Electric cars Archives Electric cars

Feb 19 2023

Huge EVs are far from perfect, but they could still help fight climate change.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

When it comes to watching the Super Bowl, I’ve always been more of a football person than a commercials person. During Sunday’s game, though, I couldn’t help but notice something about the ads.

A handful of electric-vehicle commercials aired during the game on Sunday, and all of them had one thing in common: the vehicles featured were massive.

Will Ferrell faced an army of zombies in an electric pickup and hopped into an EV Hummer in an ad for GM. Ram’s pharmaceutical-style commercial joked about “premature electrification” concerns, offering a Ram truck as a solution. Jeep’s ad for hybrid SUVs was my favorite, with its dancing animals and catchy “electric boogie.”

All these ads got me thinking about something that’s been swirling around in the news a lot lately: in the US, cars are already big, and they’re getting bigger. Now, in the name of addressing climate change, companies are catering to America’s obsession with giant vehicles, advertising the same trucks and SUVs we know and love—but electrified.

Giving people what they want could be key to boosting EV adoption. But big EVs could come with a climate cost. So for the newsletter this week, let’s dig into the issue of big EVs. How much of a problem are they really, and what should we do about it?

Supersize my car

It’s safe to say that Americans are obsessed with big vehicles. The top three best-selling vehicles in the US last year were trucks. Today, only one in four vehicles sold in the US is a sedan or hatchback.

I’ve participated in big-car culture: I learned how to drive in my family’s Ford Expedition, a massive SUV if there ever was one. It was forest green, and we called it “The Hulk.” (It was later replaced by the same model in white, which we called “Yeti.”)

Most people don’t need these gigantic vehicles. Over 60% of pickup drivers rarely or never use them to tow anything. Instead, large vehicles are luxury items, and symbols of possibility. People buy them because they imagine they might someday want to load up their truck bed with furniture or tow a camper van.

Now that the world is trying to cut emissions, car companies are producing electric versions of their bestsellers. This could be a blessing: if there are more EV options that people want to drive, that could mean more EVs on the roads, and fewer gas-powered cars. It’s arguably by producing cars perceived as cool, after all, that Tesla made EVs a mainstream option in the US in the first place. By the way, the best-selling Tesla is the Model Y, an SUV.

But even if we can persuade people to buy massive EVs, some people are starting to wonder if we really should.

Bigger vehicles, bigger problems

Electric or not, there are some major issues that come with jumbo vehicles. They cause more wear and tear on roads. They’re hard to see out of and pose a much bigger danger to cyclists and pedestrians.

Also, big vehicles are simply less efficient. For my Ford Expedition, that meant getting an average of about 17 miles per gallon of gas on the highway, while sedans built the same year could get up to 30. For large EVs, being less efficient means they’ll need bigger batteries.

A Nissan Leaf, a relatively small electric sedan, comes with a 40-kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery. An F-150 Lightning battery is more than twice the size, at 98 kWh. And the battery of the gargantuan Hummer EV clocks in at a stunning 210 kWh.

Battery materials scale roughly with capacity, so you could make four or five Nissan Leaf batteries with the material it takes to make a battery for a single Hummer EV.

We’re already going to need a lot of battery materials over the next few decades, if driving trends continue the way they’re going. Assuming vehicle ownership looks about the same in the future, lithium demand could increase 40-fold by 2040. By some estimates, we could need 300 new mines just to meet demand for batteries by 2035. And building a mine can take nearly a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

But exactly how much material we’ll need in the future depends on the size of the vehicles we choose to drive.

In a recent study, researchers tallied up how much battery material would be required to meet EV demand in a few scenarios. They found, unsurprisingly, that if people opt for smaller batteries, and fewer people own and drive vehicles, we’ll need less material.

But the scale of the difference between the scenarios is pretty eye-opening. Take the difference between the worst case and what the study considers “status quo,” for example. When it comes to lithium, in a status quo scenario where people drive as much as they do now, we’ll need 306,000 tons in 2050. If batteries get bigger, that number could inflate to 483,000 tons—50% more.

We’re not going to run out of the materials we need to manufacture batteries, but every mine we need to build comes with consequences for both people and the environment. Mining often produces pollution, especially of waterways, and the industry has been tied to human rights abuses around the world. So bigger batteries mean bigger consequences to deal with.

Bigger cars will have a bigger climate impact, too. In the most dramatic example, compare an EV Hummer with a gas-powered sedan.

EVs aren’t totally zero-emissions, even though they don’t burn fossil fuels onboard. Building them, especially their batteries, requires energy. And the electricity that powers most EVs today comes from the grid, which is powered at least partly by fossil fuels almost everywhere.

If you consider the lifetime emissions from building a battery and charging an EV, an electric model of the same car will be better than the gas-powered version in almost every scenario. But comparing different models can be a different story. A gas-powered Toyota Corolla is actually responsible for less greenhouse gas per mile than an EV Hummer, according to estimates from Quartz research. So right now, that Hummer is worse for the climate.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we should all go buy old gas-powered Corollas. EVs, even gigantic ones, keep getting cleaner. An EV Hummer charged on the 2040 grid, which should have more renewables in the power mix, will have lower emissions than one hitting the roads today. And hopefully by that time we’ll have cut down on climate impacts from mining and heavy industry too.

So what now?

It would be great if we could drive less in general. I live in a walkable city right now, so I don’t have a car at all, and I love it. If I never had to drive again, it would be too soon. Policy measures could help more cities look more like mine, or at least support public transit and walking and cycling infrastructure to cut down on car trips.

It would also be great if more people chose to drive smaller vehicles. Government action could be a huge help here too: large vehicles could be taxed more or charged more for registration, at least to help make up for the wear and tear they add to public roads. We could also probably use some updated safety standards.

But the state of things in the US right now gives big vehicles free rein. And there are people I know and love who aren’t giving up their F-150s anytime soon.

We need to address climate change, and EVs, even big ones, are a major solution. But we can do even better if people choose vehicles that fit rather than exceed their needs, or find ways to use them less.

So if you’re considering a new vehicle, think long and hard about what you really need from it. If you choose to drive a massive one, at least let it be electric.

Two more things

If you want to pay less for heat and cut your climate impact, look no further. New York’s hottest club is heat pumps. This technology has everything: electrification, efficiency, and engineering. (Imagine this all in Bill Hader’s voice from his SNL character Stefon.)

I’ve been hearing a lot about heat pumps, but I couldn’t really get my head around how they actually work—so I dove deep to bring you everything you ever could want to know. Do they work in the cold? How do they actually help the climate? Find all those answers and more in my latest story.

Also, my colleague James Temple has been digging into an interesting idea that some groups are kicking around to combat methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

One potential approach to deal with methane is to remove it from the atmosphere using iron-rich particles. These particles, with the help of sunlight, could react with the methane to convert it to carbon dioxide (still a greenhouse gas, of course, but not as bad as methane).

A Palo Alto–based group wants to start releasing these particles from the exhaust of a ship in the next couple of years, but experts warn that we don’t understand the possible effects well enough for groups to start tinkering, especially if they’re motivated by profit. Read James’s story for the full scoop.

Keeping up with climate

Battery recycler Redwood Materials won a $2 billion loan from the US government to build its recycling facilities. (Bloomberg)

→ For an inside look at the company and how recycling could help batteries get cheaper and more sustainable, check out my story from last month. (MIT Technology Review)

→ Redwood founder and former Tesla exec JB Straubel thinks battery recycling needs to move even faster. (MIT Technology Review)

Electrochemistry could help address climate change across heavy industry. Here’s what you need to know about what it is. (Wall Street Journal)

“Right to Repair” laws could help cut environmental impacts from tech. But lobbyists from Big Tech are getting involved in the legislation, which could cut its benefits. (Grist)

Exxon is giving up on its algae biofuels program, which the company has long touted as an example of its climate work. (Bloomberg)

Using electricity to power ports could cut air pollution, by a lot. (Canary Media)

New funding in the US could put power in individuals’ hands when it comes to solving climate change: a full 30% of the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate impacts come from choices that people make about their vehicles and homes. (Washington Post)

→ Predicting the bill’s effects is harder than you might think, though. (MIT Technology Review)

Hydrogen-truck startup Nikola has started working on a fuel system. The company plans to fuel 7,500 heavy-duty trucks by 2026. (Wall Street Journal)

Climate change could be screwing up maple syrup production. Sugar maples produce sap only in a specific set of conditions, and winters are changing across the northeast US and Canada, where the trees grow. (Bloomberg)

A pilot program in New York City shows how much switching your gas stove for an induction model could help indoor air quality. (Inside Climate News)

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Feb 18 2023

Meet the new batteries unlocking cheaper electric vehicles

New batteries are coming to America.

This week, Ford announced plans for a new factory in Michigan that will produce lithium iron phosphate batteries for its electric vehicles. The plant, expected to cost $3.5 billion and begin production in 2026, would be the first to make these batteries in the US.

“This is a big deal,” said Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in a press conference unveiling plans for the factory. Expanding battery options will allow Ford to “build more EVs faster, and ultimately make them more affordable,” said Bill Ford, Ford’s executive chair.

Also known as lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) batteries, the type to be produced at the new plant are a lower-cost alternative to the nickel- and cobalt-containing batteries used in most electric vehicles in the US and Europe today. While the technology has grown in popularity in China, Ford’s factory, developed in partnership with the Chinese battery giant CATL, marks a milestone in the West. By cutting costs while also boosting charging speed and extending lifetime, LFP batteries could help expand EV options for drivers.

Lithium-ion batteries all contain lithium, which helps store charge in a part of the battery called the cathode. But lithium doesn’t do this job alone: it’s joined in the cathode by a supporting cast of other materials.

The most common kind of cathode used in vehicles today contains nickel, manganese, and cobalt in addition to lithium. Some automakers, like Tesla, use another cathode chemistry made with nickel, cobalt, and aluminum. Both these cathode types have risen to prominence in part because they have high energy density, meaning the batteries will be smaller and lighter than others that can store the same amount of energy.

While those two used to be the default choices for cathodes in EV batteries, lithium iron phosphate, an older chemistry, has seen a comeback in the past few years, largely driven by huge growth in China.

These iron-containing batteries tend to be about 20% cheaper than other lithium-ion batteries with the same capacity today. This is partly because LFP doesn’t contain cobalt or nickel, expensive metals that have seen huge price swings in recent years. Battery makers are also working to reduce cobalt content because mining the metal has been tied to particularly harmful working conditions.

Making cathodes without cobalt and nickel could help automakers cut costs, and some have already begun to shift battery chemistry used in vehicles sold in the US. Tesla imports LFP cells from China today for some models, including its Model 3. Ford previously announced that it would start using the technology in its Mach-E in 2023 and in the F-150 Lightning in 2024.

With its newly announced factory, Ford would become the first automaker to produce LFP batteries in the US. The new facility, which will use technology from CATL, could help kick-start LFP production in the US more broadly. “It’s a pivotal point for the North American manufacturing landscape,” says Evelina Stoikou, a battery technology analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy-focused research firm.

Several smaller LFP production facilities could also come online around the same time as the Ford plant.

In October 2022, the US federal government announced a nearly $200 million investment to help a company called ICL-IP America build a factory in Missouri. The plant will make material for LFP cathodes, which will then be used to make batteries. It should begin production in 2025.

Meanwhile, a Utah-based company called American Battery Factory is planning a production facility for LFP batteries in Tucson, Arizona. That facility is expected to cost about $1.2 billion and should come online in 2026.

While the increasing availability of alternative battery chemistries could significantly expand options for automakers and drivers, LFP probably won’t fully replace other technologies. “It’s not the holy grail for batteries,” Stoikou says.

LFP batteries are cheaper than other chemistries and can have a longer lifetime, but they also tend to be heavier and bulkier. That can be a problem for vehicles, because if a battery is heavier, it will take more energy to cart around, limiting range. And larger batteries could take up space for seating or cargo.

Drivers in the US and Europe tend to prefer bigger vehicles with longer range. That makes it necessary to pack more energy into a constrained space, so LFP might never dominate in the West as it has in China, Stoikou says.

LFP growth will likely level off after this year, stabilizing at about 40% of the global battery market for EVs, Stoikou says. And looking ahead, we’ll likely soon see other, newer chemistries making their way into cars.

Adding manganese to iron-containing batteries could boost efficiencies while keeping costs low. Automakers could move away from lithium-ion chemistries altogether, instead shifting to solid-state lithium-metal batteries, which could have even higher energy density. And EVs might not even rely on lithium in the future, since sodium-ion batteries could offer a cheaper option down the road.

Each of those chemical combinations might be key to transportation in the future. It’s LFP’s moment now, but there are plenty of others just behind it.

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Jan 18 2023

This is where Tesla’s former CTO thinks battery recycling is headed

Battery recycling is one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023. Explore the rest of the list here.

As Tesla’s former chief technology officer, JB Straubel has been a major player in bringing electric vehicles to the world. He’s often credited with inventing key pieces of Tesla’s battery technology and establishing the company’s charging network. After leaving Tesla in 2019, Straubel began a new venture: Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company.

Redwood has raised nearly $800 million in venture funding. It’s building a billion-dollar facility in Nevada and recently announced plans for a second campus outside Charleston, South Carolina. In these plants, Redwood plans to extract valuable metals such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel from used batteries and produce cathodes and anodes for new ones.

I spoke to Straubel about the role he sees battery recycling playing in the transition to renewable energy, his plans for Redwood, and what’s next. You can read my full piece about battery recycling here.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. (Note: I worked as an intern at Tesla in 2016, while Straubel was still CTO, though we didn’t work directly together.)

Why did you decide to leave Tesla, and why did you pick battery recycling as your next step?

Certainly Tesla was an amazing adventure, but as it was succeeding, I think it was becoming more obvious that battery scaling would present the need to get so many more raw materials, components, and batteries themselves. That was this looming bottleneck and challenge for the whole industry, even way back then. And I think it’s even more clear today.

The idea was pretty unconventional at the time. Even your question kind of hints at it—it’s like, why did you leave this glamorous, exciting high-performance car company to go work on garbage? I think entrepreneurship involves being a little bit contrarian. And I think to really make meaningful innovation, it’s often not very conventional.

Why do you see battery recycling as an important part of the energy transition?

Increasingly, the solution to some of these sustainability problems is to electrify it and to add a battery to it, which is great, and I spent the majority of my career championing that and helping accelerate that. And if we don’t electrify everything, I think our climate goals are completely sunk. But at the same time, it’s a phenomenal amount of batteries. And I just think we really need to figure out a robust solution at the end of life.

I think this entire new sustainable economy as we’re envisioning it, with everything electrified, simply can’t work unless you have a closed loop for the raw materials. There aren’t enough new raw materials to keep building and throwing them away; it would fundamentally be impossible.

Battery recycling is an intuitive solution to those two issues, but tell me more about the technical challenge of pulling it off, and how it would work.

It’s more complicated than I think many people appreciate. There’s just a whole ton of chemistry, chemical engineering, and production engineering that has to happen to make and refine all of the components that go into a battery. It’s not just a sorting or garbage management problem.

There’s a lot of room for innovation, and these things haven’t been well optimized, or even done at all in some cases. So that’s really the fun stuff as an engineer, where you get to invent and innovate things that haven’t been done two, three, four times already.

But something that isn’t intuitive is just what a high level of reusability the metals inside of a battery have. All of those materials we put into a battery and into an EV don’t go anywhere. They’re all still there. They don’t get degraded, they don’t get compromised—99% of those metals, or perhaps more, can be reused again and again and again. Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.

I don’t believe we’re appropriately internalizing how bad climate change is going to be.

JB Straubel

There are not going to be a lot of electric vehicles coming off the roads for a long time. How are you thinking about navigating that and facing shortages in your supply of used batteries?

I really see our position as a sustainable battery materials company. One of our key objectives and goals is to look at the very long term and to make sure we’re architecting the most efficient systems for the long term, where recycled material content is the majority of supply.

But in the meantime, we’re taking a pragmatic view. We have to blend in a certain amount of virgin material—whatever we can get in the most environmentally friendly way—to augment the ramp-up while we need to transition away from fossil fuels.

Was that a clear decision to you, to supplement with mined material versus sticking to only using recycled material?

I’d say it’s a very natural decision to make. Our goal is to help decarbonize batteries and reduce the energy impact and the embedded CO2. And I think it’s better for the world to remove a fossil-fuel vehicle than to say, “Well, we can’t build an electric vehicle because we don’t have enough recycled material.”

When I visited, I definitely felt a sense of urgency. Do you feel like you’re moving fast enough, and do you feel like this industry is moving fast enough?

I generally don’t think we’re going fast enough. I don’t think anyone is. You know, I do have this sense of paranoia and urgency and almost—not exactly—panic. That’s not helpful.

But I guess it really derives from a deep feeling that I don’t believe we’re appropriately internalizing how bad climate change is going to be. So I guess I have this anxiety and fear that it’s going to get a whole lot worse than I think most people are expecting.

And there’s such inertia to it, so now is our only time to really prepare and react. And the scale of all this is so big that even when we’re running flat out as fast as we can, with all that urgency that you felt and hopefully more, it’ll still take us decades.

Do you feel you can handle any battery chemistry that industry comes up with? What if everybody goes to cheaper chemistries like iron phosphate, or if everybody starts moving to really different technologies, like solid state?

I’m really genuinely pretty agnostic on this. I want to make sure that we are focused on the bigger picture, which is figuring out how we enable a transition to sustainability overall. And therefore, we really are rooting for whatever battery technology ends up having the best performance.

And I think it will be a mix. We’re going to see a bigger diversity of battery chemistries and technologies.

So when we’re designing this circular system, we need to think about all the different technologies, and they have pros and cons. Some are more challenging in different ways. Obviously, iron phosphate has a lower total commodity metal value, but it’s certainly not zero. There’s a great opportunity to recycle lithium and copper from those. So I think each one has its own set of characteristics that we have to manage.

What do you see as Redwood’s biggest challenge in the next year, and then in the long term?

Over the next year, we’re just in an incredibly rapid growth and deployment phase. We are innovating across a whole bunch of different areas simultaneously. It’s really exciting and fun, but it’s also just quite challenging to manage all of the parallel threads as we’re doing it. It’s like a huge multiplayer game of chess or something.

In the longer term, it’s increasingly going to be about scale and efficiency of scaling. This is just a huge, huge industry. The physical size of these facilities is massive, the amount of materials is massive, and the capital requirements are really massive as well. So I think over decades into the future, I’d say, where our focus and challenges will be is making sure we’re hyper-efficient about scaling up to terawatt-hour scale, literally.

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Jan 13 2023

Two climate technologies that matter

It’s been an exciting week here at MIT Technology Review, because on Monday we released our 2023 list of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies! This is always one of my favorite times of the year, when we get to take a hard look at technologies that will matter in the upcoming year and beyond. And this year, two of the items on the list are related to climate and energy.

Read on to find out what they are (if you haven’t already peeked at the list by now) and learn a little bit about why we picked them. Also, there’s been a lot of news floating around about gas stoves. So if you’re confused by the hullabaloo, I’ve got you covered with what you need to know.

The 2023 Breakthrough Technologies

It’s finally here—our 2023 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Two climate items made the list this year: electric vehicles and battery recycling!

We’ve been working on this list since July, sifting through our coverage and keeping our eyes on the news to pick out technologies we think will be important.

If you haven’t perused it yet, a good place to start is the introductory essay from my editor, David Rotman. In it, David talks about the government’s role in innovation and explains what the recent embrace of industrial policy, both in the US and in many other countries, will mean for future technologies. In a nutshell, Silicon Valley’s approach isn’t doing a great job boosting productivity and transforming the economy. But there’s another way.

If you’re interested in understanding what it takes to help technologies make an impact, or if you just want to learn what the phrase “industrial policy” really means, I’d highly recommend giving the piece a read before diving into the rest of the list.

Now, on to the breakthroughs, starting with the inevitable EV.

I know some of you might be thinking that electric vehicles aren’t exactly new. The first Tesla Roadsters were delivered 15 years ago (yes, 2008 was 15 years ago), and small numbers of other electric cars, like the GM EV1, had even made it onto roads in the 1990s.

EVs made the list this year not because of any one technical milestone, but because they’ve reached critical mass. They’re a real commercial contender now, reaching about 13% of global new vehicle sales in 2022. This is a big moment for electric vehicles, marked by progress not only in technology but also in infrastructure, manufacturing, and consumer acceptance.

It was a tricky thing to crystallize exactly what about EVs should be on the list this year. Different forms of this idea came up early on when we were planning, with several members on the team proposing ideas that touched on EVs in some way.

My original pitch was the EV pickup. Trucks are massively popular in the US: the top three vehicles sold in the country in 2022 were pickups, with the Ford F-series topping the list. So the release of the new electric version of the F-150 (the Lightning), along with other major releases from GMC and Rivian, felt like a significant moment.

But the rollout for EVs looks so different around the world. While people in the US are chasing bigger EVs, in other countries vehicles are shrinking. The Hongguang Mini in China, a minicar that costs less than $5,000, is skyrocketing in popularity, and two- and three-wheeled vehicles are surging in India.

So ultimately, electric trucks would have been a limited representative of this moment for EVs. (Not to mention there are major issues with supersizing vehicles.)

But around the world, it’s increasingly becoming clear: the age of the electric vehicle is here.

The other climate item on the list, covered by yours truly, is battery recycling.

Lithium-ion batteries in EVs, as well as in devices like cell phones and laptops, contain valuable materials that can be reused for new batteries.

Developments in the recycling process are helping companies recover more of those valuable metals and other materials. Today, the market for battery recycling is concentrated in China. But North American companies like Redwood Materials, Li-Cycle, and Ascend Elements are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funding and building factories that could be a key part of the battery materials ecosystem for decades to come.

That’s all I’m going to say about that for now, because (spoiler alert!) we’ll be diving deeper on battery recycling next week in the newsletter. (If you haven’t already, be sure to go back and read the very first issue of The Spark from last October for a sneak peek at what’s coming …)

Find the full list of breakthrough technologies here. They’re all fascinating and worth learning about, but I’d especially recommend checking out CRISPR for high cholesterol and ancient DNA analysis. Plus, you can vote for what you think the 11th technology should be!

Another thing

What’s the fuss about with gas stoves?

On Monday, a US Consumer Product Safety Commission representative told Bloomberg News the group would consider new regulations for gas stoves. The appliances have been in the news since a study published in December found that about 12% of current childhood asthma in the US can be attributed to them.

This statement from the CPSC isn’t as dramatic as some headlines are making it sound, though. A member of the federal agency told Bloomberg that even issuing a proposal in the coming year would be “on the quick side.” He also later clarified on Twitter that regulations would apply to new products: “To be clear, CPSC isn’t coming for anyone’s gas stoves.” The comments were enough to send Senator Joe Manchin into a tizzy, though.

So, should you be worried about your gas stove?

There’s a growing body of research showing both health and climate risks.

Last year, a study found that gas stoves release methane even when turned off, and confirmed that during cooking, they can emit nitrogen oxides (NOx) at levels that surpass standards set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. NOx are common pollutants also found in cigarette smoke and vehicle exhaust, and they can cause or aggravate respiratory problems, especially in children.

In addition to raising health concerns, the methane that leaks from stoves and the carbon dioxide released by burning natural gas are both greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. About 35% of households in the US cook with gas stoves. Rates are similar in Europe, with about 30% of energy for cooking coming from gas.

Critics point out that we have bigger fish to fry when it comes to both climate and human health. And that’s probably true—cooking is a small piece of any individual’s natural-gas use, and likely only a sliver of total individual emissions. There are plenty of other sources of nitrogen oxides you probably encounter every day too (I’m looking at you, cars).

What’s there to do about it?

Still, replacing your gas stove can help cut the harms to climate and health from cooking. It can be an expensive prospect, but new policy in the US could make replacing gas-powered stoves significantly cheaper. Tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act could help cover the cost of new electric appliances for middle- and low-income households.

And if you are stuck with a gas stove (like I am, in my rental), you can help with ventilation by using range exhausts and opening windows when cooking, which is a good practice even if you’re using an electric or induction range. And if you happen to be researching new stoves, consider that industry groups are working hard to influence public opinion, so make sure you’re getting information from sources worth trusting.

Keeping up with Climate

Sales of EVs and plug-in hybrids smashed records in China last year, with over 5.67 million vehicles sold in 2022. The market for gas-powered cars shrank 13%. (Wall Street Journal)

→ Hybrid cars aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. (MIT Technology Review)

→ China is betting on another alternative: methanol-powered cars (MIT Technology Review)

The most talked-about climate change papers last year included research on covid-19, climate tipping points, and the Arctic. (CarbonBrief)

If you’ve ever wanted backup debunking basic climate change myths at a party or family dinner, this is a great starter pack. (Discover)

Nearly 200 countries just agreed to conserve 30% of land and seas by 2030. But details about how to reach that goal, often called 30×30, are a bit fuzzy. (Grist)

The Great Salt Lake in Utah is a fascinating ecosystem. But unless lawmakers make changes to allow more water to flow into it, the lake could dry up in the next five years. (CNN)

A new UN report confirms that the atmospheric ozone layer is on its way to recovering. Most parts should be back to their 1980 state by 2040. (NPR)

→ In the 1987 Montreal Protocol, dozens of countries agreed to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and other synthetic chemicals that were harming the ozone layer. In 2007, we took a look back at what the treaty meant for the world. (MIT Technology Review)

→ The action also prevented some warming we would have otherwise seen. (MIT Technology Review)

US emissions rose about 1% last year. The good news is that they could have risen faster, given the pace of economic growth, but we need to cut emissions to make progress on addressing climate change. (Vox)

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Climate change Electric cars TR10 2023

Jan 10 2023

The inevitable EV: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023

Electric vehicles are transforming the auto industry.

While sales have slowly ticked up for years, they’re now soaring. The emissions-free cars and trucks will likely account for 13% of all new auto sales globally in 2022, up from 4% just two years earlier, according to the International Energy Agency. They’re on track to make up about 30% of those sales by the end of this decade.

A mix of forces has propelled the vehicles from a niche choice to a mainstream option.

Governments have enacted policies compelling automakers to retool and incentivizing consumers to make the switch. Notably, California and New York will require all new cars, trucks, and SUVs to be zero-emissions by 2035, and the EU had nearly finalized a similar rule at press time.

Auto companies, in turn, are setting up supply chains, building manufacturing capacity, and releasing more models with better performance, across price points and product types.

The Hongguang Mini, a tiny car that starts a little below $5,000, has become the best-selling electric vehicle in the world, reinforcing China’s dominance as the largest manufacturer of EVs.

A growing line-up of two- and three-wheelers from Hero Electric, Ather, and other companies helped EV sales triple in India over the last year (though the total number is still only around 430,000). And models ranging in size and price from the Chevy Bolt to the Ford F-150 Lightning are bringing more Americans into the electric fold.

There are still big challenges ahead. Most of the vehicles must become cheaper. Charging options need to be more convenient. Clean electricity generation will have to increase dramatically to accommodate the surge in vehicle charging. And it will be a massive undertaking to make enough batteries. But it’s now clear that the heyday of the gas-guzzler is dimming.

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Climate change Electric cars

Dec 23 2022

The US Postal Service is finally getting EVs

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The US Postal Service is finally going electric. The USPS announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire at least 66,000 electric delivery vehicles between now and 2028, and all purchases after 2026 will be EVs. In total, the agency will invest nearly $10 billion to electrify its fleet.

It’s been a long road to get here, folks. Constant criticism, a strongly-worded letter from the Environmental Protection Agency, a presidential plea, and a lawsuit from 16 states is all it took for the agency to commit to quit purchasing new gas-powered delivery vehicles.

Let’s take a look inside the USPS’s plan to switch to EVs and review what it took to get here. And as an end-of-year treat, I’ve also rounded up some of my favorite Tech Review climate coverage from the year. Let’s get into it.

The obvious choice

As of 2020, transportation was the single biggest driver of climate change in the US, accounting for 27% of greenhouse gas emissions. And the US federal government operates the largest fleet in the world at 650,000 vehicles, with the USPS making up about one-third of that.

Joe Biden has made the federal fleet one of the targets of his plans for EVs, setting a goal for all new federal vehicles purchased after 2035 to be electric, with light-duty vehicles hitting that target by 2027.

But the USPS has been marching to a different drummer. Even as the Biden administration touted plans to electrify and cut emissions, the USPS seemed to dig in its heels on plans to purchase more fossil fuel-powered vehicles. Last year, when the agency first announced a contract to replace trucks, only 10% were going to be EVs.

Mail trucks needed an upgrade, and badly. Many on the road today are nearly 30 years old. Replacing them with electric ones is an obvious move.

In addition to cutting lifetime emissions by half or more, EVs are in many cases cheaper over their lifetime than gas-powered vehicles today. They’re easier to maintain, too. And while some applications, like long-distance trucking, can pose difficulties for battery-powered vehicles, mail delivery is the perfect setup for EVs, with trucks returning to a central location where they can be charged overnight.

Finally, the agency saw the light. But it took a while. Let’s take a look back at this saga, starting from the beginning.

January 2021: US President Joe Biden signs an executive order calling for plans to electrify the federal vehicle fleet.
February 2021: USPS awards a contract to Oshkosh Defense to make “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles.” USPS head Louis DeJoy reveals in Congressional testimony that just 10% of the vehicles would be EVs, citing high costs.
March 2021: Criticism of the USPS and its plan starts. In following months, lawmakers discuss getting additional funding to the agency to help it electrify.
October 2021: Biden proposes a $1.75 trillion spending package that includes $6 billion in funding to help the USPS purchase EVs. Talks stall on the funding.
February 2022: Following another executive order on electrifying the federal fleet, EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality both send letters to the USPS, urging it to reconsider plans and incorporate more EVs into its future fleet.
March 2022: The USPS places its first order for new delivery vehicles. Of the 50,000 vehicles, the agency says more than 20% will be electric, beating the earlier mark of 10%.
April 2022: California Attorney General Rob Bonta files a lawsuit against the USPS, arguing that the Postal Service vehicles pollute the air in communities where they operate. In total, 15 other states, and a few major cities, back the suit.
July 2022: The USPS again revises its plans. Of the 50,000 vehicles from Oshkosh Defense, at least 50% will be electric. Including plans to purchase other new vehicles, the agency “anticipates” that at least 40% of the total new vehicles will be electric.
August 2022: The Inflation Reduction Act passes and is signed into law, setting aside $3 billion for the USPS to purchase zero-emissions vehicles and build charging infrastructure.
December 2022: The USPS releases a statement saying that of the 60,000 vehicles in the contract, at least 45,000 will be electric, including all deliveries after 2026. EVs triumph.

In the interest of you finishing this newsletter before the new year, that’s not a comprehensive timeline, but it gives you an idea of how long a journey this has been. What a saga!

A caveat: this commitment is only for new vehicle purchases. Gas guzzlers purchased in the next few years could stay on the road for years to come, so don’t expect a fully zero-emissions fleet anytime soon.

Regardless, as the year winds to a close, I think we can count the USPS going electric as a win for climate action and mail delivery alike.

A look back at 2022

This has been quite the year, both for Tech Review’s climate coverage and for the climate world in general. So let’s take a quick look back at some highlights from the year.

Innovation is alive and well. We put together a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies every year, and it’s always one of my favorite things to work on. Released in February, our 2022 TR10 list included three (!) climate items.

Iron batteries on the grid – Low-cost energy storage will help balance out the grid when intermittent supplies like solar and wind aren’t running.
Practical fusion reactors – Startups are making progress on a new generation of small, (relatively) cheap fusion reactors. (They’re pretty different from the reactor at the center of recent fusion news.)
Carbon removal factory – Direct air capture can help us clean up some carbon dioxide emissions that we’ve already emitted.

Our 2023 list is coming out very soon…any guesses on what we included?

2022 was a great year for climate startups and venture capital. But the prospects for some technologies might not be so rosy.

Cheap synthetic fuels sound too good to be true. They might be.

Ditto with using kelp to combat climate change.
Electric planes could also have trouble taking off.

On the positive side of things, the Inflation Reduction Act passed, setting aside an unprecedented $370 billion in climate and energy spending.

We saw unprecedented climate disasters this summer and fall. Flooding in Pakistan killed over a thousand people and displaced millions. Heat waves in China exposed weaknesses in EV charging infrastructure there.

But along with the disasters, climate action gained momentum too, including an agreement on climate finance for vulnerable nations at the UN climate conference.

Finally, this year we launched The Spark, where we’ve talked about some of the most exciting advances in climate tech! I feel like so much has happened since our first edition, where I took a look inside a battery recycling facility. We’ve covered everything from molten salt batteries to UN climate conferences, from genetically-tweaked crops capturing carbon to new plastic recycling methods. Stick around to see what exciting news we’ll get into in 2023!

Keeping up with climate

Startup Kodama Systems plans to take wildfire-fueling biomass and bury it underground to capture carbon. The company raised $6.6 million from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and other investors. (MIT Technology Review)

A UN meeting on biodiversity reached an agreement this week. Delegates agreed to protect 30% of the most crucial land and water for biodiversity by 2030. Over 200 countries joined the agreement. Notably absent? The US. (Associated Press)

→ Funding in the agreement is another of the conference’s key outcomes. (CarbonBrief)

An offshore wind developer is delaying a project in Massachusetts, citing rising costs. The move could affect one of the state’s largest offshore wind farms. (Boston Globe)

→ California’s recent offshore wind auction could be even costlier, since turbines there will need to float. (MIT Technology Review)

Soup throwers, range anxiety, and of course, IRA. Check out these and Grist’s other picks for climate words of the year. (Grist)

Talks are failing in negotiations to reopen a key aluminum plant in Washington. The cause? There’s not enough cheap renewable energy to go around. (Washington Post)

An NPR investigation tied utilities in Alabama and Florida to news sites giving them favorable coverage. The sites’ criticisms included clean energy policies. (NPR)

California passed new rules limiting what customers can get paid for electricity generated by their rooftop solar panels. Solar advocates argue the drastic changes will slow growth in the solar industry. (Canary Media)

→ The state is already seeing a tricky issue when it comes to solar: the more you build, the less helpful additional capacity tends to be for the grid. (MIT Technology Review)

A new facility in Sweden will use electricity, hydrogen, and captured carbon dioxide to make methanol, an alternative shipping fuel. (Bloomberg)

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Climate change Electric cars

Dec 23 2022

Why EVs won’t replace hybrid cars anytime soon

The end could be coming soon for cars as we know them.

To limit global warming to 1.5 °C, the 2015 international Paris climate agreement set 2050 as a worldwide deadline to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. That means gas-powered vehicles will need to be largely off the road by then. And since cars typically have a lifetime of 15 to 20 years, reaching net zero in 2050 would likely mean no new production of gas-powered cars after about 2035.

Several major car companies, including GM and Volvo, have announced plans to produce only electric cars by or before 2035, in anticipation of the transition. But not all automakers are on the same page.

Notably, Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, has emphasized that it plans to offer a range of options, including hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles, instead of focusing exclusively on electric vehicles. A Toyota spokesperson told MIT Technology Review that the company is focused on how to reduce carbon emissions most quickly, rather than how many vehicles of a certain type it can sell.

The company has continued releasing new hybrid vehicles, including plug-in hybrids that can drive short distances on electricity using a small battery. In November, Toyota announced the 2023 edition of its Prius Prime, a plug-in hybrid.

Some environmental groups have criticized the company’s slow approach to EVs. To get to zero emissions, they argue, we will need all-electric vehicles, and the sooner the better.

But in recent interviews, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda has raised doubts about just how fast the auto industry can pull a U-turn on fossil fuels, calling the US target of making EVs reach half of new car sales by 2030 a “tough ask.” While Toyota plans for EV sales to reach 3.5 million by 2030 (or 35% of its current annual sales), the company also sees hybrids as an affordable option customers will want, and one that can play a key role in cutting emissions.

A tale of two hybrids

Two different categories of vehicles are referred to as hybrids. Conventional hybrid electric vehicles have a small battery that helps the gas-powered engine by recapturing energy during driving, like the energy that would otherwise be lost during braking. They cannot drive more than a couple of miles on battery power, and slowly at that. Rather, the battery helps boost gas mileage and can provide extra torque. The original Toyota Prius models are among the most familiar traditional hybrid vehicles.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles, on the other hand, have a battery about 10 times larger than the one in a traditional hybrid, and that battery can be plugged in and charged using electricity. Plug-in hybrids can typically run 25 to 50 miles on electricity, switching over to their gasoline engine for longer distances. The Prius Prime, introduced in 2012, is a plug-in hybrid.

Conventional hybrids are far more common in the US than either all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles, though sales of electric vehicles have grown quickly over the past several years.

Hybrid vehicles are a straightforward story when it comes to climate effects: switching from a fully gas-powered vehicle to a hybrid version of the same model will mean reducing emissions about 20% while driving.

Plug-in hybrids and EVs can be responsible for more significant emissions cuts, though figuring out exactly how much they’re helping the climate can be an involved exercise. The answer largely depends on driving and charging habits, says Georg Bieker, a researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).

Not surprisingly, electric vehicles produce less in lifetime carbon emissions than their gas-powered counterparts. A significant fraction of an EV’s emissions are attributable to manufacturing, especially the production of their batteries. Total emissions from EVs also depend on the sources of electricity used to charge their batteries.

EVs in the US correspond to between 60% and 68% lower lifetime emissions than gas-powered vehicles. In Europe, savings are higher, between 66% and 69%. In China, where the grid is powered by a higher fraction of highly polluting coal power, cuts are lower, between 37% and 45%.

The gap between EVs and gas-powered vehicles is only expected to grow as the grid comes to be powered more by renewables and less by fossil fuels like coal. For example, EVs that hit the road in China in 2030 could produce 64% less in lifetime emissions than a gas car, compared with a maximum saving of 45% today.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles can offer significant emissions savings too: as much as 46% (compared with gas-powered vehicles) in the US.

The difference between the US and other markets in the climate impact of plug-in hybrids, Bieker says, largely comes down to driving habits. Gas-powered vehicles in the US have higher fuel consumption, so there’s a bigger impact from switching to electricity.

Driving and charging habits are at the heart of the debate over plug-in hybrids: the vehicles’ climate effects, depending on how they’re used. In ideal cases, the vehicles can use electricity for most of their mileage. Most new plug-in hybrids today have a range of between 30 and 50 miles on electricity, which is enough for many people’s daily commuting needs, says David Gohlke, an energy and environment analyst at Argonne National Laboratory.

“I’m not necessarily a representative example of how someone uses the vehicle, but my plug-in hybrid is an electric vehicle for nine months of the year,” Gohlke says. He plugs in his vehicle every day when he gets home, which usually provides enough power to get him to and from work. Cold weather can limit the range, so he tends to use more gasoline in the winter, he adds.

Drivers of plug-in hybrids can vary widely in their habits, however. “There’s a large gap between what is assumed in regulation and what the real performance looks like,” says Zifei Yang, head of light-duty vehicles at the ICCT. While some official EU estimates assume that drivers use electricity about 70 to 85% of the time, self-reported data show that the share for personal cars is closer to 45 to 50%. Drivers in the US have similar charging habits.

The road forward

In the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act in the US, new tax credits apply to both plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, provided they meet requirements on price and domestic manufacturing.

But in other major markets, policy pushes are favoring electric vehicles over plug-ins. Some European nations, like Germany, are beginning to phase out subsidies for plug-in hybrids. In China, subsidies for plug-in vehicles are lower than those for electric vehicles, and they require a minimum electric range of around 50 miles, Yang says.

The various policies reflect differences in consumer attitudes: in particular, many Americans are still reluctant to buy EVs.

Lack of access to charging, as well as concerns about range, are among the leading reasons US consumers say they wouldn’t consider an electric vehicle, says Mark Singer, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Those concerns have made some consumers more receptive to plug-in hybrids than they are to electric vehicles, he adds.

In the US, there are just over 6,000 fast charging stations, and about 50,000 total locations that house EV chargers, as of the end of 2021. By comparison, there are about 150,000 fuel stations for gas-powered cars. Charging access is still a concern for many drivers, especially along interstate highways, where only 6% of EV charging stations are located.

Today, a driver could easily go hundreds of miles between fast charging stations, especially in rural parts of the country. But the picture is changing quickly: the total number of charging stations has doubled in just the last few years in the US, and new federal funding will continue to support the network’s growth.

The transition from internal-combustion engines is well underway. EV sales continue to grow: they hit 10% of global sales in 2022. The picture isn’t the same everywhere, though: China saw nearly double the global average, at 19%, and the US lags behind at 5.5%.

The EU recently banned new sales of gas-powered cars, including plug-in hybrids and anything else that can burn fossil fuels, starting in 2035. California and New York enacted similar bans that also take effect in 2035, though sales of some plug-in hybrids will still be allowed there.

Transportation’s decarbonization won’t look the same everywhere. How plug-in hybrids fit in with this transition remains to be seen, especially in the near term, and especially in markets that haven’t yet passed strict regulations around future vehicle sales.

Even if the relatively modest emissions cuts that hybrids contribute don’t align with aspirational climate goals, people may still turn to those cars, at least for the near future. Toyota, for one, is betting that plug-in hybrids, along with conventional hybrid models, will find acceptance among consumers. And it’s hard to argue that the world’s largest automaker doesn’t know how to sell cars.

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Climate change Electric cars sustainable energy Tech policy

Oct 21 2022

Billions in funding could kick-start the US battery materials industry

The US federal government is spending big on batteries and electric vehicles. As part of that spending spree, President Joe Biden and the Department of Energy have just announced $2.8 billion in awards to companies involved in producing the minerals and other materials that go into the batteries.

The funding will go to 20 projects, ranging from lithium processing and electrode manufacturing to battery recycling.

Both public and private funding for battery manufacturing in the US have exploded, sped by the passage earlier this year of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives for electric vehicles. Under the requirements in the new electric-vehicle tax credits, battery components must be sourced and made in the US or its free-trade partners. But much of the investment in battery manufacturing so far has been focused on later stages in the supply chain, especially factories that make battery cells for electric vehicles.

The new spending is an attempt to build out the earlier parts of the supply chain so the materials that go into a battery can also be made or sourced domestically. Making battery precursors in the US could help drive down costs for new technologies and ensure a steady supply of batteries, as well as establishing new companies and creating jobs.

The funding is a step toward “building the foundation of a domestic battery industry,” Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment at Johns Hopkins, said in an email.

Multibillion-dollar manufacturing plants for battery cells and EVs are popping up all over the country. But earlier parts of the supply chain are still largely based in Asia, especially China, which makes up the vast majority of global capacity for mineral processing and electrode manufacturing.

This funding announcement reflects an attempt by the US to catch up, especially for processing the minerals used to make batteries. Four of the projects that received funding are companies working to extract and process lithium, a key metal for lithium-ion batteries. The supply of lithium may need to increase by 20 times between now and 2050 to meet demand. Lithium production represents “one of the vulnerable pieces of the supply chain,” Nahm says.

Another significant focus appears to be production of lithium–iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, a lower-cost chemistry. LFP batteries differ from other lithium-ion batteries in that they don’t contain nickel or cobalt, two expensive metals that could be limited in the coming decades.

LFP technology could become a significant chunk of the battery market in the next few decades, potentially making up 40% of the global supply by 2030, according to some analysts. And the US historically hasn’t been a center of LFP battery production, says Evelina Stoikou, an energy storage associate at BloombergNEF.

While most of the projects are focused on today’s batteries, a couple of grants will fund near-term technologies that aren’t widely used yet. These include silicon-based anodes, which can increase the energy stored in lithium-ion batteries.

The scale of the funding just announced is striking—most of the grants are for hundreds of millions of dollars. And while the federal funding totals $2.8 billion, all the grants also require company investment as well. Including the private funding matches, these projects total about $9 billion.

The money could mean speedier progress in building supply chains. But “it’s not a guarantee that the projects are going to be completed,” Stoikou says. She points out that there were massive federal funding rounds for battery manufacturers in 2009, and many of those projects folded soon after.

The context today is likely different, though, Stoikou says. For one thing, batteries are a more established industry, and demand for domestically produced batteries will likely only increase, partly because of the requirements that EVs and their components be made in the US.

The new $2.8 billion in funding is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in late 2021, but there are also several other major funding bills that will help build other parts of the battery supply chain. There’s also funding for batteries and their supply chains in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act that passed this summer, and even the Defense Production Act, which Biden invoked earlier this year to accelerate domestic production of clean energy technologies.

This funding will help build out the US battery industry, but there are still billions of dollars and many years ahead, says Jeff Chamberlain, CEO of battery-focused venture capital firm Volta. Still, he adds, “this looks like the beginning.”

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Supersize my car

Bigger vehicles, bigger problems

So what now?

Related reading:

Two more things

Keeping up with climate

The 2023 Breakthrough Technologies

Another thing

Keeping up with Climate

The obvious choice

A look back at 2022

Keeping up with climate

A tale of two hybrids

The road forward