They Can't Own The Sun

Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, marking a new first

Wind and solar generation are surging in Utah’s power mix, and experts expect the trend to continue despite cuts to federal clean energy incentives.

Utah’s solar generation eclipsed all other electricity sources for the first time ever in May, which energy experts are calling a win for the environment and economy.

Photovoltaic panels in Utah produced nearly 1 terawatt hour in May 2026. That represented nearly a third of all electricity generated in the state that month, according to data from Ember, a global energy think tank. Natural gas generated 32%, coal generated 28% and wind generated 2%.

“This particular milestone is a curiosity,” said Dan Schroeder, a physics professor at Weber State University who regularly checks energy data. “But the trend of more and more solar in Utah is wonderful news for air quality, it’s wonderful news for the climate, and it’s wonderful news for jobs and the economy.”

Schroeder attributes the trend to several large solar farms coming online in recent years. The 2,500-acre Green River Energy Center in Emery County became operational this spring and includes 400 megawatts of solar generation and 400 megawatts of battery storage. Excelsior Energy Capital’s Faraday Solar project in Utah County started providing up to 685 megawatts for the Meta data center there last fall. The Elektron Solar Project, an 80-megawatt photovoltaic farm in Tooele County, began sending electricity to Salt Lake City, Park City and Summit County in June 2024.

Solar also supports nearly 8,000 jobs in Utah, according to the latest information from the Solar Energy Industries Association. The state is home to 132 solar companies, including 54 solar developers and 23 solar manufacturers. Investors committed $1.5 billion to Utah’s solar market in 2025 alone, an association fact sheet said.

Electricity generation is complicated, however, and solar won’t represent a third of Utah’s portfolio every month.

But with its sunny, dry climate, “Utah still has room to grow its solar percentage,” Schroeder said.

He pointed to California, which saw nearly 51% of its electricity generation come from solar panels in May, the most recent month that Ember has data.

“We’re going to see milestones like this increasingly happen,” said Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and energy analyst with Utah Clean Energy.

About 51% of the new utility-scale electricity generation added to the nation’s grid is expected to come from solar this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration or EIA. The country will add another 43.4 gigawatts of solar, 24.3 gigawatts of battery storage and 11.8 gigawatts of new wind power in 2026, compared to just 6.3 gigawatts of natural gas generation and zero new coal capacity.

Some of Utah’s electricity gets exported to other states, and some of its solar farms serve a single customer, like the project in Utah County that has a contract with Meta.

Mitchell pulled the numbers from the state’s largest electricity provider, PacifiCorp, which is the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power. Turns out, another renewable energy source has seen a surge in generation in the region — wind power.

Wind blew past all other energy sources in PacifiCorp’s portfolio for Utah, Wyoming and Idaho in December and January for the first time, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“Wind plus solar is on a tear right now,” Mitchell said. “We may have achieved liftoff.”

And the two power sources compliment each other, Mitchell said, since wind generation is highest in the winter months and solar produces the most electricity in the summer.

Most of PacifiCorp’s wind generation comes from facilities in Wyoming, according to Jona Whitesides, a spokesperson with Rocky Mountain Power. He said the recent sweep in wind power likely comes from investment in new turbines, including 400 megawatts added to the grid last fall at PacifiCorp’s Rock Creek II facility.

“A lot of days we are using more wind,” Whitesides said. “There are no fuel costs there; it’s essentially free.”

The Trump administration is phasing out tax incentives for wind and solar projects, however, calling them “expensive and unreliable.” But renewables combined with battery storage increasingly produce some of the cheapest, cleanest and most consistent energy sources in the country, Mitchell said, and are not subject to price spikes and uncertainty brought by global politics.

Burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, which is mostly composed of methane, creates pollution and contributes to a warming planet. Mitchell said he keeps a running list of the ways a warming West is impacting Utahns at home.

A record-hot spring followed by a cold snap caused fruit farmers to lose their crops, for example. Utah also saw virtually zero snowpack over the winter. Emergency room visits from tick bites are also on the rise in the West, Axios reports, as milder winters and earlier onset of warm temperatures help the insects thrive.

“In order to reduce those impacts in the future, we need to be reducing our emissions,” Mitchell said. “And we need to be doing it faster.”

Still, the shift in priorities at the federal level caused PacifiCorp to abandon plans to build more wind and solar projects in the next two decades, according to its latest Integrated Resource Plan update. The pivot has earned the utility criticism from renewable advocates like Utah Clean Energy.

Whitesides called the Integrated Resource Plan a “snapshot in time” which is constantly revised depending on energy costs along with federal and state policies.

“It didn’t make financial sense to move forward with new renewable resources at this given time,” Whitesides said. “In two years, we could have a different administration. It may bring back more renewables.”

The utility plans to continue purchasing new electricity from third-party wind and solar farms in the meantime.

“Actually most of our solar is third party; we own very little solar,” Whitesides said. “We don’t disagree that there is value in renewables.”

Putting Things Together

I'm not sure any single idea can flourish all by its little ol' lonesome - at least it's extremely rare that anything stands alone. I can't think of anything anyway, and of course, if I can't think of it, then it must not exist, right?

So there's probably something, but my default position is that nothing in nature exists exclusive of everything else in nature. It's all evolutionary. Everything comes from (and so is part of) everything else.

Ooh. See what I did there? I got all zen and shit.

Anyway, same goes for anything people come up with. Everything goes with everything else.

So I get a little freaky when somebody takes one thing and marries it up with something else, either to create a new thing, or to prove that a technology thingie and a nature thingie can be put together in a way that benefits everything.

Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They’re not the only crop thriving in the shade.

He grows hops, used to make beer, and in recent years has also been generating electricity, with solar panels sprawled across 1.3 hectares (32 acres) of his land in the small hop-making town of Au in der Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.

The pilot project — a collaboration between Wimmer and local solar technology company Hallertauer Handelshaus — was set up in the fall of last year. The electricity made at this farm can power around 250 households, and the hops get shade they’ll need more often as climate change turbocharges summer heat.

Solar panels atop crops has been gaining traction in recent years as incentives and demand for clean energy skyrocket. Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields. The team in Germany says its effort is the first agrivoltaic project that’s solely focused on hops, but projects have sprouted around the world in several countries for a variety of grains, fruits and vegetables.

Beer-making hops can suffer if exposed to too much sun, said Bernhard Gruber, who’s managing the project’s solar component — and since there were already solar installations on the farm, it made sense to give them a second purpose by mounting them on poles above the crops.

In addition to shielding plants from solar stress, the shade could mean “water from precipitation lasts longer, leaving more in the soil” and that “the hops stay healthier and are less susceptible to diseases,” Gruber said. A scientific analysis of the benefits for the plants will be concluded in October.

The farm is working with researchers to understand how to get the balance right, so the hops get enough shade and sunlight for the best harvests each year.

In the U.K., where weather is also getting hotter and more variable, a team of researchers is looking at how to retrofit solar panels onto greenhouses or polytunnels — frames covered in plastic where crops grow underneath — with semi-transparent or transparent installations.

“You can get your renewables from the land that you do have covered and you don’t need to do these massive solar arrays on good agricultural land, which is what you’ve tended to see around to date,” said Elinor Thompson, a reader at Greenwich University who’s leading the research.

Thompson, a plant biologist, and her team are working with a fruit farm in Kent in southern England to make sure the plants also get the best out of solar structures.

“Nobody can afford to lose crop, especially in current conditions,” she said. “We are assuming that British summers are going to get hotter, we have a problem with water shortages, we need to be efficient in all parts of agriculture.”

Having shade where it’s useful and monitoring the effects of different arrangements of solar panels on a variety of crops will help the world prepare for a more climate-variable future, Thompson said.

In East Africa, which has suffered from a long and punishing drought that scientists said was worsened by human-caused climate change, solar panels can also help keep moisture in plants and soil and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield who’s developing two agrivoltaic systems in Kenya and Tanzania.

Randle-Boggis said the systems can be used for “climate change resilience and a way of improving the growing environment for crops, while also providing low carbon electricity.” He said that some of the crops under the partial shade of solar panels are using around 16% less irrigation.

The solar-covered farms saw increased yields for maize, Swiss chard and beans, and while growers experienced lower yields for onions and sweet peppers, they still had the added benefit of clean electricity generation.

But crop yields can also “vary depending on the weather conditions because we’re seeing the climate changing,” said Randle-Boggis, although he added he was “really surprised and impressed with some of the results that we’re seeing” for solar-covered crops.

“Maize is grown by about 50% of farmers in Tanzania. Maize is also a sun loving plant. So the fact that we had an 11% yield increase in maize ... is a phenomenal result,” he said.

And Randle-Boggis said these projects can continue to be replicated around the world for many different crops, as long as systems are “designed with the local context in mind.”

A future with more crops under solar is Gruber’s hope for beer-making hops, too.

“At the end of the year we will set up another solar park over hops,” which will have about 10 times the electricity-generating potential as the current project, Gruber said.

But that’s still just the beginning.

“We’re getting lots of inquires from hop farmers,” he said, “even from abroad.”

Congratulations to all the

beer-drinkers

and Greenies -

we got us a big fat 'W'

Gearing Up

We can expect the usual chorus of "conservative" voices telling us not to conserve anything, and what the world really needs is real Americans who eat whatever they want to eat, and shit wherever they want to shit.

I guess we can only hope we raised our kids right - that they're beginning to see that nothing good happens if good people don't step up, get involved in whatever big or small way, stay involved, and insist on better.

E.P.A. Lays Out Rules to Turbocharge Sales of Electric Cars and Trucks

The Biden administration is proposing rules to ensure that two-thirds of new cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the U.S. by 2032 are all-electric.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Wednesday will propose the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032.

If the two rules are enacted as proposed, they would put the world’s largest economy on track to slash its planet-warming emissions at the pace that scientists say is required of all nations in order to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change.

The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry. Last year, all-electric vehicles were just 5.8 percent of new car sales in the United States and fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold.

“By proposing the most ambitious pollution standards ever for cars and trucks, we are delivering on the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to protect people and the planet, securing critical reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution and ensuring significant economic benefits like lower fuel and maintenance costs for families,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Michael S. Regan, said in a statement.

The E.P.A. cannot mandate that carmakers sell a certain number of electric vehicles. But under the Clean Air Act, the agency can limit the pollution generated by the total number of cars each manufacturer sells. And the agency can set that limit so tightly that the only way manufacturers can comply is to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles.

The proposed tailpipe pollution limits for cars, first reported by The New York Times on Saturday, are designed to ensure that 67 percent of sales of new light-duty passenger vehicles, from sedans to pickup trucks, will be all-electric by 2032. Additionally, 46 percent of sales of new medium-duty trucks, such as delivery vans, will be all-electric or of some other form of zero-emissions technology by the same year, according to the plan.

The E.P.A. also proposed a companion rule governing heavy-duty vehicles, designed so that half of new buses and 25 percent of new heavy trucks sold would be all-electric by 2032.

Combined, the two rules would eliminate the equivalent of carbon dioxide emissions generated over two years by all sectors of the economy in the United States, the second biggest polluting country on the planet after China.

But some autoworkers and manufacturers fear that the transition to all-electric vehicles envisioned by the Biden administration goes too far, too fast and could result in job losses and lower profits.

Major automakers have for the most part invested heavily in electrification. Nonetheless, several are apprehensive about customer demand for the pricier all-electric models; the supply of batteries; and the speed with which a national network of charging stations can be created.

Automakers and union workers have been expressing those fears directly to the president since 2021, when Mr. Biden announced an executive order directing government policies to ensure that 50 percent of all new passenger vehicle sales be all-electric by 2030.

As word began to spread last week that his new regulations were designed to go still further, some automakers pushed back.

John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents large U.S. and foreign automakers, questioned how the E.P.A. could justify “exceeding the carefully considered and data-driven goal announced by the administration in the executive order.”

“Yes, America’s transition to an electric and low-carbon transportation future is well underway,” Mr. Bozzella said in a statement. “E.V. and battery manufacturing is ramping up across the country because automakers have self-financed billions to expand vehicle electrification. It’s also true that E.P.A.’s proposed emissions plan is aggressive by any measure.”

“Remember this: A lot has to go right for this massive — and unprecedented — change in our automotive market and industrial base to succeed,” Mr. Bozzella said.

Engineers and scientists at the E.P.A. have been working over the past year to determine how much electric vehicle technology is likely to advance in the next decade in order to set the strongest, achievable tailpipe emissions limits.

Tensions between the auto industry and the Biden administration played out over the past week, as the administration was forced to rearrange its rollout of the proposal, according to three people familiar with what happened.

Officials had originally planned for Mr. Regan to announce the policies in Detroit, surrounded by American-made all-electric vehicles.

But as auto executives and the United Auto Workers learned the details of the proposed regulations, some grew uneasy about publicly supporting it, according to the people familiar with their thinking. The setting was moved from Detroit to the E.P.A. headquarters in Washington, where Mr. Regan is scheduled to make remarks Wednesday at 11 a.m.

In an interview, Mr. Regan acknowledged that some auto executives and leaders of the United Auto Workers had expressed anxiety over the proposals — adding that they could be amended to assuage those fears.

“We’re very mindful that this is a proposal, and we want to give as much flexibility possible,” he said. The agency will accept public comments on the proposed rules before they are finalized next year. The rules would take effect starting with model year 2027.

Environmentalists praised Mr. Biden for delivering on a promise he made during his first days in office, when he called climate change a “moral imperative, an economic imperative” that would be central to all his decision-making.

A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency found that nations would have to stop sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 to keep average global temperatures from increasing 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Beyond that point, scientists say, the effects of catastrophic heat waves, flooding, drought, crop failures and species extinction would become significantly harder for humanity to handle. The planet has already warmed by an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Mr. Biden has pledged to cut the country’s emissions in half by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. He took a major step toward meeting that target last summer, when he signed the Inflation Reduction Act. It includes $370 billion in spending over the next decade to fight climate change, including tax incentives up to $7,500 for the purchase of American-made electric vehicles.

That law is projected to help the United States cut its emissions by 40 percent by 2030 — not quite enough to meet Mr. Biden’s pledge. Experts said the new E.P.A. regulations, if enacted as proposed, are needed to reach Mr. Biden’s goal.

“The EPA standards are a huge step forward in addressing the largest source of climate pollution: transportation,” said Luke Tonachel, senior director of the clean vehicles and buildings program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.

A sharp rise in electric vehicles in the United States could mean wider availability and sales of electric vehicles outside its borders, Mr. Tonachel said. “This can be a world-leading standard that puts the world on a much-needed pathway for curbing global pollution from transportation,” he said.

Laurence Tubiana, the CEO of the European Climate Foundation who helped broker the 2015 Paris climate accord, welcomed the E.P.A.’s action.

“This is confirmation to the world of the seriousness of the engagement of Joe Biden on climate change and keeps the U.S. as a front-runner on climate,” Ms. Tubiana said. “It’s resonating very well in Europe and the world.”

Still, others see the proposed regulations as government overreach and say they will surely face legal challenges.

“They are using this established longstanding statute for an entirely new purpose, to force an entirely new goal — the transformation of the industry to electric vehicles,” said Steven G. Bradbury, who served as the chief legal counsel for the Transportation Department during the Trump administration. “This is clearly driven by the president’s directive to achieve these results. I don’t think you can do this. Congress never contemplated the use of statutes in this way.”

Key Phrase:

"I don't think you can do this"

Translated:

• We don't want to do this because it threatens the status quo that makes us a very comfortable living, and keeps a few of us in power at the expense of everybody else
• We'll burn this joint to the ground fighting to keep from having to make the changes necessary to ensure a planet suitable for human habitation

Traditional conservative doctrine

has transformed the GOP

into a full-blown death cult.

Side Benefits

The house and car will merge — and change how we power our lives

Next generation of EV batteries will power homes and feed energy to the grid

When the power went out at Nate Graham’s New Mexico home last year, his family huddled around a fireplace in the cold and dark. Even the gas furnace was out, with no electricity for the fan. After failing to coax enough heat from the wood-burning fireplace, Graham’s wife and two children decamped for the comfort of a relative’s house until electricity returned two days later.

The next time the power failed, Graham was prepared. He had a $150 inverter, a device that converts direct current from batteries into the alternating current needed to run appliances, hooked up to his new Chevy Bolt, an electric vehicle. The Bolt’s battery powered his refrigerator, lights and other crucial devices with ease. As the rest of his neighborhood outside Albuquerque languished in darkness, Graham’s family life continued virtually unchanged. “It was a complete game changer making power outages a nonissue,” says Graham, 35, a manager at a software company. “It lasted a day-and-a-half, but it could have gone much longer.”

Today, Graham primarily powers his home appliances with rooftop solar panels and, when the power goes out, his Chevy Bolt. He has cut his monthly energy bill from about $220 to $8 per month. “I’m not a rich person, but it was relatively easy,” says Graham “You wind up in a magical position with no [natural] gas, no oil and no gasoline bill.”

Graham is a preview of what some automakers are now promising anyone with an EV: An enormous home battery on wheels that can reverse the flow of electricity to power the entire home through the main electric panel.

Beyond serving as an emissions-free backup generator, the EV has the potential of revolutionizing the car’s role in American society, transforming it from an enabler of a carbon-intensive existence into a key step in the nation’s transition into renewable energy.

note: Anybody care to hazard a guess as to why the Dirty Fuels cartel is working so hard to keep us all hooked on oil?

Home solar panels had already been chipping away at the United States’ centralized power system, forcing utilities to make electricity transfer a two-way street. More recently, home batteries have allowed households with solar arrays to become energy traders, recharging when electricity prices are low, replacing grid power when prices are high, and then selling electricity for a profit during peak hours.

But batteries are expensive. Using EVs makes this kind of home setup cheaper and a real possibility for more Americans.

So there may be a time, perhaps soon, when your car not only gets you from point A to point B, but also serves as the hub of your personal power plant.

I looked into new vehicles and hardware to answer the most common questions about how to power your home (and the grid) with your car.

Why power your home with an EV battery

America’s grid is not in good shape. Prices are up and reliability is down. Since 2000, the number of major outages has risen from less than two dozen to more than 180 per year, based on federal data, the Wall Street Journal reports. The average utility customer in 2020 endured about eight hours of power interruptions, double the previous decade.

Utilities’ relationship with their customers is set to get even rockier. Residential electricity prices, which have risen 21 percent since 2008, are predicted to keep climbing as utilities spend more than $1 trillion upgrading infrastructure, erecting transmission lines for renewable energy and protecting against extreme weather.

U.S. homeowners, increasingly, are opting out. About 8 percent of them have installed solar panels. An increasing number are adding home batteries from companies such as LG, Tesla and Panasonic. These are essentially banks of hundreds of battery cells, similar to those in your laptop, capable of storing energy and discharging electricity.

EnergySage, a renewable energy marketplace, says two-thirds of its customers now request battery quotes when soliciting bids for home solar panels, and about 15 percent install them. This setup allows homeowners to declare (at least partial) independence from the grid by storing and consuming solar power overnight, as well as supplying electricity during outages.

But it doesn’t come cheap. The average home consumes about 20 kilowatt-hours per day, a measure of energy over time. That works out to about $15,000 for enough batteries on your wall to ensure a full day of backup power (although the net cost is lower after incentives and other potential savings).

An alternative is in the driveway. A typical EV stores about 67 kWh in its battery, more than three days’ worth of electricity, sitting unused (vehicles are parked for about 95 percent of their useful life). Until recently, the only way to tap it was by rigging an inverter system like Graham’s. But bidirectional charging, the ability for vehicle electricity to flow both ways, is now a commercial reality in the United States. By 2024, numerous makes and models will be in dealerships.

You can even buy one today: The Ford F-150 Lightning, an all-electric version of America’s best-selling pickup truck. It’s scrambling the economics of home energy.

How an EV battery can power your home

Ford changed how customers saw their trucks when it rolled out a hybrid version of the F-150, says Ryan O’Gorman of Ford’s energy services program. The truck doubles as a generator sporting as many as 11 outlets spread around the vehicle, including a 240-volt outlet typically used for appliances like clothes dryers. During disasters like the 2021 ice storm that left millions of Texans without electricity, Ford dealers lent out their hybrid F-150s as home generators.

The Lighting, the fully electric version of the F-150, takes the next step by offering home backup power. Under each Lightning sits a massive 98 kWh to 131 kWh battery pack. That’s enough energy, Ford estimates, to power a home for three days (10 days if rationing). “The vehicle has an immense amount of power to move that much metal down the road at 80 mph,” says O’Gorman.

Instead of plugging appliances into the truck, the truck plugs into the house, replacing the grid. This requires some equipment: an 80-watt bidirectional charger and a home integration system, which is a hardware unit that allows you to disconnect your house from the grid and power it with the truck. Sunrun, the nation’s largest residential solar installer, is Ford’s preferred installation partner, although any licensed professional can install them.

How much it will cost

Installing the extra hardware will cost about $5,000. (Ford includes the bidirectional charger with its premium models). Home wiring upgrades, or an optional solar array, would push the cost higher.

Even at that price, the F-150 may be the cheapest home battery on the market.

When battery prices surged last year because of rising demand and supply chain issues, automakers were first in line thanks to their enormous scale. That allowed them to make deals that appear to have radically undercut home battery prices.

Take the $56,000 F-150 Lightning. With the standard 98 kWh battery, it offers energy storage equivalent to seven Tesla PowerWalls ($15,500 each installed) for about half the price per kWh. So, for slightly over the U.S. median car price of $50,000, you get a home battery and a car.

For now, the Lightening only offers a house-size backup battery. But the next round of software upgrades will monitor home energy usage to decide the best time (and price) to recharge vehicles. During peak hours, it can disconnect your home from the electricity grid, relying on battery power, until prices fall.

Utilities across the country are also starting to allow EVs to supply electricity to the grid. Owners can opt into vehicle-to-grid services that allow utilities to call on their car’s battery during peak demand, for a price. Sunrun CEO Mary Powell says the company has already received about 1,000 orders for the F-150’s home battery systems around the country, particularly in places like California and Texas rocked by blackouts related to extreme weather (about 10 percent also opted to add solar).

Eventually, it aims to build a coordinated network as it does for home stationary batteries that could help balance the grid and power millions of homes. The potential is enormous. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that if, as expected, California’s new clean air standards add 14 million zero-emission vehicles to garages by 2035, the collective battery storage could power all of California’s homes for three days.

Will this help the climate?

The idea is companies like Sunrun, along with utilities, will recruit vehicles like the F-150 Lightning to form virtual power plants. These networks of thousands or millions of devices can supply electricity during critical times. By 2030, according to the clean energy nonprofit RMI, this could reduce peak loads in the United States by 60 gigawatts, equivalent to the average consumption of 50 million households. That would cut the number of power plants we need to build, and help redistribute clean energy throughout the day.

Here’s why. Think of today’s electricity grid as a very expensive highway system with dozens of lanes crisscrossing the nation. Yet it’s only at full capacity a few times a year. Because utilities must always keep the lights on, they invest billions of dollars in (polluting) power plants that may only operate for a few hours or even a few minutes each year. As the share of renewable energy increases, utilities may need even more of these plants to smooth out fluctuations when the wind or sun isn’t available.

Batteries offer an alternative. By storing energy and dispatching it at the right time, they can help utilities ramp up renewables without expensive new natural gas plants as a backup.

Still, using an EV as a home battery might not be the best way to cut your overall emissions, especially if you buy an oversize one. (The new Hummer EV, for example, pollutes more per mile than small gas-powered sedans).

The most effective way to zero out emissions, researchers argue, is reducing personal dependence on cars. Mass transit, cycling, walkability, better zoning and land use planning are all necessary to hit emission reduction targets in the transportation sector, which is now the largest source of U.S. emissions, even as EVs replace their fossil fuel counterparts.

But cities won’t develop walkable designs and ubiquitous transit systems overnight — if they ever do. America was built for cars: 93 percent of U.S. households own a vehicle.

So if you aren’t getting rid of your vehicle, you’ll face new choices the next time you walk into a car dealership: How do you want to power your home and the grid?

Many of the EVs rolling off assembly lines today will give you that option, says Douglas Alfaro of WallBox, an EV charging and energy management company. The company is partnering with automakers to design hardware that works with almost any vehicle — Ford’s charging infrastructure, so far, is proprietary. This is already starting to happen: Makers of the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Lucid Air, Kia EV6, VW’s ID.4, Mitsubishi Outlander, and Chevy Silverado EV have announced they will offer home electricity services in the next year or so.

As Graham realized after his last power outage in New Mexico, electrifying your life means rethinking how your vehicle is connected to everything else. In the future, our cars will be plugged into our homes and other intelligent devices, trading electricity with each other and the outside world.

Today's Green Stuff

On my best day, I could get it down to about 5 seconds in my '56 Chevy.

327 bored out to about 335. Holley 650 double-pumper on top of an Edlebrock highrise manifold, 2.02 Fuely heads, custom pipes, 4-speed trans out of a 'Vette, Mr Gasket vertical gate shifter, 410 rear end with Positrac and traction bars.

I loved that car, and I would've traded it for this EV Hummer in a heartbeat.

It's a fuckin' Hummer, FFS

Tipping Into The Green

Bloomberg:

US Crosses the Electric-Car Tipping Point for Mass Adoption

Once 5% of new-car sales go fully electric, everything changes — according to a Bloomberg analysis of the 19 countries that have made the EV pivot.

Many people of a certain age can recall the first time they held a smartphone. The devices were weird and expensive and novel enough to draw a crowd at parties. Then, less than a decade later, it became unusual not to own one.

That same society-altering shift is happening now with electric vehicles, according to a Bloomberg analysis of adoption rates around the world. The US is the latest country to pass what’s become a critical EV tipping point: 5% of new car sales powered only by electricity. This threshold signals the start of mass EV adoption, the period when technological preferences rapidly flip, according to the analysis.

For the past six months, the US joined Europe and China — collectively the three largest car markets — in moving beyond the 5% tipping point. If the US follows the trend established by 18 countries that came before it, a quarter of new car sales could be electric by the end of 2025. That would be a year or two ahead of most major forecasts.

Why is 5% so important?

Most successful new technologies — electricity, televisions, mobile phones, the internet, even LED lightbulbs — follow an S-shaped adoption curve. Sales move at a crawl in the early-adopter phase, then surprisingly quickly once things go mainstream. (The top of the S curve represents the last holdouts who refuse to give up their old flip phones.)

In the case of electric vehicles, 5% seems to be the point when early adopters are overtaken by mainstream demand. Before then, sales tend to be slow and unpredictable. Afterward, rapidly accelerating demand ensues.

It makes sense that countries around the world would follow similar patterns of EV adoption. Most impediments are universal: there aren’t enough public chargers, the cars are expensive and in limited supply, buyers don’t know much about them. Once the road has been paved for the first 5%, the masses soon follow.

Thus the adoption curve followed by South Korea starting in 2021 ends up looking a lot like the one taken by China in 2018, which is similar to Norway after its first 5% quarter in 2013. The next major car markets approaching the tipping point this year include Canada, Australia, and Spain.

A higher bar for hybrids

The analysis above is for vehicles that run on batteries only. Some countries, primarily in Europe, were quicker to adopt plug-in hybrids, which have smaller batteries backed by a gasoline-powered engine. Including those, the world just surpassed 20 million electric vehicles on the road, and that figure will double again by the end of next year, according to a recent report by analysts at BloombergNEF.

Since using a plug-in hybrid doesn’t require the same level of infrastructure or consumer awareness, the early phase of adoption was less consistent. A consistent tipping point for this broader category of EVs wasn’t achieved until 10% of new vehicles had a plug.

The US and China mostly skipped plug-in hybrids and went straight to fully-electric vehicles, and the US hasn’t yet crossed the 10% threshold.

Behind every country that crossed an EV tipping point is a program of federal incentives and pollution standards. In the US, the Biden administration last year issued an executive order calling for EVs to make up half of new vehicles by 2030 (including plug-in hybrids). According to the tipping-point analysis, it should beat that goal with several years to spare.
Tipping the carmakers

Continued growth also depends on the ability of automakers and their suppliers to increase production fast enough. Volkswagen, Ford, and BMW are each targeting 50% or more of their global sales to be fully electric by the end of the decade.

It turns out, automakers have tipping points, too. Factories must be retooled and supply chains reconfigured. To achieve the most cost savings, the entire vehicle must be redesigned with electrification in mind. In Europe, once 10% of an automaker’s quarterly sales go electric, the share triples in less than two years.

The chart below doesn’t include Toyota, which is the biggest automaker that hasn’t reached the 10% EV threshold in Europe. Toyota’s target of 3.5 million annual EV sales by 2030, as a share of its 10 million annual vehicle sales, is among the least aggressive of the major automakers. The chart also doesn’t include Tesla, the world’s biggest EV maker, whose sales are entirely electric.

Is the world’s transition to EVs inevitable?

So far, 90% of the world's EV sales have come from the US, China and Europe. That means countries responsible for about a third of global annual auto sales haven't passed the tipping point. None of the countries in Latin America, Africa, or Southeast Asia has made the jump. If they do, it’s uncertain whether global miners will be able to keep up with demand for battery metals.

Still, global sales of electric vehicles tripled in the last two years, according to the International Energy Agency. All of the net growth in global car sales in 2021 came from electric cars, and that’s a trend that BloobmergNEF forecasts suggest will continue indefinitely. This year could be the high water mark for vehicles on the road without a plug.

Applying the tipping point analysis to the entire globe, the share of fully electric vehicles worldwide passed the 5% threshold for the first time last year. Including plug-in hybrids, the 10% tipping point will be passed sometime this year. If the trends holds true, accelerating demand can be expected.

Today's Green Thing

Why do Republicans want to drag us down?

Why won't they let us compete?

Why do they need us to lose?

Dan Jørgensen Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities of Denmark, tasked with reducing the country’s emissions by 70 percent by 2030 and closing down its oil industry.

Imagine having a cabinet post that included the word "climate" here in USAmerica Inc.

It sounds like science fiction, but it's just science.

Fate Aligning With The Cosmos

So - yesterday, Bernie unveiled his 16-trillion-dollar plan for converting to a green economy, and today, David Koch died.

We may be on to something here.

Fight For It

Fossil fuel companies are run by smart guys who clawed their way to the top of their organizations by knowing what the fuck they're doing.

Those guys have invested most of their lives in their careers - and since the global oil reserves are supposed to hold out for another 50 years, and since they're not getting any younger, they'll be cashing in on all that hard work - so don't expect them to bail.

They have to be beaten - by political means and by economic means - because they won't just walk away from that kind of power.

A Word From Professor Cole

Juan Cole (aka the smartest guy in any room when it comes to talking about the gigundous cluster fuck polite people call The Middle East):

Why the US needs Electric Cars: Saudi Arabia threatens Pivot away from US
Posted on 10/23/2013 by Juan Cole

The royal family of Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy with no constitution and no elected legislature, is in a snit about US foreign policy. King Abdullah doesn’t like even the mild American criticism of the Sunni Bahrain monarchy’s brutal crackdown on the majority Shiite community in that country. He is furious that President Obama went with the Russian plan to sequester Syria’s chemical weapons rather than bombing Damascus. He is petrified of a breakthrough in American and Iranian relations that might permit Iran to keep its nuclear enrichment program and allow Tehran to retain a nuclear breakout capacity, which would deter any outside overthrow of the Iranian regime. Those are the stated discontents leaked by Saudi uber-hawk Bandar Bin Sultan.

Behind the scenes, another Saudi concern is that the US likes democracy too much. Washington ultimately backed the Arab upheavals that led to the fall of presidents for life in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Saudi Arabia hated this outbreak of popular politics and parliamentary competition. It connived with Egypt’s generals to roll back gains in Egypt in favor of more authoritarian rule. It has just cut off Yemen because the post-Saleh situation there isn’t developing its way. Only in Syria do the Saudis want regime change, and there it is because they want to weaken Iran and depose a Shiite ruling clique in favor of a fundamentalist Sunni one.

USA - USA - USA

We're number - 2.  OK OK - not too shabby.

But wait; these rankings are a little fudged, cuz if this was a tournament (and make no mistake here - it is a tournament), we'd be listed as 3rd place.  Again tho', not bad from the standpoint of total energy produced.  This is a big-assed joint that needs and produces big-ass bunches of energy, but in terms of the percentage of the total energy produced, we're #111.

So - fuck; again!?!

There are 17 countries in the world getting more than 90% of their energy from renewable sources.

Somebody please explain to me how it seems Burundi knows a little somethin' that we just can't quite figure out.

What is it about Tajikistan?  Kyrgyzstan?  And the Congo for fuck sake!?!  You're telling me they have their shit together enough to meet 100% of their energy needs without fossil fuels and we're just standin' around with our thumbs up our butts?

Yeah, yeah - OK.  Factor out all the cars and you get a different thing altogether - or do ya?  One more thing to chew on here: a British company owns the world's Land Speed Record for an Electric Car - as reported in Auto Week.

The Drayson Racing Technologies Lola B12/69 EV electric race car hit a top speed of 204.2 mph at a racetrack at RAF Elvington in Yorkshire, England, smashing the previous record of 175 mph set by Battery Box General Electric in 1974. Fittingly, Lord Paul Drayson was behind the wheel.

The Brits.  Makers of some of the shittiest cars on the planet for 70 years.  That's who owns the single most important world record for going fast in a car right now.  Once upon a time, if you wanted to go fast in a car, you just called Richard and Kyle Petty down in Carolina, or the Unsers, or just about anybody in the US with a shade tree in their backyard and a little extra time this summer.

But we choose to be Number One Hundred-and-Eleven.  We are so fucked.

Interesting

Ok - it's Bloomberg and all, but there's a lot of "bidness guys" who understand the basics of the science and they know it's real etc, but who still feel trapped in the closet.  Maybe this gives them a way out.  It's a start anyway.