Current Climate brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability every Monday. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
MediaNews Group via Getty Images
Much of news around renewables and climate has grown downbeat as the Trump Administration kills federal incentives for most forms of clean energy, seeks to accelerate fossil fuel production and prepares to jettison the basis for the EPA’s regulatory efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions since 2009. But there are still some bright spots.
One of is the continued rapid expansion of the EV charging network in the U.S. In the year’s second quarter, the pace of installation of new charging ports and stations grew at a record pace. By the end of the year, about 16,700 fast-charge ports will likely be built, which is 2.4 times the level across the country in 2022, according to EV industry researcher Paren. If the current rate of growth continues, the number of U.S. fast-charging ports could top 100,000 in 2027, up from 59,694 ports at the end of June. The total number of EV charging stations rose to 11,687 at the end of the quarter from 10,761 in Q1.
Even with the pullback in federal support for EV charging, Paren estimates a 20% annual increase in new ports this year. Charging costs have also dipped a bit, to 48 cents/kWh from 50 cents/kWh a year ago, the result of both increased competition and new pricing systems, such as those offering discounts at off-peak times.
Even Tesla, which operates the biggest U.S. charging network, is upping its game. In July, the Elon Musk-led company opened its first Tesla Diner in Hollywood that features, along with cheeseburgers, fries and drive-in movie screens, 80 Supercharger stations—the biggest urban charging station in the country.
The Big Read
Boston Globe via Getty Images
Waymo’s Growing Electric Robotaxi Fleet Is Headed To Dallas
Waymo, the leading U.S. robotaxi operator, plans to launch the autonomous ride service in Dallas next year, its second market in Texas, where it’s partnering with Avis to keep its growing fleet of electric vehicles in service. The Alphabet Inc. unit’s steady expansion pace draws a sharp contrast with Tesla, which remains in test mode despite CEO Elon Musk’s continued claims of its autonomous tech prowess.
Mountain View, California-based Waymo said in a blog post it’s launching commercial rides in Dallas in 2026, where it’s also been testing, without specifying exactly when. It already operates in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, and previously said it would launch service in Miami and Washington, DC, next year as well. The company said Dallas is of interest as it thinks it can help road safety in a city with the highest traffic fatality rate among U.S. cities with populations above 1 million people.
The news comes a week after Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Waymo could soon triple the number of cities it’s operating in. “The Waymo driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is testing across more than ten cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia,” he said on Alphabet’s July 23 results calls. “We hope to serve riders in all ten in the future.”
Along with Dallas, New York and Philadelphia, Waymo has confirmed that it’s testing electric robotaxis in Houston, San Antonio, Miami, San Diego, Nashville, Washington, Boston and Tokyo. Currently, it’s providing over 250,000 paid rides a week in the five cities where the service is available. That could be worth at least $5.1 million a week, based on an average fare of $20.43 per ride, an estimate by Obi, an app that aggregates real-time ride-hail prices.
Read more here
Hot Topic
Courtesy of Costa Samaras
Costa Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, on upgrading infrastructure for a rapidly changing climate
After a year of natural disasters, including massive Canadian wildfires, the hurricane that devastated Asheville, North Carolina, L.A. fires in January and Texas flooding this summer, are extreme weather events the new normal?
Yes. A lot of times we fall back on this: “Nobody could have foreseen this.” That’s just not how it works. We’re foreseeing it right now. It’s been foreseen. That thing of saying “oh, this is a once in a generation” or a “once in a thousand years” kind of thing, that’s not how we think about risk anymore.
It’s not just about assuming the worst all the time. It’s more about not being unaware of what could happen, so that you don’t say that you’re surprised when we’re telling you not to be surprised.
It’s virtually certain that it’s going to be hotter. So we should be planning for our social systems, our health system, our infrastructure systems, our energy systems to be able to withstand more intense and prolonged heatwaves. These are things that we might not think about, the way that it affects our electricity grid or our water system or our transportation system or even our rail system. More intense heat stresses our systems in ways that they weren’t designed for.
The most important thing that we should be worried about is that heat is deadly, and it’s especially deadly for vulnerable households, elderly people with weakened immune systems and very young children. For example, air conditioning is an adaptive technology that we don’t think about as a technology for resilience, but it absolutely is. If people can’t use air conditioning or can’t afford to use air conditioning or don’t have air conditioning and it’s really hot, they can die. And on a super hot day, the grid and power plants become a little bit less efficient. Transmission lines become a little less efficient. The distribution system, the transformers and the wires that come to our homes, every little bit of power that moves from the power plant to our homes, on a very hot day gets eroded a little bit. And that coincides with days of the year when we need extra power.
It’s everybody turning their air conditioning on as the grid is becoming a little less efficient. And sometimes power plants can’t operate when it’s really hot. For example, ones that may use a river for water cooling, but the rivers are too hot to be effective. We have a power system that has been designed for the weather of the 20th century. That’s not the weather that we have anymore.
What kinds of changes should we be making to the power transmission system to adjust to a hotter climate or just more severe weather?
We should be making changes to our supply system, our transmission system, and the way that we use electricity for a warming world. On the supply side, we should be adding more clean energy, solar and wind and geothermal, so that we stop the emissions that are making things worse. On the transmission side, there are new technologies that are called grid-enhancing technologies. There are opportunities to make power lines out of different materials that you can put more electricity through on hot days, but that also don’t sag as much when it’s hot. The materials used in conventional power lines expand. If you think about holding a string between two points, when it’s hot it expands and starts to go closer toward the ground. That’s dangerous because if it starts to sag too much, it gets close to a tree, it hits a tree and can spark a wildfire. That part of our electricity system is very susceptible to very high heat, so you should be thinking about new technologies to both reduce the sag but also enable us to put more electricity through the same infrastructure on very hot days.
In the distribution system, depending on where we are in the country, we might want to put more of those lines underground because even though it’s more expensive, so that they’re less susceptible to getting knocked down in an extreme storm or iced over in many parts of the country when there’s a lot of ice.
And then finally at home, we need more distributed generation like solar and batteries, more intelligence to manage electricity loads with virtual power plants and so that if there’s a problem with the transmission line or there’s problem with power plants that are further away, we have some opportunity for resilience to still generate electricity when we need it close to where we are.
One last thing is we definitely can’t give up on energy efficiency. The more that we make our homes and businesses efficient, the less energy we’ll need to draw from the grid on those super-hot days. What’s not acceptable is that we assume people are going to have to go without air conditioning, especially low-income folks. That’s just not an equitable, resilient solution. People should not be in danger because of high heat.
What about coastal regions that are at ever greater risk for more intense storms, such as Florida or the Gulf region? What should we be doing there?
We know in addition to heat, we’re going to be facing increased intensity of storms, increased sea level rise and storm surge on the coasts, challenges in different parts of the water system and water availability and wildfire risk. In places like Florida, you’re facing high heat, storm surge, sea level rise and extreme storms like hurricanes. There are opportunities–very low, no-regret opportunities–where we should be building our homes and infrastructure in places that are exposed to hurricanes to withstand high winds, heavy storms and the types of storm surge that push water onto land. Those are things we should be doing as a matter of standard, but we’re not doing it in a systematic way to ensure that the infrastructure we have and the infrastructure we’re building is going to be able to perform under increasingly intense climate-induced weather events.
Lots of parts of Florida are heavily exposed to current and future climate risks, but it’s important to understand that climate risks affect every part of the country. You don’t have to be on the coast to be exposed to the dangers of climate change. A lot of people thought North Carolina was safe or different parts of the upper Midwest or different parts of inland California were safe. There are always ways we can improve our communities to be more resilient toward climate impacts.
What’s clear is climate change is causing damage right now, and the more emissions we generate, the worse it’s going to be in the future. So it’s on us to get the world’s emissions to zero as fast as possible, while also building infrastructure, human and social systems, to be able to withstand the types of climate impacts that we see now and are going to see in the future.
What Else We’re Reading
The Vatican will be the world’s first carbon-neutral state, powered by a 430-hectare solar farm (Associated Press)
Motherf***ing wind farms. Samuel L. Jackson joins a wind power campaign after Trump criticism (Bloomberg)
Tesla signs a $4.3 billion deal with South Korea’s LGES for lithium-iron phosphate battery cells made in Michigan, reducing its China reliance (Reuters)
EPA climate rollbacks: When politics buries science, the public pays (Forbes)
The National Science Foundation plans an abrupt end to the lone U.S. Antarctic research icebreaker. The termination of the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer shocks polar scientists (Science)
How Ben & Jerry’s is recycling food waste into energy (PBS News Hour)
History & Hydrology: What you don’t understand about China’s new dam (Forbes)
More From Forbes
