogen, methane, and water to turn iron oxide into pure iron.

Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) - A method of processing iron or steel that uses an electrical arc to melt the metal.

Fines - Fine particulate that can clog the pores in the coke bed of a blast furnace; typically smaller than 6.3mm or 0.25in.

Ellingham Diagram - A diagram from showing the oxygen affinity of metals (how likely they are to oxidize).

Tuyere - A type of nozzle used in steelmaking.

Refractory - A material used for thermal protection, also known as "fire brick".

NAAQS - National Ambient Air Quality Standards; standards set by the EPA for local air quality.

Scope 1 Emissions - Direct greenhouse gas emissions from sources controlled or owned by an organization.

Scope 2 Emissions - Emissions that are indirectly associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling.

Scope 3 Emissions - Emissions associated with the use of the product, including transportation of the product by a third party.

Scope 1/2/3 Emissions EPA Link

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) - Electric utility in Tennessee.

Electric Vehicles:

Tesla has continued its price increases, with the Model Y now starting just over $60k.

A study found that adding wireless charging to EVs increased interest in EVs by nearly double.

• The study was performed by an interested party and should be taken with some skepticism.

MIT's Carbon Counter tool has been updated for 2021.

• This tool is a dynamic chart that allows you to look at the GHG emissions and monthly costs of different vehicles of different fuel types.
• It's fun to play around in the settings (under "Customize").
• Removing the "Federal Tax Credit" option is available.

Rivian went public and quickly became the second-most valuable vehicle company in the world.

• They raised $12b by going public.
• Another article with more info.

Ford and Rivian are no longer partnering on producing vehicles together.

• This is apparently a mutual decision the companies made together to focus more on their own offerings.
• The market seems to treat this as a vote of confidence for Ford and the opposite for Rivian.
• Ford is still an investor in Rivian.
• Rivian's stock dropped a decent bit at this announcement.
• Ford's stock seems to have increased.

Ford has begun delivering pre-production versions of its E-Transit van to certain customers for testing.

• This is slightly ahead of schedule, so that's cool.
• Deliveries of proper, production vehicles is expected in early 2022.

Ford has (again) increased their EV production targets, doubling their previous goal to 600k EVs by 2023.

Blue Bird (the bus manufacturer) is getting a Vehicle-to-Grid facility installed at its delivery hub in Georgia.

• Nuvve is installing 200 of its 125kW V2G chargers at the facility.

The company, Connected Kerb, has installed 1k Level 2 chargers across the UK in 2021.

• They hope to install 30k more by the end of 2022.
• More info in the article.

Battery manufacturer, Northvolt, has produced its first batteries made completely from recycled nickel, manganese, and cobalt that they harvested from old batteries.

• Both the recycling and production were done at their site in Västerås, Sweden.
• They claim their process can be scaled to commercial levels and are preparing to build a plant able to recycle 125k tons of batteries per year.
• This will be co-located with a battery plant and the recycled materials will make up half that plant's 60GWh annual output.

8 new electric school buses have been deployed in Minnesota.

• These were partially funded through a grant program run by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA).
• The buses cost $388k each, compared to $80k for diesel buses.
• A big portion of these deployments is to collect data on operating the buses in cold climates.
• The buses are manufactured by Lion.

Five school systems in West Virginia are receiving grant money from Appalachian Power to purchase electric school buses.

• This is funding 9 total buses so far.
• $250k of grant funding per bus, plus money for charging infrastructure.

Everett Transit is going to buy and install six inductive charging stations in 2022, which will support 9 new Gillig electric buses to be delivered in 2022.

Los Angeles Department of Transportation has won a grant to install bus charges paired with 1.5MW of solar and 4.5MWh of battery storage.

• These will support 100 Proterra electric buses.
• The grant was for $6m.

Trillium will provide hydrogen fueling for the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District in Illinois.

• Interestingly, the fuel will be produced on-site via electrolysis with their own solar panels, also on-site.
• This will power 20 buses.
• This really confuses me because if you're already producing solar on-site, wouldn't it be more energy efficient to simply use that electricity directly in the buses instead of going through the hydrogen production process?
• For electric buses:
• A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory about hydrogen fueling station costs.

A European shipping company, DFDS, has ordered 100 Volvo FM Electric Trucks, to be delivered starting at the end of 2022.

Energy:

Entergy, Louisiana is planning on building 475MW of solar in Louisiana.

• They currently only have 55MW of renewables on the grid in Louisiana, so that's a big increase.

Entergy is going to deploy 1GW of renewable energy over the next five years.

The Vineyard (offshore) Windfarm is finally going to get built near Cape Cod.

• This is an 800MW project that has been in the works for three years.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has opened a 60 day public comment period on dedicating a large area along the California coast as being open for offshore wind development.

• This is an area off Morro Bay.
• Period opened on November 12.

A farm in Colorado is growing crops under its solar panels, the article is a fun and interesting read.

Policy:

California has announced $1.4b in funding over three years for Electric Vehicle and Hydrogen Fueling infrastructure.

• $314m for light-duty vehicle charging
• $690m for medium/heavy-duty vehicle charging (which includes hydrogen)
• $77m for hydrogen fueling alone
• $25m for "zero or near-zero carbon fuel production and supply" (presumably renewable power for chargers or green hydrogen (hydrogen from electrolysis with renewable electricity))
• $244m for EV/Hydrogen vehicle manufacturing
• $15m for workforce training/development

Germany increased funding for residential EV charging to 800m Euro.

• This provides up to 900 Euro for private or public Level 2 chargers!

Infrastructure Bill PowerPoint Presentation (will need permission to access)

• Alt fuel corridors maps.

Electric Vehicles:

The U.S. Department of Energy released a report with some CO2/mi figures for different vehicle types, and they're mostly unsurprising.

• 402 g/mi - Gasoline
• 206 g/mi - Electric (battery)
• 250 g/mi - Plug-in Hybrid Electric
• 237 g/mi - Hydrogen (natural gas)
• Link to the report itself.

Tesla will soon begin selling level 2 chargers that use the J1772 plug type.

• This is small news, but paired with their network slowly opening up to non-Teslas, it's slightly interesting news.

Tesla has opened up 10 Superchargers in the Netherlands to non-Tesla vehicles as a pilot project.

Ford is investing £230 million in electric powertrain production in the UK!

Toyota announced a new EV, but there's no price right now?

• Apparently they're going to have a yoke steering "wheel", at least in China?
• I implore you to go to this article and look at what is probably the worst graph ever created.
• It will apparently be available in 2022 some time.

BMW is currently doing research with Oak Ridge National Labs to work on high-powered wireless charging for the Porcshe Taycan.

Long Beach Transit in California has purchased 20 new all-electric transit buses from New Flyer.

• The transit agency expects to be all alternative fuels by the end of 2021 and all electric by the end of the decade.

Two native tribes in Minnesota have won a $6.5m Department of Energy grant for EV deployment which will fund at least 19 new vehicles and associated charging equipment.

The Australian petrol company, Ampol, will deploy DC Fast Chargers at 100 of their gas stations across Australia.

• This is in partnership with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency's announcement of EV charger funding that we discussed in Episode 26.
• These chargers will be dual-port, 50kW chargers.
• This is part of a $100m commitment by Ampol towards future energy projects.

FREYR Battery and Koch Strategic Platforms are working together to develop 50GWh of battery production in the U.S.

SKC is investing $423m in semiconductor production at a plant in Georgia to support EVs.

There was a recent meeting about the battery supply chain gap held by Argonne National Labs, and a recording is available here.

The Michigan utility Consumers Energy says it's ready to support more than 1 million EVs in its territory by 2030, which is around a third of the total vehicles in their region.

• This is interesting because many EV naysayers point at our grid's "inability to handle EVs" as being A Thing That Is Real, despite the fact that literally every electric utility I can think of very much wants EVs to become a thing (think about it, EVs represent *more electricity for them to sell*.

California will soon get public DC Fast Chargers at Taco Bell locations in the state!

• These will be 75kW Tritium chargers.
• The first installations will be in San Francisco, but will likely expand elsewhere.
• The chargers will have battery backups and potentially solar. Lots of focus on using renewable electricity.

Energy:

One of the last three coal power plants in Louisiana is shutting down at the end of 2021.

• It is a 650MW power plant.
• It was supposed to shut down in 2026, but the timeline has moved forward.
• It will apparently save customers $9-15/mo on electricity.
• Most of the electricity will be replaced with renewables.

Policy:

The Infrastructure Bill has finally passed, and among many other things it includes $7.5b for EV chargers.

• The Biden administration has a stated goal of installing 500k chargers across the U.S.
• $7.5b at 50% cost share (federal requirement for grant programs) may fun up to 100k chargers*
• I'm making the assumption that 500k chargers means 500k fast chargers, but this is slightly ambiguous, though I think it's been heavily implied in the past. Recent language implies Level 2 chargers may be included.
• Here is the press release from the White House about the bill's passing.

The governor of Louisiana attended last week's climate conference in Glasgow and said quite a bit about Louisiana's role in the ongoing energy transition.

• This isn't as widely interesting, but it's very relevant for my home state.
• He focused on our industrial sector having a lot of transferrable skills as we move from oil and gas towards renewables.
• He also stated that the next governor won't be able to walk back his changes because the commercial sector is demanding climate action.

Electric Vehicles (and other fuels):

Apple is apparently struggling to find a battery manufacturer for its electric car.

• As I've said a billion times, any company serious about electric vehicles needs to get into the battery game.

GM is going to install 40k Level 2 charging stations in North America starting in 2022.

• Not clear when they will have these installed by.
• This program will provide up to 10 chargers to a GM dealership and that dealership will determine good community locations to install the chargers in.
• This article is weirdly pessimistic because Level 2 chargers aren't incredibly fast, I think that's goofy.
• 4k of these chargers will be installed in Canada.

Tesla plans to triple its Supercharging network over the next two years.

• The network has doubled in the last 18 months.

Tesla plans to switch to Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries in the Model 3 and Y globally.

• These batteries are a shift from more expensive but higher performing Nickel Manganese Cobalt batteries currently used in their U.S. vehicles.
• This shift will free up the more high-performing batteries for harder applications such as the Cybertruck or Semi.

Panasonic has produced prototype 4680 battery cells with plans to begin test production in March of 2022.

• These are the new, larger (fatter) battery cells that Tesla announced on Battery Day.
• 4680 means 46mm diameter, 80mm height
• For more info on these batteries, this video by Sandy Munro gives a breakdown.

Hertz, the car rental company, has announced the purchase of 100k Tesla Model 3's.

• They cited the Supercharger network as being a reason for choosing Tesla.
• These vehicles will be in both the U.S. and in Europe.

Uber will have access to 50k of these Hertz-owned Teslas for Uber drivers.

• These Teslas will cost drivers $334 per week with maintenance and insurance covered.
• Uber also offers $1/ride up to $4000/year to drivers who use electric vehicles.

Fairfax County, Virginia is receiving 8 new electric school buses and chargers with 10 more on the way in 2022.

• The first eight are being bought in partnership with the utility, Dominion Energy.
• The 10 coming in 2022 are through a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality grant.
• The school district hopes to go all electric by 2035.

Buffalo, New York has purchased 10 new New Flyer electric transit buses with an option in the contract to purchase 140 more.

Moscow, Russia has officially deployed its 800th electric transit bus, still on target to reach 1000 electric buses by the end of 2021.

A fleet in Virginia is converting 49 of its vehicles to run on renewable propane.

• Renewable propane is a fairly new fuel, produced much like renewable diesel (which you can learn a bit about in the Petroleum Pat episode).
• Renewable propane is *very* hard to come by.
• Blossman Gas is providing this propane.
• This project was helped along by a colleague of mine at Virginia Clean Cities.
• Renewable Propane is likely in the ballpark of 40-60% lower carbon than gasoline, but data is scarce.

A group of Brazilian companies, including the airline, Gol, are partnering to deploy 250 electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft for a rideshare service, to launch in 2024.

• These craft will have a range of 100 miles (160 km) at 200mph (320 kmh).
• They will carry 4 passengers per flight.
• They will be deployed in São Paulo.

Energy:

Construction has begun on a 250MW wind farm in Ellis County, Oklahoma, expected to generate 1.1 TWh per year.

• Operation will begin by the end of 2022.
• Expected to offset 676k tons of CO2 per year.

Cypress Creek Renewables has a 270MW solar project in construction in Texas.

Georgia is getting a 250MW solar project in Lee County with construction to begin soon.

A hydroelectric power station in Alaska may see its output increase by 50% due to a melting glacier.

• It currently produces 120MW.

Dubuque, Iowa has finished construction of its landfill Renewable Natural Gas project.

• This facility will produce the equivalent of 1.7 million gallons of gasoline worth of natural gas per year.
• This is a huge project.

The company, Chart Industries, has won a Department of Energy grant for a carbon capture project.

• The goal is to capture upwards of 95% of the CO2 in the "flue gas" stream (flue gas is basically waste gas from the industrial process).

North Dakota regulators approved the state's first carbon capture project.

• The project would inject carbon deep below ground and they expect to be able to store 250 billion tons of CO2.
• This is being installed near an ethanol plant that would utilize the well.

Policy:

California's Clean Fuel Reward program is reducing its plug-in vehicle rebate from $1,500 to $750 as of November 1, 2021.

Electric Vehicles:

Waymo vehicles have decided to use a single street as a turnaround point and it's hilarious.

Nikola has landed a Letter of Intent from PGT Trucking to lease 100 fuel-cell trucks in 2023.

• This also includes fueling infrastructure.

VW's CEO Herbert Diess invited Elon Musk to speak at a VW executive crisis meeting.

• Diess praised Tesla's ability to be nimble and adjust to the changing market (specifically the silicon shortage).
• Elon referred to VW as Tesla's greatest competitor.
• Apparently Tesla's new plan in Germany can crank out a car in 10 hours where it takes VW 30 hours or more to build a car.
• I love this story.

Green Car Reports has a First Drive review of the Volvo C40 Recharge if you're interested in such things.

Toyota made some announcements, but they're nebulous. We'll allegedly see 15 EV models by 2025.

• 7 of these models will be "Beyond Zero" models???? Whatever that means.

The "Made in America" index is out for the year and Tesla tops the charts in terms of EVs, with 65% of their vehicles being made in America.

A new study showed that battery cathodes made from recycled materials work significantly better than cathodes made of "fresh" materials.

• This is specifically with Nick-Manganese-Cobalt (NMC) batteries, it's not clear if this applies to other chemistries.
• The recycling was done by Battery Resources, a company in the process of commercializing.
• The paper shows they were able to achieve a higher cycle life than "fresh" cathodes:
• There are lots of open questions about scalability and how widely applicable this is.

Energy:

The company B2U Storage Solutions is making money using old EV batteries for grid storage.

• They use old Nissan Leaf batteries.
• They make **$175** profit for every MWh of electricity sold to the grid. ($175 is the correct number, in the audio I say $105 at some point, but I misspoke.)
• The project cost $200/kWh ($200,000/MWh).
• Assuming the batteries can only cycle once per day, this is a 3 year return-on-investment.
• They currently have 4MWh of storage at 2.75MW of power output.
• The project is also paired with a 1MW solar project on-site.
• There is a video in the article that is 4min long and *well* worth watching.

Renewable Energy Group is expanding their Geismer, LA plant to produce 340m gallons of renewable diesel, up from 90m gallons.

• This is a $950m investment.
• It will add 60 permanent jobs and 500 temporary (construction) jobs.
• Full production begins in 2024.
• Louisiana's governor said this project will help us achieve our net-zero goals in Louisiana, which won't be true unless we have incentives that make renewable diesel cheaper, since it's all sold out of state currently.

There's lots of solar power coming to Kentucky, most recently a 125MW project that will supply the University of Kentucky, North American Stainless, Dow, and the University of Louisville.

• In total, Kentucky has 815MW of solar to be built in the next 5 years.

Electric Vehicles:

Tesla has accused Rivian of stealing trade secrets related to battery technology.

Tesla has increased the prices of the Model 3 and Y by $2,000, which means the cheapest Tesla is now over $40k.

Tesla is releasing a CCS adapter in Korea, with people suspecting this will come to the U.S. at some point. They've also removed the CHAdeMO adapter from their website.

National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) says there is no need to investigate Tesla fires.

Mazda has a fully electric vehicle now, and it leaves a *lot* to be desired. MX-30, 100 miles of range, ~$35k starting.

• The review is rather scathing. 

Ford is deploying a task force of "charge angels" out to test the U.S.'s charging infrastructure to ensure that chargers meet Ford's standards.

• As goofy as the title "charge angel" is, the idea is pretty cool.
• They have dedicated employees that have specially outfitted Mach-E's and drive around the country testing chargers for reliability. They then report the results back to Ford so that the company can have a more targeted approach to filling charging gaps.

LG Chem is covering the cost of the Chevy Bolt recall, which amounts to $1.9b!

GM is building a battery development facility in Michigan for testing and production improvement, to be completed in mid-2022.

• The goal of this facility is to allow them to test new batteries as well as manufacturing processes.

GM also announced plans to have 1 million EVs on the road by 2025, all-electric by 2035, spend $35b on electrification and autonomous driving, and have a $30k EV come out soon.

GM says that its Ultra Cruise driver assist will provide "hands-free driving in 95% of scenarios" in 2023.

• haha
• In the U.S. and Canada.
• They will add LIDAR to achieve this.

Rivian is apparently going to begin producing its own batteries at some point. We have next to no information apart from that.

The battery manufacturer Northvolt is investing $750m in a new expansion to their battery manufacturing and research.

• There isn't much news on how much battery production this will result in, but it's a big investment.
• The facility being upgraded is in Västerås, Sweden, and the investment will over double the number of employees working there (at that facility, not in the whole city).

Plymouth, Minnesota is going to have 100 level 2 charging stations installed through a partnership with Carbon Solutions Group.

• Most of these chargers would be a paid service to people charging at them, but the price will at least be lower than comparable gasoline prices.

Columbus, Ohio just put two electric buses into service. Eight more will arrive next year.

• They intend to get rid of diesel altogether by 2025, relying on compressed natural gas (CNG) and electric buses.
• They have 321 buses in total.

Port Arthur, Texas is receiving its 11th electric bus, partially through an Entergy grant that covered a quarter of the cost.

Austin, Texas has purchased 197 electric transit buses, which will increase its total to 203.

• They plan to convert its entire fleet of over 400 buses to electric.
• This is a mix of Proterra and New Flyer buses.
• The original press release.
• This is the largest electric vehicle procurement in the nation.

Hyundai and Shell are partnering to build 48 new hydrogen fueling stations in California as part of Project Neptune.

Energy:

Shell is getting into the Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) game with some dairy projects.

• There's not much in the way of specifics about the projects, but there are three in the works.
• The total output of the projects mentioned is equal to around 8 million gallons of gasoline (a GHG reduction of very roughly 100k tons; assuming the gas is used in transit buses and replacing diesel).

A pilot offshore wind project by GE in the Netherlands produced significantly more electricity than hoped, which is good news.

• The project planned on hitting 12MW of electricity from the single turbine, instead reaching 14MW!
• This is the same type of turbine that may see use in Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Ørsted is building a $20m operations and maintenance facility in Maryland to support offshore wind development.

Energy-ish:

Google is adding a suite of efficiency options to its offerings, including in Google Maps.

• For Maps in particular, Google will now offer routes based on whether they're more carbon-efficient than other routes.
• They will also specify which flights are lowest in carbon impact when searching for flights in Google.
• Google Nest will also have options for pairing the thermostat with when the grid is cleanest.

Transportation Network Companies such as Lyft and Uber increase fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions by 20-40%, according to a report from Uber and Lyft as well as a study by Carnegie Mellon University.

• This increase in fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions comes from "deadheading", which is driving without a passenger (between pickups, for example).
• The study by Carnegie Mellon also found that congestion significantly increases as a result of ride-hailing services.

Policy:

Google and YouTube are removing monetization from climate change denial content.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is phasing out the usage/production of Hydrofluorocarbons.

• Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are incredibly potent greenhouse gases.
• They're commonly used in refrigeration.
• Under this rule, production and consumption in the U.S. must reduce by 85% over the next 15 years.
• Some plants that emit HFCs as by-products of other processes must reduce emissions by 99.9% by October 2022.
• This article is very long, fair warning.

Electric Vehicles:

The Lucid Dream is going into proper production with deliveries beginning in October!

Madrid has purchased 30 more fully electric buses for a total of 85 electric transit buses in their fleet.

EVOLVE KY has installed 82 Level 2 EV chargers in Louisville, Kentucky that are free to use.

Tennessee's governor announced a new technical college to support the workforce at the new Ford EV battery plants to be built in Tennessee.

• The college will be developed in conjunction with SK Innovation and Ford (who are jointly building the battery plant).

Lordstown is selling a significant amount of its factory to Foxconn.

• Lordstown isn't selling its motor or battery lines, though.
• The factory will also be used for Fisker EV production.
• Foxconn is also buying $50m worth of Lordstown stock.

GM is planning on having its U.S. plants run on 100% renewable electricity by 2025 instead of the previous goal of 2030.

Tesla now has a "trial period" for gaining access to the "Full Self Driving" beta.

Video Series: The YouTube channel JerryRigEverything is converting an old military hummer to be fully electric.

• This is a link to the first video in the playlist.

Other:

FAA is implementing an efficiency program at 27 airports that will reduce taxiing time and save a ton of fuel/emissions.

• The software was developed in partnership with NASA!
• The pilot project (hehe) saved 275k gallons of fuel, equal to 185 flights between Chicago and New York.
• It reduced average taxi time by 15min per flight.
• This will save 75k tons of CO2 emissions annually.

Electric Vehicles:

Ford is considering producing Mach-E's as dedicated police vehicles.

Ford is investing in battery recycling, specifically targeting closed-loop recycling.

• Part of this is through a $50m (USD) investment in Redwood Materials, which is a battery recycling company founded by J.B. Straubel of Tesla fame

Ford and SK Innovations are investing $11.4b for electric F-150 manufacturing and battery manufacturing in the U.S.

• There will be 3 battery plants and 1 F-150 Lightning plant.
• These plants will be in Stanton, Tennessee and Glendale, Kentucky and will create 11,000 jobs.
• This is Ford's largest single manufacturing investment in its history.
• Ford is investing $7b, and SK is investing the remaining $4.4b.
• Once fully operational, the battery plants will be able to produce enough batteries for 2.2m EVs!
• Ford also mentioned they will spend $525m over five years for technician training for the shift towards EVs.

GM is resuming battery production for the Bolt.

• There is also a software update for Bolt owners that will monitor the battery for issues to prioritize replacements in high-risk vehicles.

Michigan is hoping to pilot the country's first under-road inductive EV charging project.

• We talked about Indiana hopefully piloting a similar project in Episode 24.
• It will be a 1 mile (1.6km) stretch of road in Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb county.
• The request for proposals will be opened on September 28, 2021.
• The article makes it sound like they're pretty explicitly trying to beat Indiana to the punch.

An Australian mine, owned by Roy Hill, has purchased a battery-electric train from Wabtec.

• The purchase comes after a pilot project with the company that tested an earlier model of the train.
• The train will have 7MWh of battery storage.
• They will take delivery of the train in 2023.
• They expect it to save over 10% in carbon emissions as well as cost.

Oregon is getting some more electric transit buses in the Eugene-Springfield area!

• Lane Transit District has purchased 19 electric transit buses from New Flyer.
• This will complement their existing 11 electric buses.

California is deploying 100 new drayage and regional trucks!

• The project is called JETSI, the Joint Electric Truck Scaling Initiative and it will last 8 years.
• It's a partnership of more than 20 organizations, both companies and government entities.

Rivian is putting vehicles in people's hands! There are several reviews around:

• Green Car Reports
• JerryRigEverything video (with lots of offroading)

Michigan is investing in EV charging infrastructure with a new plan called the Lake Michigan Electric Vehicle Circuit.

• Michigan will spend up to $6.25m for the project.
• They will do a feasibility study first to determine the best strategy for deployment.

Energy:

We once again have loud opposition to offshore wind power that is rooted in a "not in my backyard" mentality around the aesthetics of offshore wind power (this time, in Georgia).

• Several Republican politicians are opposing offshore wind power in Georgia because it would "ruin their views".
• They also cite issues around wind power and bird populations, but that totally ignores that fossil fuel power is significantly worse for birds than wind power.
• For information about bird deaths per unit energy produced by different sources, see this paper.

Shell sold off a massive oil production in the Permian basin.

• It was a $9.5b deal with ConocoPhillips.

Electric Vehicles:

GM is allegedly asking owners of Chevy Bolts not to park within 50ft (15m) of other vehicles.

• I didn't see this recommendation on GM's website, but it was originally reported by Bloomberg and has been widely reported since.

Lucid Air Dream Edition achieves a 520mi (840km) EPA range.

Rivian is officially rolling production vehicles off the line, but we don't know when deliveries start yet.

Ford has dedicated $250m more towards their F-150 Lightning efforts, which will provide 450 new jobs.

• This goes hand-in-hand with their recent announcement of increased production targets for the F-150 Lightning.

The F-150 Lightning appears to still be on track for Spring 2022 deliveries and pre-production vehicles have been made.

Consumer Reports wrote a review of the new Tesla Model S steering yoke. They didn't like it.

Bridgestone is partnering with EVBox to deploy 3500 new EV chargers across Europe.

• This will be a 5-year deployment.
• The project will begin in France and Italy before expanding into the UK, Germany, Poland, Spain, and other European countries.
• The chargers will be a mix of DC Fast Chargers and "regular chargers" (presumably Level 2).

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has continued work on their megawatt-scale charging project, going up to 3.75MW!

• The charging standard would provide electricity up to 1250V and 3000A, which is a bonkers amount of power.
• The system is called MCS or Megawatt Charging System.
• It's a partnership with several industry members and NREL.
• This work will be incredibly important for heavy-duty electrification.

Another banger of a video by Engineering Explained that looks at whether it's better to keep your current car, or buy a new (more efficient) vehicle.

Energy:

Hyundai is going to deploy some battery storage in Texas using old EV batteries.

• The article is *very* scant on details.
• They say the battery setup will "store a half-megawatt power, enough to power some 100 homes for a day".
• Hyundai has previously stated that they want to have "lease" programs for their batteries so they can have more control over the batteries' lives and improve reuse/recycling. (Ep. 5)

A proposed 320MW solar farm in Kansas (which would be the largest in Kansas) is facing pushback over people trying to keep their idyllic views.

Electric Vehicles:

If Chevy ends up needing to replace all the battery packs in Bolts due to the recall, owners may end up with a range increase due to newer, better batteries.

• This may mean 8% more range, and the new batteries would have a separate, new warranty.
• They've paused production until the issues are resolved, unsurprisingly.

The Lucid Air Dream Edition (read: Expensiver Edition) has been driven/reviewed by MotorTrend.

• The review is pretty glowing, but the only part I find particularly worth mentioning is that it appears to have a range of over 500mi (805km) in real-world driving.
• It costs like $170k.

Rivian filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with a valuation of $80b.

• The actual IPO would occur around November.

We officially have range numbers for the Rivian R1T and R1S at 314mi (505km) and 316mi (508km) respectively.

The Tesla Cybertruck is officially delayed to late 2022. The Roadster is also delayed to 2023, but let's be honest, it'll be later than that.

In happier Tesla news, they've released their 2020 Impact Report, and part of it is a claim that they can recover 92% of battery materials in their recycling process.

The Tesla Model S Plaid has officially broken the record for fastest production EV ever at the Nürburgring.

Ford has doubled their annual production goals for the F-150 Lightning from 40k by 2024 to 80k by 2024.

• This is still a small number, but an increase is nice.
• They allegedly have 120k+ reservations
• The target increases to 160k annually by 2025.

Toyota will invest $13.6b in battery tech over the next decade.

• $9b of this will be dedicated to battery production.
• They intend to eventually produce 200GWh of batteries (presumably annually).
• There's more being reported about this, but frankly it's all just words at this point and I don't have much patience for Toyota when it comes to EVs so I'm keeping it to these three numbers until we have more compelling info.

In the first week of deliveries, the Tesla Model Y has become the best-selling vehicle of any kind in Norway.

• This will obviously not continue, but it's fun.
• The article also referred to Norwegians as Vikings with a capital "v", I'm sure that stereotype should be continued in 2021.

The Electrify America app is now compatible with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

The FAA has announced $20.4m in grants to electrify airports.

• This includes stuff like electric buses, charging stations, and shore power.

Australia's Renewable Energy Agency awarded $26.8m to fund 403 EV stations (around $67k per station).

• These will be at least 50kW stations.

Shell and its subsidiary, Ubitricity, are apparently going to install 50k on-street EV chargers in the United Kingdom by 2025.

• These chargers will be integrated into lamp-poles, and will presumably be Level 2 chargers, but details are scant.

Oak Ridge National Labs has licensed its wireless EV charging technology to HEVO.

• They will make 300kW wireless chargers with this tech.
• The original Oak Ridge demo yielded 120kW charging at 97% efficiency through a 6 inch airgap!
• They've also demonstrated 20kW charging through an 11 inch airgap with 92% efficiency.
• HEVO expects to get between 90-96.5% efficiency at 300kW, potentially at highway speeds for under-road charging.

The Atlas Public Policy group has released a report claiming that fully electrifying the federal fleet could save nearly $5.5b USD by 2030.

Norway will pilot an autonomous, electric cargo ship!

• The Norwegian chemical firm Yara International developed the ship.
• Its first voyage will occur later this year, allegedly.
• It will sail between the towns of Herøya and Brevik (which is like, a couple of miles (a few kilometers)).
• The plan is for it to replace 40k truck journeys.

Waymo is now offering rides to the public for the first time in their autonomous vehicles in San Francisco using Jaguar iPaces.

The YouTube channel, MKBHD, did a fantastic video about a 1000 mile (1600km) trip taken in a gas-powered Audi, a Mach-E, and a Tesla Model S to compare the trip times:

• Main channel video.
• Longer, second channel video (first video in the series).
• Podcast episode about the experiment (YouTube link).

Energy:

Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas are getting some new wind power!

• In the most cursed portmanteau ever, ArkLaTex is getting around 287MW of new wind power.
• It will be joined by a 999MW addition in early 2022.
• The total project will allegedly save $2b over its 30y lifetime.

42% of new generation capacity in 2020 in the U.S. was wind power!

• We added nearly 17GW of wind power.
• Wind accounted for 11% of total energy production in 2020.
• Solar accounted for 38% of new power, followed by natural gas at 20%

A new study by the University of Michigan estimates that carbon capture and utilization (CCU) can reduce carbon emissions by 15% and save $800b.

• Full text of the study is available at the link below the article, but the article gives a nice summary.
• One interesting note from the study is that it classified emissions savings by looking at every pathway's probability of reducing carbon emissions, which points to the uncertainty in the effectiveness of different technologies.

Policy:

New York has passed legislation to work on banning internal combustion engines by 2035 for passenger and off-road vehicles, and by 2045 for heavy-duty vehicles.

• "Provides that one hundred percent of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks shall be zero-emissions by two thousand thirty-five, medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles by two thousand forty-five and off-road vehicles and equipment by two thousand thirty-five."
• Some of the lines say "where feasible" for the requirement.
• There's no consequence outlines as far as I could tell.
• This is being reported as a ban and I don't see anywhere in the text of the legislation (which is very short) that it *is* a proper ban.

To End:

The Martin Drake Coal Plant in Colorado is shifting from coal to natural gas, then being retired in favor of renewables, all before 2023. This article is incredible.

• Somer Mese, the manager of the plant, “I get the big picture, coal is dirty. Natural gas is cleaner. Renewables are even better. I understand the need for change and to move forward with technology from a hundred-year-old coal fired power plant to something state-of-the-art.” 
• They are offering retraining for new jobs at the new renewable facilities to every single employee, no one will be left behind.

Walkable City by Jeff Speck

Thank you Adrian for providing the pronunciation of Nürburgring.

Electric Vehicles:

Chevy has recalled all Bolts made for battery issues.

• Around 140k Bolts were recalled for battery replacement.
• If they manage to find another solution, they can implement that, but the current plan is replacing the batteries.
• Chevy is seeking reimbursement from LG Chem, their battery supplier.

Nissan has joined the ranks of automotive companies stating their EV sales goals: 40% battery-electric by 2030!

• This is 40% all-electric, this doesn't include hybrids and such.
• The rest of their lineup will be at least hybrid, too!

NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) is opening an investigation into Tesla's Autopilot system.

• This is happening after a series of accidents when Autopilot was engaged.

KORE Power is building a battery plant in Maricopa County, Arizona that will produce up to 12GWh of batteries per year.

• Production is planned to begin in 2023.
• They also plan to be a net-zero carbon facility.

Tesla AI Day Full Presentation

Tesla AI Day, just the robot part.

Energy:

Solar installations in Indiana plummeted when the state canceled its incentive program.

• Installations have dropped by around half.
• This is not a surprise.

The Vistra Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility just got an upgrade that made it the largest battery energy storage system in the world.

• New capacity is 400MW and 1.6GWh
• This is enough to power 300k homes
• This will eventually expand to 750MW and 3GWh

A new study suggests that methane emissions are around twice what EPA reports.

• The EPA relies on self-reporting and local monitoring.
• This study used aircraft flyovers and satellite tracking.

Exxon dude talks about the silliness they've done to undermine climate change efforts.

10min video about the interview (contains some swearing and such).

Important videos about the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report:

Simon Clark (a proper climate physicist) talks about the IPCC report.

Hank Green talks about possible approaches for governments to tackle climate change.

Hank Green's call to arms for Americans regarding climate change.

• I want to note here that I often disagree with Hank Green on many political topics and this video is deeply political in nature. Despite that fact, I agree that we need to do what we can to show our representatives that we believe in climate change and support action that will get us out of the mess we're in. I think this video is worth watching if you believe climate change is a real problem we need to solve, even if you disagree with Hank politically.

Electric Vehicles:

Tesla is *actually* considering opening up the Supercharger network in the U.S.

• Allegedly happening later this year.
• Adapters from Tesla's plugs to the CCS standard would need to be available
• There may be a different charging rate (price) for non-Teslas
• Tesla may charge more for slower charging EVs
• They may also add dynamic pricing based on how busy chargers are

We now have more info about the Polestar 2.

• Up to 265mi range
• Starts at $47,200
• All-around upgrade from the previous model.
• To be released near the end of 2021.

Rivian is installing its level 2 charging stations in every Tennessee state park (56) as part of its "Waypoint Network".

• Rivian is footing the bill for all of this
• Includes a 10 year maintenance contract
• The chargers will be free to use (at least initially)
• Partnership with the state's Department of Environment and Conservation
• 11.5kW chargers

There's another Chevy Bolt recall for fire risk. Yay.

• Model years 2017-2019
• They suggest you:

Shell is installing charging stations at 100 Waitrose locations across the UK by 2025.

• The first installations will begin at the beginning of 2022.
• Each location will get six 22kW chargers and two 50kW chargers.
• Shell also plans to install a total of 5000 charging ports at gas stations in the UK by 2025.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory published a study looking at whether the electric grid can support full electrification of delivery fleets in the US.

• They found that 80-90% of all substations could support full electrification of delivery fleets, even if they used the fastest charging available.

Indiana is going to pilot an under-road inductive EV charging project for heavy duty trucks.

• The project will include studies, testing, and so on at Purdue, then the installation of a quarter-mile charging strip of interstate.
• The road will charge vehicles up to 200kW

Other fuels:

In California, natural gas trucks were carbon-negative overall due to the use of renewable natural gas (RNG):

• 92% of all natural gas used in vehicles was RNG
• This data comes directly from the California Air Resources Board (CARB)
• In the US overall, 53% of all natural gas in vehicles was RNG

40 ethanol plants pledge to be carbon neutral by 2050.

• They claim ethanol reduces GHG emissions by 52% over gasoline already and they'll bring that number to 70% by 2030.

"Blue Hydrogen" produces more carbon per megajoule than coal, largely due to methane leakage.

• Full study.
• Blue Hydrogen is hydrogen produced through steam methane reforming (SMR) and paired with carbon capture and sequestration.
• The study assumes that the sequestration part of the process is 100% efficient (a bold assumption).
• Crucially, the study compares the carbon emissions on a per-megajoule basis, which doesn't factor in the fact that hydrogen may be used more efficiently than coal.
• They show that simply burning the natural gas instead of producing hydrogen with it is more carbon-efficient (again, they don't consider fuel cells as far as I can tell).
• They showed the carbon capture process results in 12% lower emissions over pure SMR hydrogen production.

Energy:

Oil and Gas accounts for 5.6% of US jobs and 6.8% of labor income.

• This is from a study by the American Petroleum Institute
• It factors in indirect jobs from oil/gas work as well
• Louisiana in particular gets 12.6% of its jobs and 23% of its GDP from oil/gas

The Cricket Valley Energy Center is planning to convert its natural gas power plant in Dover Plains, NY to run on hydrogen.

• They plan to use "green hydrogen", but don't provide details about where/how they'll get that hydrogen

Policy:

Minnesota has adopted California's Zero-Emission Vehicle standards.

Biden is apparently considering mandating that airlines use 100% renewable jet fuel by 2050.

• According to the article, renewable jet fuel currently costs 2-5x the price of petroleum jet fuel

This is the first episode of its type, so I would love feedback on whether I hit a good balance of technical and comprehensible. Is this episode too long? Is it too unstructured? Any feedback would be appreciated!

Please forgive the slightly worse audio quality of this episode. It was recorded on the road at the tail end of my Chicago vacation and Petroleum Pat was gracious enough to allow me to record in his home, which is not prepared for such things.

CORRECTION: I inserted a correction into the episode about a stat I got wrong towards the end, so here is a link to some data that supports my correction. I also mentioned that freight is 20% of the mileage driven, which is also incorrect in the same way, but the qualitative discussion still stands.

This conversation was totally unscripted with loose notes about topics we wanted to discuss, but this was the first time I learned about basically everything we discussed. I learned an absolutely incredible amount from this conversation and I sincerely hope that you all enjoy it as much as I did!

I also want to mention that we mentioned Shell's recently changed plans regarding their product portfolio, but we never quite touched on the subject enough. The long and short of it is that they're moving away from a lot of the direct petroleum production side of things for various reasons. Our conversation went in other directions and it didn't feel natural to jump back into it more (on top of the fact we had already been chatting for over two hours!). Maybe this is a topic that will come up in a future episode.

Because this was a free-flowing conversation, we did use some industry jargon and technical terms on occasion. While I think we pretty well defined everything discussed as we used the technical terms, I want to provide the below glossary of terms and acronyms for your convenience. I hope this helps!

Glossary:

• Hydrocarbon - general term for molecules consisting of a chain of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms attached
• Coke - essentially pure carbon, made by heating petroleum products in the absence of oxygen in a process called coking
• Bottoms - the heavier hydrocarbons left behind in the fractionation/distillation process
• ATB  - atmospheric bottoms; the heavy hydrocarbons left behind in the fractionation/distillation process performed at atmospheric pressure (as opposed to bottoms left behind during fractionation under vacuum)
• Bunker fuel - very heavy, long-chain hydrocarbon petroleum product, often made of the "bottoms" from distillation and used in marine ships
• LPG - Liquified Petroleum Gas; this is what we usually call propane, but is actually a mixture of propane, butane, and other light hydrocarbons
• Ethane - a short hydrocarbon composed of two carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms; C2H6
• Propane - a short hydrocarbon composed of three carbon atoms and  eight hydrogen atoms; C3H8
• Butane - a short hydrocarbon composed of four carbon atoms and ten hydrogen atoms; C4H10
• Naphptha - a petroleum product with medium-length hydrocarbon chains (between about 5 and 10 carbons long), in this conversation it is mostly interchangeable with gasoline
• Gasoline - basically naphtha, but with specific required octane numbers that meet fuel standards
• Octane Number - a standard metric that essentially measures the temperature required to ignite gasoline, higher number corresponds to higher ignition temperature
• Diesel - fuel made from longer chain hydrocarbons (between around 12 and 18 carbons) that meet cetane number fuel standards
• Cetane Number - a standard metric that essentially measures the temperature required to ignite diesel, higher number corresponds to higher ignition temperature
• City Gas - Natural Gas, provided by municipal or city gas lines
• Natural Gas - a fuel that is primarily composed of methane (upwards of 90%), may also contain small amounts of propane, butane, hydrogen, and other fuels
• Methane - a molecule consisting of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms; CH4; a potent greenhouse gas (~25x worse than CO2)
• Odorant - usually ethyl mercaptan, a sulphur compound used to odorize natural gas and propane
• Distillation - a process wherein a feedstock is heated up to the point that you can separate the components based on their boiling point
• Hydrocracker - a unit used to "crack" longer hydrocarbon chains into shorter hydrocarbons; this process allows a refinery to turn "bottoms" from distillation into basically any other shorter hydrocarbon they need
• Vacuum gas oil - long chain hydrocarbons used in hydrocrackers to make smaller hydrocarbons
• Batch process - a process that is not continuous at the refinery, as opposed to most processes which are continuous and products constantly flow
• H2S - a sulphur compound consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one sulphur compound; naturally occurring in petroleum and removed to prevent SOx emissions
• SOx - a sulphur compound produced by combustion with sulphur present; a criteria pollutant under the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS); produces acid rain and is bad for lung health
• NOx - oxides of nitrogen; a criteria pollutant under NAAQS and a precursor to ozone, which is bad for lung health; produced during combustion, especially at higher temperatures
• CO - carbon monoxide; a criteria pollutant under NAAQS, also bad for lung health; produced during combustion of hydrocarbon fuels
• RVP - Reid Vapor Pressure; a measure of the volatility of gasoline; this quality can be changed to account for environmental and performance factors and is specifically changed for summer and winter blends of gasoline (winter blends will use a higher RVP blend which aids with ignition)

Relevant Links:

Gasoline Reid Vapor Pressure | US EPA

NAAQS Table | US EPA

Americans Have No Idea How Much Fuel Idling Uses - YouTube

**I apologize for the audio quality of this episode, I had a weird mic issue this week and was not able to get it fixed before this episode.**

Electric Vehicles:

Ford patents a method for charging EVs while they're being towed.

• Focus is on RVs, so it's not quite as bonkers as it sounds.
• The article also mention the idea of using the EV to provide extra power when needed, essentially making a weird sort of two-component hybrid, though the patent doesn't mention this.
• Engineering Explained video about charging a Tesla by towing it.

Rivian R1T (the truck) deliveries are delayed again until September from July.

Tesla will apparently open up its European Supercharger network by September 2022.

• This came out during a meeting with the government of Vestland, Norway.
• Similar is expected in Sweden, and potentially the rest of Europe.

Tesla is finally offering Full Self Driving as a subscription as an option instead of a single purchase.

• $199/mo if you currently have basic lane-keeping and such.
• $99/mo if you currently have Enhanced Autopilot
• You need to pay for Hardware 3.0 upgrade if you don't have it ($1500)

Nikola announced 51 new dealerships in 9 states.

• Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland.

GM has notified 50k Bolt owners that they should not charge their vehicles overnight due to fire risk.

• National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said this should be done regardless of whether owners received the recent software patch.
• This is the result of two battery fires from November 2020.

Electrify America intends to double its network by 2025.

• This would mean around 10k DC Fast Chargers across the country.

United Airlines and Mesa Air Group have invested in Heart Aerospace for their electric, 19-passenger airplanes.

• They expect commercial deliveries in 2026.

Honda is going all-electric by *2040*.

• This is deeply frustrating because they're going all-electric in Europe by 2022 (which includes hybrids, but still).

Electric Vehicles:

Rivian patented a new maneuver enabled by their four-motor design.

Atlanta will purchase 10 new electric transit buses!

Virginia has updated its "Virginia 511" app and website to show electric vehicle charging stations.

• The site shows traffic data and all sorts of great data for motorists, and now it supports EV charging locations.
• The website itself.

Energy:

Maine no longer allows offshore wind developments within state waters (so within 3mi of the coast).

• This was done to appease the local lobster fishers who were concerned that offshore wind would reduce available fishing waters and reduce their yields.
• **I need to learn about how much harder it is to do offshore wind more than 3mi off the coast**

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released a Request For Information regarding the interest in offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico.

Policy:

A group of around 80 companies sign a letter to Congress pressing for a 100% clean electricity by 2035 mandate.

• Companies of note:
  • 3M
  • Apple
  • eBay
  • Exelon
  • Etsy
  • GM
  • Google
  • HP Inc.
  • Logitech
  • Paypal
  • Salesforce
  • Tesla
  • Unilever

Sandy Munro talks about the Mach-E door.

Electric Vehicles:

Lordstown Motors' CEO and CFO have both resigned. So that's promising.

• Unsurprisingly, stocks immediately dropped by about 20% and has not recovered.

Audi will only sell electric vehicles starting in 2033, will launch only electric models after 2026.

• I said Audi is pretty small, this isn't strictly true, but they're like 10th in global production so it's kinda true. Sorry for the mild hyperbole.

VW will only sell EVs in Europe starting between 2033-2035, the U.S. and China later on.

We have a closer look at the Kia EV6 if you're interested in such things.

NREL Report analyzes the state of charging infrastructure in the U.S.:

• NREL’s 2017 National Plug-In Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Analysis estimated how much public and workplace charging infrastructure would be required in the United States to meet charging needs for a central scenario in which 15 million light-duty plug-in electric vehicles(PEVs) are on the road by 2030 (601,000 Level 2 and 27,500 DC fast EVSE) (Wood et al. 2017). Based on this analysis, about 63.5% and 14.3% of the necessary DC fast and Level 2 EVSE, respectively, have been installed as of Q4. However, in Q4, the number of DC fast EVSE and Level 2 EVSE per 1,000 PEVs currently on the road was 10.7 and 52.5 respectively, compared with NREL’s projected need of 1.8 and 40.1, respectively. This indicates that infrastructure development is keeping up with, and even surpassing, forecasted needs. It is important to note, however, that the majority (54.2%) of public DC fast EVSE in the Station Locator are on the Tesla network and are therefore only readily accessible to Tesla drivers.
• DC Fast Chargers
• Level 2 Chargers
• 54.2% of public DC Fast Chargers are Tesla-only.
• afdc.energy.gov/stations/

Deployment:

St. Louis has deployed 18 new all-electric transit buses.

• Each bus costs $1.33m
  • Diesel buses very roughly cost around $500k
• Operational costs are expected to be $0.59/mi
• They also estimate they'll save 100-160 tons of CO2 per year with the new buses.

Moscow plans to only purchase electric buses from now on.

• Over the next 4 years, they intend to purchase 2,675 new electric buses
• Fully electric by 2032
• By the end of 2021 they will have 1,000 electric buses on the road.

Zarazoga, Spain will be deploying 68 all-electric transit buses over the next couple of years.

• They're fleet is comprised of 470 vehicles, 111 of which are hybrids, and 4 are electric.

New York City is deploying 7 electric trash trucks.

• Not a huge amount of detail, but this does follow a pilot project New York started in 2020.

Miami-Dade County will deploy 75 new Proterra electric buses over the next couple of years.

• They already have 33 and are acquiring 42 more.

Energy:

Catholics are choosing cremation over burial, and some solar developers are taking advantage of unused cemetery space for solar installations.

A non-profit is plugging abandoned (orphaned) gas wells across the U.S.

• Funding is coming from private donations, payments from oil and gas companies, and similar sources.
• It costs around $30k/site.
• They are on track to plug a couple dozen more this year.
• Each well is equivalent to taking upwards of 500 cars off the road.
• Their website.

This is the first episode of its type, so I would love feedback on whether I hit a good balance of technical and comprehensible. Is this episode too long? Is it too unstructured? Any feedback would be appreciated!

I mistakenly said that Volatile Organic Compounds are a Criteria Pollutant under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). It is not a Criteria Pollutant itself, but it is an Ozone precursor, Ozone being a Criteria Pollutant.

References:

California Air Resources Board Carbon Intensity pathways (note that zero isn't labeled on the x-axis; RNG is Bio-CNG on this chart).

My article about how Landfill Renewable Natural Gas projects work.

EPA Landfill Methane basics.

Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) | US EPA

Argonne National Labs RNG Project Database.

EPA Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks report.

EPA Methane sources by sector.

National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) page, this is a shockingly good page.

A study in Colorado found that they could eliminate 1.4 million tons of GHG emissions per year using RNG.

American Gas Foundation study regarding RNG technologies, availability, and cost.

The report from New York Renews that talks about RNG being bad (as well as other fuels).

Electric Vehicles:

Lordstown Motors:

• President of Lordstown Motors states that there are enough "binding orders" to stay afloat until May 2022.
• SEC filing states that Lordstown Motors does *not* have binding orders.

Tesla Plaid:

• 2022 Tesla Model S Plaid First Test: 0–60 MPH in 1.98 Seconds*! (motortrend.com)
• Tesla Plaid release event.
• General Plaid overview.

Lincoln will sell its first fully electric vehicle in 2022, we have next to zero details.

Mazda's first electric vehicle will be released in *2025*.

• 25% of their sales will be electric by 2030.

Honda Clarity PHEV has been discontinued, Fuel Cell version will stick around for one more year.

California estimates it needs 1.2 million EV chargers by 2030. It currently has 73k.

Energy:

Mississippi is getting its first wind farm!

• 200MW capacity.

**I didn't discuss the Tesla Plaid Model S announcement in this episode because there isn't much new to say about it. It may come up in a later episode, but if you want to learn more about it in the meantime, you can check out these links:
Full Release Event.

The Verge short video on the event.

Headlines from this episode:

Electric Vehicles:

Nissan Ariya deliveries will be delayed until early 2022.

• This is partially due to semiconductor shortages.
• Around a 6mo delay all told.

Lordstown Motors is apparently struggling pretty badly.

• They submitted an Amended Form 10-K/A that mentioned, "Additional funding is needed for production in 2022 and beyond and to continue our ramp up to full commercial production. The amounts required may be significant." 
• “The Company believes that our current level of cash and cash equivalents are not sufficient to fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale of such vehicles.”
• They have lowered production targets for 2021 from 2,200 vehicles to 1,000.
• They lost $125m in Q1 this year.
• Their shares subsequently fell by 16%.

Toyota says it isn't anti-EV.

• Most of the article is not new, but these quotes are interesting:
  • “We are not anti-BEV,” proclaimed Carter (VP Toyota North America). “In fact we are committing to rolling out more BEVs.” “For the industry to reach an all electric future it’s going to take combined efforts between automakers, government, dealers, suppliers, and of course, most importantly, consumers,” Carter added. 
  • Lisa Materazzo, VP of marketing "[Toyota is] all in on BEVs.", "The customer is the boss; they’ll be the ones deciding what technology best suits their needs,” she said. “We are well positioned with our portfolio approach to go where the market takes us and we will follow the lead from our consumers.”

Electrify America is finally selling home chargers.

• 9.6kW at 40A
• $649

A company SparkCharge offers "charging as a service" (called ChargeUp), basically a subscription model for DC Fast Charging.

• $25/mo
• 1 charge per day
• 50min sessions (100min premium)
• Max of 80% charge
• They bring the charger (powered by batteries) to your vehicle.
• Available in Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco
• Home | ChargeUp EV Charging (chargeupdelivers.com)
• They also do roadside assistance stuff.

Energy:

A request for information by the Department of Interior has gone out to gauge interest in offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico.

• Louisiana's governor is supportive of this.
• National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) published two reports stating that the Gulf is very well positioned for wind.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has launched an "Earthshot" initiative to reduce hydrogen cost to $1/kg from renewables (currently around $5/kg).

• The beginning of this is a request for information about the industry.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to find me on Twitter @archduketyler

Headlines from this episode:

Electric Vehicles:

BMW announced two new EVs for sale in Q1 2022:

• BMW i4 Sedan:
• BMW iX SUV:
• Both shooting for 200kW charging

A comparison of the BMW i4 to the Tesla Model 3.

Around 6k Tesla Model 3 and Y vehicles were recalled due to a potential brake issue.

• "The loose bolts could allow the brake caliper to separate and contact the inner surface of the wheel rim. This could prevent the wheel from freely rotating, causing a loss of tire pressure, Tesla told the NHTSA."

Hyundai is reportedly stopping development of gasoline engines.

EVgo is introducing charger reservations in California and Washington state for a $3 fee.

• Reservations can be cancelled 24hr before the time with no cost, so maybe there will be a fee for late cancellation.

7-Eleven plans to install 500 DC Fast Chargers at 250 locations across the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2022.

Misc.

Michelin is developing an inflatable sail system for cargo ships to increase fuel efficiency by 20%.

• The project is called "Wing Sail Mobility", or WISAMO (because of course there's an acronym).
• It's a collaboration with two Swiss inventors.
• They are telescoping to allow for crossing under bridges and such.
• They intend to deploy the first test ship in 2022.

Energy:

The first TerraPower nuclear reactor is slated to be built in Wyoming to replace an aging coal plant.

• This will be a pilot project producing 345MW.
• Location to be announced at the end of 2021.
• There is also an energy storage system that can add an additional 155MW of power when needed.
• This project is using their "Natrium" system.

CORRECTION: In the section about the federal EV tax credit, the quoted article was incorrect. The sunset period is triggered (as I suggested would be better) by the percentage of EVs sold in the nation, not per automaker. I initially read that in an Elektrek article, but other articles (including the CNET article linked) apparently got the sunset incorrect. The bill will not pass, but I wanted to add this correction here.

Link to bill text: JCT Bluebook Template (senate.gov)

Headlines from this episode:

Electric Vehicles:

U.S. Tesla Model 3 and Y will no longer have radar for forward-collision avoidance.

Volvo Lights (Volvo's heavy-duty EV brand) delivered a vehicle to Albertson's, which is now in service in California.

Ford is doubling down harder on electrification!

• $30b investment in electrification by 2030 (including battery development)
• 40% of sales expected to be electric by 2030 (around 1.5m vehicles based on current numbers)
• They hope to cut battery costs by 40% by 2025
• They also have well over 70k reservations for the F-150 Lightning!

MKBHD did a great video about the F-150 Lightning with a piece of information that was not reported anywhere else.

• The range figures quoted by Ford assume a truck loaded with 1,000lb of cargo.
• Unladen range may be well over 400!

Florø, Norway now has a charging station for boats and electric cars!

• The 150kW charging is the first in a planned series of installations across the coast.

Not much detail here, but Hyundai will unveil a "subscription" model for their EVs later this year.

Energy:

A 250MW solar project is being protested by a neighboring small town in Ohio.

Venture Global LNG is planning a 1m ton per year Carbon Capture project in Louisiana.

• They do not have permits yet, so this is early-days right now.
• The carbon would be injected into saline aquifers.
• This particular project is going to be in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana

The Biden Administration wants to open up a significant portion of California's coast to offshore wind.

A new wind turbine design by GE and Glosten may make it easier to build very large offshore wind projects.

• The turbines could produce 12-14MW each.
• They will utilize a floating platform anchored by "tendons" that actively control the position of the turbine.
• This may reduce the platform's mass by 35% overall.

Policy:

A bill has been introduced to provide support for existing nuclear plants to prevent them from being retired.

Legislation that probably won't pass was introduced to revamp the federal EV tax credit. (PLEASE SEE CORRECTION ABOVE)

• It would add $2,500 in credit for vehicles that are produced in America, and another $2,500 for vehicles produced by a unionized workforce.
• There would be a price cap of $80k for the vehicles, so more expensive vehicles wouldn't qualify.
• It would also make it a refundable tax credit!
• INCORRECT: The sunset period based on an automaker's EV sales will be removed and replaced by a sunset when a given automaker's sales top 50% being electric.
• CORRECT: The sunset period is based on US EV sales as a percentage of total sales, phasing out after 50%.
• There is also a 30% tax credit for automakers retooling their manufacturing to build EVs.

California Air Resources Board is considering ruling that would put a cap on battery degradation from automakers.

• Starts with Model Year 2026
• 80% battery life for 15 years or 150k miles
• Battery warranties also need to cover 10 years or 150k miles
• There are also proposed labeling requirements to help with recycling/repurposing batteries

**While editing this episode, I noticed that my claim about the average home generator size may be slightly off from the actual average. The numbers I gave were in line with my experience, but may not be representative of the average. This is inconsequential to the point I was making, but I figured I'd mention it here just as an aside. Our generator produces a max of 5.5kW, so at the high range of what I said in the episode.

Headlines from this episode:

Electric Vehicles:

Hyundai will invest $7.4b in U.S. EV production by 2025.

• U.S. EV production to begin in 2022.
• They will also continue investment in hydrogen.

2022 Kia EV6 details now available, will be for sale in all 50 states, reservations open on June 3.

Toyota is a wimp. They project 85% of their U.S. vehicles will have a gas engine by 2030 (includes plug-in hybrids).

• Their 2030 sales projections are:
  • 30% pure gasoline
  • 55% gasoline hybrids
  • 15% battery or hydrogen electric

Ford is partnering with SK Innovations to build 2 EV battery plants, eventually producing enough batteries to supply 600k EVs per year.

Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck! Some places to learn about the truck:

• Ford's YouTube channel (several Lightning videos in addition to the livestream.
• Reveal livestream.
• Sandy Munro first impressions.
• Verge article about it.
• I also did a podcast episode with my first impressions of the reveal! Look in your podcast feed if you haven't already listened to it.

Energy:

Bitcoin miners take advantage of flared methane at oil drill sites.

Another natural gas power plant has been resurrected for the sake of feeding the Bitcoin monster.

Policy:

There are whisperings about the new administration proposing changes to the federal EV incentives, including direct rebates but potentially an income cap of $250k.

Texas is considering a bill that would enact an annual EV fee, a scaled VMT fee, and an annual surcharge.

• $190–$240 annual alternative fuel vehicle fee.
  • $190 for vehicles weighing less than 6,000lb, $240 for heavier vehicles.
• A scaled VMT (vehicle miles traveled) fee:
  • This fee can be taken *instead of* the annual fee.
  • The fee starts at $30/year for vehicles traveling 3k miles or less, and increases by $40 for every 3k miles up to a max of $190 at 12k miles.
• There is a different, cheaper fee schedule for plug-in hybrids.
• $10 annual surcharge that funds a new charging infrastructure advisory council.
• The bill also includes language for the fees be reassessed yearly to account for:
  • Inflation
  • If the federal government levies a special tax on alternative fuel vehicles, the state tax will decrease proportionately.
• Relevant section of bill starts at Sec. 502.503.