European leaders complained for years that the United States was not doing enough to fight climate change. Now that the Biden administration has devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to that cause, many Europeans are complaining that the United States is going about it the wrong way. That new critique is born of a deep fear in […]
Read MoreLast summer, in a meeting with business and labor leaders as Congress prepared to vote on the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden argued that it would result in “the largest investment ever in clean energy and American energy security — the largest in our history.” He added, “It will be the largest investment in […]
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Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solutions announced plans on Thursday to build a $4.3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia, the latest clean energy facility to come to the state. The project is expected to bring 3,000 new jobs to southeast Georgia by the end of 2025. It is the second battery manufacturing […]
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Not long after buying a Ford E-Transit van for his plumbing business last November, Mitch Smedley sat down with some receipts and a calculator to figure out how much the electric vehicle was saving him on fuel expenses. A few minutes of number crunching showed he was spending about $110 to $140 a week on […]
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) leapt into the conversation in late April with the release of its Global EV Outlook 2023, the latest in an annual series of market assessments. By then, the federal government had committed up to C$13 billion to an EV battery plant in St. Thomas, Ontario that will be Canada’s biggest factory when it goes […]
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BAMBLE, Norway — About 110 miles south of Oslo, along a highway lined with pine and birch trees, a shiny fueling station offers a glimpse of a future where electric vehicles rule. Chargers far outnumber gasoline pumps at the service area operated by Circle K, a retail chain that got its start in Texas. During […]
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When frigid weather caused rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve across North Carolina, Eliana and David Mundula quickly grew worried about their 2½-week-old daughter, whom they had brought home days earlier from a neonatal intensive care unit. “The temperature was dropping in the house,” said Ms. Mundula, who lives in Matthews, south of Charlotte. “I became […]
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Designed to accelerate the shift to electric cars among other climate goals, the Inflation Reduction Act has in practice made buying such vehicles a lot more complicated. In August, the law ruled out the full tax credit of $7,500 for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids assembled outside North America. That may make it harder for […]
Read More Even as sales of all Hyundai and Kia cars jumped in the first three months of the year, the brands’ electric vehicle sales fell more than 25 percent, according to Kelley Blue Book. Electric car sales on the whole soared to another record in the first quarter, on a pace to top one million cars […]
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A hall showing off electric vehicles made by Nio, XPeng Motors, Zeekr and dozens of other Chinese companies was mobbed with visitors. An area nearby full of gasoline-powered cars by foreign brands barely got a second look by anyone. At the same event, Volkswagen, which vies with Toyota to be the world’s biggest seller of […]
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American brands like Tesla and General Motors will benefit most from rules that determine which electric vehicles qualify for tax credits starting on Tuesday. Foreign carmakers like Hyundai will be at a significant disadvantage because of restrictions aimed at cutting China out of the supply chain. Only 10 vehicles will initially qualify for tax credits […]
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For years, foreign automakers in China had a bead on customers drawn to luxury brands, like the Cao family in Shanghai. Not anymore. Ben Cao and his wife, Rachel, both 36, are trading down from two Porsches to one, a gasoline-fueled $290,000 Porsche 911 sports car, and buying their first electric vehicle, a $70,000 sport […]
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In Changsha, deep in China’s interior, thousands of chemists, engineers and manufacturing workers are shaping the future of batteries. The city’s Central South University churns out the graduates who are advancing the technology, much as Stanford University molded the careers of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who pioneered microchips. Across the Xiang River, vast factories mix minerals […]
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The Biden administration’s plan to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles — reaching a two-thirds share of new cars in less than a decade — pushes automakers further in a direction they have already been going. But meeting the new timetable will be a challenge. Most car companies are convinced that a transition to electric […]
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In the coming decades, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind will increasingly dominate the conventional power grid. This is because those sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy, ensuring a reliable grid — one that can deliver power 24/7 — requires some means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and […]
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In early 2021, the U.S. government set an ambitious goal: to decarbonize its power grid, the system that generates and transmits electricity throughout the country, by 2035. It’s an important goal in the fight against climate change, and will require a switch from current, greenhouse-gas producing energy sources (such as coal and natural gas), to […]
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Erick Belmer has seen how tough the car business can be. He was working at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, when it shut down in 2019, devastating the community. Mr. Belmer, an industrial mechanic, got another job at a G.M. transmission factory in Toledo, but his commute is now 140 miles each way. […]
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The Biden administration on Friday released new rules that will significantly shorten the list of electric vehicles that qualify for federal tax credits. Officials hope the change will push carmakers to move their supply chains out of China and to the United States or its allies. The rules, issued by the Treasury Department, are a […]
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WASHINGTON — The United States and Japan have reached an agreement over supplies of the critical minerals used to make car batteries, a deal that will likely put to rest a contentious issue in the relationship with Japan and could be a model for resolving similar disputes with other trading partners. The agreement provides a […]
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After returning home from his job at a car battery recycling plant in northern Mexico one evening in 2019, Azael Mateo González Ramírez said he felt dizzy, his bones ached and his throat was raspy. Then came stomach pain, he said, followed by bouts of diarrhea. The plant in Monterrey where he worked handled used […]
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Lithium, the common ingredient in almost all electric-car batteries, has become so precious that it is often called white gold. But something surprising has happened recently: The metal’s price has fallen, helping to make electric vehicles more affordable. Since January, the price of lithium has dropped by nearly 20 percent, according to Benchmark Minerals, even […]
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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is preparing to impose some of the first new rules in a generation to restrict or ban an array of toxic chemicals that are widely used in manufacturing, presenting the White House with tough choices between its economic agenda and public health. Many of the substances in question are important […]
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The small-town mayor, long a loyal foot soldier for Hungary’s governing party, recently committed what he described as “political suicide,” throwing himself in the path of an enormous $7.8 billion Chinese battery factory project promoted by his dissent-intolerant prime minister, Viktor Orban. “It is like lying in front of a steamroller,” Zoltan Timar, the mayor […]
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National and global plans to combat climate change include increasing the electrification of vehicles and the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources. But some projections show that these trends might require costly new power plants to meet peak loads in the evening when cars are plugged in after the workday. What’s more, overproduction of […]
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Free-trade deals are legal agreements that the World Trade Organization defines as covering “substantially all trade” between countries, including a broad range of goods and, typically, services. They usually take years to negotiate and, in the United States, require the approval of Congress. Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics at the Cato Institute, said […]
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This is not just the doing of the I.R.A. To a degree hardly anyone but wonks really appreciates, green energy in the United States was a heavily red-state phenomenon before the legislation even hit Mr. Biden’s desk in August. Already, Texas produces more renewable energy than anywhere else in the country — in fact, almost […]
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Just before midnight on a Friday in January, a fire tore through a three-story house in East Elmhurst, Queens, injuring 10 people inside and killing a 63-year-old man who was trapped on the second floor. Five days later, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, another fire broke out in the basement of a house in Forest […]
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Emma McConville was thrilled when she landed a job as a geologist at Exxon Mobil in 2017. She was assigned to work on one of the company’s most exciting and lucrative projects, a giant oil field off Guyana. But after oil prices collapsed during the pandemic, she was laid off on a video call at […]
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Phosphorus is an essential ingredient in thousands of products, including herbicides, lithium-ion batteries, and even soft drinks. Most of this phosphorus comes from an energy-intensive process that contributes significantly to global carbon emissions. In an effort to reduce that carbon footprint, MIT chemists have devised an alternative way to generate white phosphorus, a critical intermediate […]
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For more than a century, much of the world has run on the combustion of fossil fuels. Now, to avert the threat of climate change, the energy system is changing. Notably, solar and wind systems are replacing fossil fuel combustion for generating electricity and heat, and batteries are replacing the internal combustion engine for powering […]
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“What this report will get into is the fact that there are multiple electrified futures ahead of us that all get us to zero emissions but differ dramatically in how much mining they would require and how much mobility they would provide to Americans.” Transportation is the single largest source of U.S. emissions, making its transition off […]
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