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It’s a tough time for electric trucking in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut off funding for heavy-duty vehicle charging and port infrastructure. Republicans in Congress are trying to rescind states’ authority to set clean vehicle mandates. And tariffs are throttling incoming cargoes to U.S. ports, hampering the business of trucking as a whole while likely also driving up the already-high price of battery-powered trucks.
But in Southern California, the transition away from diesel trucks, which emit a disproportionate share of the transportation sector’s planet-warming and health-harming emissions, is moving forward despite federal policy obstacles. Two big all-electric charging depots opened in April to serve clean trucks operating in the region, which is home to the busiest seaport complex in the country and is the epicenter of U.S. electric truck adoption.
The first, located in Rancho Dominguez, 12 miles north of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is owned and operated by Terawatt Infrastructure, a startup with more than $1 billion in capital and that is working with a consortium of companies including Ikea, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo. With 7 megawatts of capacity at 20 fast-charging stalls, it can charge up to 125 trucks per day.
The second site is in Colton, a city about 60 miles east of Los Angeles in California’s Inland Empire, a region crowded with massive distribution warehouses. That site is owned and operated by Greenlane, a more than $650 million joint venture of Daimler Truck North America, utility NextEra Energy, and investment firm BlackRock Alternatives. It has 12 pull-through sites for trucks hauling trailers, which are equipped with 400-kilowatt dual-port chargers, along with 29 “bobtail” lanes — sites for trucks without attached trailers — equipped with 180-kW chargers. In total, it can support just over 10 megawatts of charging.
These facilities are the latest in a line of big truck-charging depots springing up across California, built by major firms like Amazon and PepsiCo, freight companies such as NFI Industries and Schneider National, logistics operators like Prologis, and startups including Forum Mobility, Voltera, and WattEV. This proliferation is in response to the state’s ambitious truck electrification goals, which include a target for completely zero-emissions fleets by 2045, and to the the hefty incentives it has put in place to accomplish that.
Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s newly opened electric truck stops represent a new class of charging site meant to serve the next phase in the Southern California electric truck charging evolution.
Early truck-charging sites were designed to serve shorter-range trucks that deliver goods from a central warehouse before returning to recharge overnight. But Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s new depots are meant to function more like a classic highway stop for battery-powered trucks looking to deliver goods hundreds of miles away.
The new stations will support more routes per day from Southern California’s crowded ports to its distribution warehouses further inland, said Emilia Sibley, lead of Terawatt’s heavy-duty business unit. Terawatt’s newly opened site, which serves the trucks of customers ranging from relatively small freight haulers like Hight Logistics to global corporates like PepsiCo, is “meant to be an enabler for on-the-go charging,” she said — a place to get a “top-off charge to get from the port to the Inland Empire multiple times per day, rather than once a day.”
This infrastructure will allow truck owners to “extend the range and economics of these heavy-duty assets,” she said. Owners and operators measure the value of trucks not just on up-front price and long-term operating cost, but on the revenue the vehicles generate over their useful life. Being able to run two trips per day instead of one could essentially double a truck’s value.
The same dynamic applies to electric trucks looking for a recharge at the end of delivery routes in the farther reaches of the Inland Empire, said Andrea Pratt, Greenlane’s vice president of government and utility relations. Unlike most truck-charging depots today, Greenlane’s Colton site is open to any electric truck, in the traditional “truck stop–type model,” she said. “We are publicly facing, and we will always have charging available for trucks to come up and charge ad hoc.”
These big new charging depots are also the launchpads for a broader eastward expansion of truck-charging capacity. Greenlane’s Colton site is the first of a string of electric truck stops being planned from Long Beach to the Mojave Desert cities of Barstow and Baker as part of its I-15 commercial EV charging corridor project. And Terawatt and its partners are planning several large-scale charging sites along the I-10 highway from California to Texas.
The routes and use cases open to electric trucks will further expand as the next generation of longer-range trucks from mainstream manufacturers and those from all-electric specialists like Tesla or Windrose Technology become available, Pratt said. Tesla said this week that full-scale production of its long-delayed Semi will begin in 2026.
“As battery technology increases and as prices come down, you’re really going to see a change in the market,” Pratt said.
Both Greenlane’s and Terawatt’s new charging depots also offer fancier versions of the typical truck stop amenities, such as a lounge area with food and drink for sale, restrooms, free Wi-Fi, and round-the-clock security and customer support. Those are important both for on-the-go truckers spending a half hour to an hour to top up their batteries for the next leg of their journey and for trucks reserving bobtail spots to recharge overnight.
“Sites like ours can really de-risk the zero-emissions vehicle journey,” Pratt said, particularly for the vast majority of U.S. trucking fleets that own 10 or fewer trucks. “You may be less likely to need to put down a lot of capital to electrify your property if there’s a Greenlane or a Terawatt or a Forum down the street — and there will be someone there if something’s gone wrong.”
This build-it-and-they-will-come approach to electric trucking comes with its fair share of financial risk — particularly in the shadow of the second Trump administration.
The administration has frozen or restricted billions of dollars in grant funding authorized by Congress in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Those actions have left states and companies uncertain about whether they can rely on billions of federal dollars for building charging infrastructure on major transit corridors and for projects to invest in clean ports.
The Trump administration also plans to roll back federal transportation emissions regulations and has made clear it won’t support states’ efforts to put more stringent emissions mandates into effect. In January, California withdrew its plans to seek federal approval of its Advanced Clean Fleets mandate, which set statewide zero-emissions truck purchasing quotas on most large truck fleets.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have introduced resolutions seeking to rescind federal waivers that allow California and 10 other states to impose Advanced Clean Trucks mandates, which require manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of zero-emissions trucks. That move comes despite findings from the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian that Congress lacks the legal standing to take these actions.
Economic troubles are compounding the regulatory uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s crushingly high tariffs imposed on China have led to a major reduction in cargo being shipped to U.S. ports, including the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. That dropoff is almost certain to cause a slowdown in business for freight companies, making it less likely they will look to buy any new trucks — electric or diesel.
Those tariffs will also drive up the cost of lithium-ion batteries, most of which are made in China today. Battery costs are the biggest reason why electric trucks remain two to three times more expensive up front than diesel trucks in U.S. markets.
These headwinds further complicate the inherently uncertain economics of electric truck charging. Companies like Greenlane and Terawatt do have some levers to pull to secure demand for the charging infrastructure they’re building, however.
While Greenlane is opening its Colton chargers to all users, “that doesn’t mean we don’t have customers,” Pratt said. Last week’s ribbon-cutting featured one major anchor customer — Nevoya, a startup that’s renting office space at the site and is pledging to use it to charge up to 100 electric trucks it plans to bring onto Southern California roads.
Nevoya cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer John Verdon said the startup is working directly with “shipping customers looking to achieve sustainability goals.”
“We hire the drivers, acquire the trucks and trailers, and charge the trucks,” he said. “There are lanes where we are price-competitive with diesel — and in those markets we’re very aggressive.” But other markets are “quite candidly not price-competitive” due to challenges around charger availability and vehicle range and price.
It will take some careful planning to expand charging at the proper pace and scale to match the trucking industry’s demand for electrifying its fleet. “We’re building these things with a lot of intention and strategy behind it,” Pratt said, using such inputs as the telematics data from Daimler trucks to understand where route lengths and freight volumes allow electric trucks to compete, and how much charging is needed at which sites to support that.
“At the end of the day, for fleets, it’s all about dollars and cents and making the economics work,” she said. That puts pressure on states like California that want to keep growing the clean freight sector to keep up support, she said.
California has been a leader on incentives to expand electric trucks, she noted. The state’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project offers lucrative financial support to defray the up-front cost of electric trucks, which cost less to fuel and maintain over their lifetimes than diesel-fueled trucks.
”These are really small margins that companies are running their trucks on,” Pratt said. “If we want a long-term viable market, we need carrots and sticks — and maybe more carrots than sticks in the beginning.”
California is a trendsetter when it comes to cleaning up transportation. But the Republican-controlled Congress is trying to put an end to that, albeit through dubious legal means.
For years, the state’s various clean vehicle rules have gone well beyond federal emissions standards. Its Advanced Clean Cars II program requires that all new passenger cars sold in the state must be zero-emissions by 2035; Advanced Clean Trucks mandates that manufacturers scale up their sales of zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.
Eleven other states and Washington, D.C., have adopted California’s latest zero-emissions cars rules, and 10 have adopted its Advanced Clean Trucks regulations.
But to be enforceable, those rules needed waivers from the U.S. EPA. The waivers are what the U.S. House targeted this week, voting on Wednesday to repeal Advanced Clean Trucks and on Thursday to rescind Advanced Clean Cars II, with support from major automakers. The House votes came even after the Government Accountability Office — the nation’s top legislative auditor — said Congress doesn’t have the authority to revoke the waivers via the Congressional Review Act. The repeals still face an uphill battle in the Senate, where the body’s parliamentarian similarly said the waivers aren’t subject to such congressional oversight.
But advocates in some of the states that have followed California’s lead don’t want to let the potential repeal derail their EV progress.
More than 60 environmental, business, and housing groups sent letters to Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey last week, calling on her to preserve the state’s EV goals. Healey has already postponed enforcement of similar rules encouraging zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales last month, but this coalition says the remaining regulations are critical to meeting the state’s net-zero goals, Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus reports.
Illinois advocates are meanwhile still pushing their state to adopt Advanced Clean Trucks and Advanced Clean Cars II, they told Canary Media’s Kari Lydersen last month. Places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood have become overrun with heavy-duty trucks as warehouses crop up, bringing excessive diesel pollution with them. Replacing those trucks with zero-emissions vehicles would improve air quality, especially in frontline communities that face higher pollution burdens.
Back in California, concrete progress on electrifying heavy-duty trucks is still happening, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports. Two all-electric charging depots just opened last month — infrastructure that will allow electric trucking to keep on growing, despite all the potholes ahead.
Community solar is winning over Republicans
Community solar is building a surprising fan base. Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio have sponsored bills this year to encourage construction of solar arrays that multiple households can tap into, Alison Takemura reports for Canary Media. Pairing community solar with agricultural land is even at the heart of a model policy from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
Advocates say community solar is in line with the conservative principles of free markets and individual property rights — and a recent survey out of deep-red Texas seems to agree. The poll, commissioned by Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, found more than 90% support protecting property owners’ rights to produce electricity on their land, including with wind turbines or solar panels, and say they should be allowed to lease their land out for power generation too.
Could Spain’s massive blackouts happen in the U.S.?
Spain and Portugal suffered one of Europe’s worst power outages ever on Monday. About 55 million people lost power, sidelining hospitals, disrupting cell signals, and halting digital payments. The massive outage on a usually stable grid stirred up accusations — including from U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — that renewable power was to blame.
Spain’s grid operator hasn’t yet disclosed what caused the outages, but the country’s environmental minister said Wednesday that renewables weren’t responsible. Nearly 55% of Spain’s electricity on Monday came from solar, with another 10% each from wind, nuclear, and hydropower — a similar mix to what’s powered the country’s grid in the past, without problems. Still, experts say the outages highlight stability challenges that renewables can pose during power disruptions, and show that grid operators need to implement new technologies to better manage increasing amounts of wind and solar.
Tesla turmoil: Elon Musk and Tesla’s board chair deny a report suggesting the EV maker is seeking a new CEO amid Musk’s increasing political activity and the company’s sinking finances. (Axios, Wall Street Journal)
Gutting grants: The U.S. EPA indicates in a court filing that it intends to cancel 781 grants issued under the Biden administration, most of them tied to environmental justice, and has already notified about half of those recipients of the looming cuts. (Washington Post)
100 days of climate demolition: President Donald Trump has signed 20 climate-related executive orders in his first 100 days in office, and his term has so far been marked by stock market uncertainty, clean-manufacturing project cancellations, and tariffs that are set to hurt the fossil-fuel industry. (Heatmap)
Burgum’s energy pivot: Now largely focused on oil and gas development, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken a sharp turn since supporting an “all of the above” energy strategy that included clean energy while serving as North Dakota’s governor. (E&E News)
A second life for coal plants: Former coal-fired power plants are becoming in-demand properties as developers look to re-use the facilities’ existing power lines for gas-fired power plants, battery storage sites, or offshore wind connections. (Associated Press)
First Solar’s fortunes fall: American manufacturer First Solar, which saw a stock bump in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, has since reported lower-than-expected first quarter earnings and reduced its expected revenue and profit for the rest of the year. (Heatmap)
EV education at risk: Programs that train students to work in EV manufacturing, which arose to supply the growing industry with workers, could peter out amid the Trump administration’s continued attacks on the sector. (Hechinger Report)
Aubrey Gunnels, CEO of 3V Infrastructure, understands the risks involved in installing and owning EV chargers in thousands of apartment building garages and condominium parking lots. She also sees the opportunity.
Just look at the statistics. By 2030, EVs are expected to make up close to half of all new U.S. car sales. Today, roughly 80% of EV charging takes place at home, and roughly one-third of Americans live in multifamily housing. But only 5% of U.S. multifamily housing offers on-site EV charging, according to CBRE, one of the world’s largest property management companies and a 3V Infrastructure partner.
“People really prefer to charge at home,” Gunnels said — and they’ll want to live in apartments or condos that offer that option.
Tenants don’t pay to install EV charging, though — property owners do, and they aren’t in the business of financing, installing, or operating complex EV charging projects.
That’s where 3V Infrastructure comes in, Gunnels said. Since launching last year, the New York–based startup has raised up to $40 million from an affiliate of Greenbacker Capital Management to finance charging installations in properties across the country. With big-name customers like Camden Property Trust and Bridge Investment Group, 3V is installing chargers at hundreds of sites in 17 states, and hopes to expand to thousands by 2030, she said.
Getting big is key to 3V’s business model, Gunnels said. Many “charging-as-a-service” offerings for multifamily properties already cover the cost of chargers in exchange for monthly fees or other payback structures. But 3V isn’t asking property owners for any money at all, she explained — just a 10-year contract to let it build chargers on the site and charge customers for using them.
That means it’s up to 3V to pick the right properties, install the right number of chargers in the right locations, keep them in good working order, and decide how much it needs to charge users to make its money back.
“We’re taking early risk with the EV driver adoption rate at each site,” Gunnels said. “And once we’re profitable, we share the profits with the property owner — and that helps allow us to maintain the chargers.”
In that sense, 3V’s business model more closely resembles that of the public charging operators that rely on electricity sales to earn back their up-front costs. That’s inherently riskier than getting someone to pay you to install and operate EV chargers — and so far it’s a rarity in the world of multifamily EV charging developers.
It is, after all, still early days for the EV charging industry. The first public charger deployments were boosted by significant government or utility incentives to make up for the fact that there weren’t enough EVs on the road to reliably finance their costs.
But up-front incentives aren’t a good mechanism to ensure that chargers keep performing over the long haul. In fact, EV chargers have a long and troubled history of not working when drivers need them to. This is a well-publicized problem with public chargers, but it’s affected multifamily properties as well.
“As we all know, the statistics about EV charger uptime are not great. A lot of those chargers may be not functioning,” said Mark Kerstens, vice president of EV charging solutions at CBRE. That’s certainly true for the earliest rollouts of multifamily charging, many of them undertaken by property owners themselves.
CBRE manages and advises multifamily property owners around the world, and works with a number of chargepoint operators, including 3V, for those looking to install EV charging, Kerstens said. Some property owners have taken on charging installations and operations on their own, he said. But most are simply looking for a way to not be left behind in a market that’s constantly seeking out new amenities to draw in tenants and residents.
How badly property owners feel they need EV chargers depends on where they are and what type of tenant they want to attract, he said. He sees the overall market as shifting to the point where it could be “a negative differentiator, if you’re the only multifamily property that does not have an EV charger.” And for many property owners, “it’s just like a vending machine in the rec room — they don’t want to do it themselves, they’d rather have a service provider.”
CBRE’s EV charging partners run the gamut from all-in risk-takers like 3V to a range of “as-a-service” models that charge monthly fees or arrange cost- and revenue-sharing agreements with property owners, he said. What’s paramount, he said, is that the chargers work properly — and “there’s quite a bad track record for those who’ve tried to do it on their own.”
The same concern applies to charging provided by a third party, said Clark Longhurst, president of commercial markets at SitelogIQ, the company working with 3V on its projects with Bridge Investment Group. SitelogIQ has decades of experience installing LED lighting, building controls, and other energy-efficiency projects in multifamily housing. EV charging is a relatively new addition to that roster — and “there’s a longer list of people who will do it ‘as a service,’” he said.
But EV charging for multifamily properties has had some serious problems. Early projects were plagued by chargers that couldn’t receive wireless control signals in concrete parking garages, low-cost chargers that companies failed to repair promptly when they broke, and other issues, he said.
“I don’t want to hand this over to someone who will provide a bad experience – that’s bad for me as a property owner,” Longhurst said. Any provider of charging as a service “needs to have the same incentives — or maybe more incentives — than you have as an owner to ensure the charging works, that it’s done without friction, and if there’s a problem it’s handled quickly.”
Multifamily property owners also have to consider the risks of taking responsibility for charging infrastructure that could end up being abandoned as companies exit various markets, said Larsen Burack, EV charging product manager at analysis firm Ohm Analytics. His company’s latest report on the U.S. multifamily charging space indicates how many choices exist, from multifamily specialists such as Swtch and EverCharge to large-scale public charging providers like ChargePoint and Tesla. But those choices have also included companies like Enel X Way that abruptly exited the market and stopped supporting customers.
“Options like the 3V model are intriguing for property managers because there is no up-front capital cost and can be seen as relatively low risk,” Burack said. At the same time, “this is still a volatile industry, and if a company shutters, you risk having another Enel X situation on your hands.”
Gunnels conceded that 3V’s customers will need to have faith in its ability to execute on its 10-year contracts. She also highlighted that the company doesn’t rely on government subsidies for its projects to be profitable, and takes a conservative approach to forecasting utilization — the critical metric of how often chargers are used, and thus how quickly they can pay back their costs and earn profits.
That’s important for aligning the long-term incentives of the charging business, she believes. “Many of the stranded chargers we have across the nation are not a product of hardware or software [issues] — it’s really the economics,” she said. “If someone’s not incentivized to make sure the chargers work, they’re not going to work.”
3V’s conservative approach may limit the scope of markets and properties that the company goes after. ”We don’t believe every multifamily building has to have an EV charger in the next five years,” she said, even if most will eventually need them. 3V will also limit how many chargers it installs at each property during its initial deployment phases, as the company tests its utilization forecasts against reality.
The key to success, Gunnels said, is scale and diversity. Each individual project may be relatively small — costing, say, between $30,000 to $100,000 to install up to 14 Level 2 chargers per property.
Luckily for 3V, it’s easier to predict utilization for multifamily properties than roadside and public charging. So said Quinn Pasloske, a managing director of the Greenbacker investment fund that supplied 3V with up to $40 million going into its first round of investments.
“Historically we’ve been very averse to taking utilization risk. This has been the third rail” for investors in the charging sector, he said. Roadside charging, for instance, runs the risk of too few EVs showing up to pay back its up-front or ongoing costs — or the risk that another charging station will open across the street and steal its business.
“But when there’s charging at home, people charge at home,” he said. “Now, all of a sudden, you have captive demand. Even though you are taking utilization risk, you can measure and modulate that so much more carefully.”
To be clear, that dilution of utilization risk works best at large scales, he said.
“You cannot be doing this on a property-by-property basis,” Pasloske said. “You need scale — it needs to be over $100 million, and to get to really attractive costs of capital, over $500 million. And you need a lot of diversification.”
“But once we have scale, the cost of capital comes down dramatically,” he said. That’s because these kinds of projects can be bundled into portfolios and sold as asset-backed securities — a class of investment that can include anything from home mortgages and credit card debt to residential solar projects.
“The market is very good at understanding the risk of distributed assets, even if these assets are high risk,” Pasloske said.
3V’s eventual success relies on achieving that level of scale, Gunnels said. It’s not there yet: “We are using equity to invest in this, so the cost of capital is high. But we have enough data to show that utilization is dependable,” she said — and “we know we have to be at thousands of properties to make this model work.”
The future of the U.S. electric vehicle transition is murky — but at least through the first three months of 2025, the data tells a clear story.
Almost 300,000 EVs were sold in the first quarter of the year, according to a new report from Cox Automotive. That’s 11% more than over the same period in 2024.
Over the last few years, two trends have defined the U.S. EV market: somber headlines and slow-but-steady growth.
In late 2023, analysts began warning EV sales were not increasing as fast as once projected as concerns about cost, range, and charger availability persisted. Some even forecast sales would decline in 2024. Major automakers began walking back their 100% electric commitments. Ultimately, new EV sales rose by just 7% last year — enough to push the sector to an annual record-high of 1.3 million vehicles sold, but far slower growth than the 49% surge in 2023.
After Republicans swept the November elections, the market’s outlook grew even gloomier. That’s because federal policies supporting EV adoption are likely to disappear or at least be severely watered down.
President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has already moved to kill the strict tailpipe emissions rules supported by legacy U.S. automakers. Congressional Republicans are on a (potentially doomed) crusade to revoke waivers that have allowed states like California and New York to ban the sale of new gas vehicles after 2035. They’re also reportedly looking to gut the consumer EV tax credit, an action that would hobble EV sales. Trump’s tariffs, such as they are, present yet another hurdle: The U.S. relies heavily on China for key battery components and minerals.
But at least in Q1, EV sales were still ticking up. And that’s despite Tesla’s big decline. The U.S. market leader saw its sales drop by 9% year-over-year, the result of a stagnant product lineup and, according to some analysts, public distaste for CEO Elon Musk’s political persona. Meanwhile, General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, and BMW all saw their sales continue to rise.
The fact that the industry managed to grow despite the struggles of its overwhelming leader — Tesla accounted for 44% of the market in Q1 — speaks to the increasing vibrancy and resilience of the U.S. EV market. The question now is whether it is vibrant and resilient enough to keep growing despite federal policy headwinds.
A correction was made on April 18, 2025: The chart and image for this story were originally incorrectly labeled with 2024. The year has been changed to 2025.
The batteries inside electric vehicles can do a lot more than power a car.
They can back up homes, schools, and businesses during power outages. They can soak up grid power when it’s plentiful and cheap and send it back when it’s scarce and costly. And they could eventually provide enough reliable power to allow utilities to avoid building more power plants or expanding their grids to meet growing demand for electricity — something that would save money for utility customers as a whole.
So far, utilities have had a hard time turning this dream of batteries on wheels into a reality. Plenty have launched these “vehicle-to-everything” (V2X) pilots, but only with mixed success. Broader adoption has been held back by the cost and complexity of getting the required technologies to work smoothly in the real world — and by an absence of well-established utility programs that pay EV owners enough to make it worth their while.
In Massachusetts, a new V2X pilot project is now seeking households, businesses, schools, nonprofits, and municipal governments to test all of these ways that EVs can help the grid. And unlike many V2X tests done by other U.S. utilities, this one will offer two key financial incentives: bidirectional chargers at no cost to participants, and real money to those who commit to letting utilities tap into their EV battery power.
Over the next nine months, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s clean-energy economic development organization, will use most of the pilot’s $6 million in funding to give out up to 100 free bidirectional chargers. This is the technology that allows EV owners to not only pull electrons from the grid but to send power back and get paid for it. Households will get most of this equipment, but a subset of higher-voltage two-way chargers will go to commercial vehicle and electric school bus fleet operators.
Those chargers will be installed by September 2026, said Elijah Sinclair, MassCEC clean transportation program manager. The goal is for the pilot to provide about 1.5 megawatts of distributed energy storage capacity, roughly equivalent to the power use of about 250 homes.
Massachusetts law calls for 900,000 EVs on the road by 2030 in order to meet the state’s decarbonization goals. If a well-designed pilot project unlocks cost-effective ways or even a fraction of those future EV owners to enlist in V2X programs, the payoff could be huge, Sinclair said. EVs tend to stay plugged in far longer than it takes to fully charge up their batteries. Being able to tap into that stored energy expands the value that EVs can provide the grid and allows them to store solar and wind power to use later when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
“That could be a really important piece as we seek to get to net-zero by 2050,” Sinclair said. “It still requires a whole lot of infrastructure, and it’s complicated for the utilities. But in the future, it could be serving huge loads across the grid.”
The trick is to move from the experiment stage to a safe, simple, and profitable program for a majority of the state’s EV owners, he said. It’s not something any other state or utility has managed to pull off just yet — but MassCEC and its partners are hoping the upcoming pilot will build the foundation to make that happen.
The idea of pulling power from EV batteries is far from new. Universities and research organizations have been successfully testing V2X for more than two decades, and U.S. utilities have had pilots up and running for years.
Other countries have more fully embraced the technology. Japanese automakers started enabling EVs to provide backup power via vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-building charging to deal with the power supply emergencies that followed the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. In Europe, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) projects have been turning a profit for commercial and government vehicle fleets for years, and more recently for consumer EVs as well.
In the U.S., by contrast, vehicle-to-grid services have largely been successful in just one niche of the EV market: electric school buses, which happen to sit unused during most of the day. In Massachusetts, the company Highland Electric Fleets and the city of Beverly have been doing V2G with school buses since 2020, and have been earning money for delivering extra power to utility grids over the past few summers.
Transit and commercial vehicles, which must be on the road more frequently and have less idle time to charge, are more challenging to make profitable.
Vehicle-to-home backup power, meanwhile, has been built into the Nissan Leaf for more than a decade, and has been a major marketing draw for the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup and other new EV models. But actually engineering and installing the systems to turn a home EV charging system into a backup power system for the grid is a bit more complicated — and costly.
So said Kelly Helfrich, who leads the transportation electrification practice at Resource Innovations, a company specializing in clean-energy program implementation that is co-leading the MassCEC V2X program. She’s worked in the EV space for more than a decade, including a stint at General Motors that covered the automaker’s entry into vehicle-to-grid technology and its eventual development of V2G standards.
Bidirectional chargers are more costly and technically difficult to build compared to simple one-way chargers. That investment may well be worth it for school buses, which have big batteries that can earn lots of money while they’re sitting idle. But for everyday households, it’s harder to see a path to recouping the extra $5,000 to $10,000 in up-front costs that bidirectional equipment can bring, Helfrich said.
Installing free chargers for homeowners, as the MassCEC program is doing, “helps take that cost out of the equation,” she said, “to really test vehicle-to-home at a larger scale than we’d be able to if we were to rely on consumers to take on that expense.”
Successful V2X programs also need to make sure participants get paid for taking part.
On that front, Massachusetts already has an established program that lets EV owners earn money by helping the grid, according to Zach Woogen, executive director of the Vehicle-Grid Integration Council, a group representing EV and charging manufacturers that’s working with utilities and regulators across the country.
ConnectedSolutions is a long-running offering from utilities National Grid and Eversource, which operate in Massachusetts and other New England states. The program pays customers for reducing grid strain during hours of high demand for electricity, usually during hot summer afternoons and evenings.
ConnectedSolutions already pays EV owners who avoid charging during those hours, Woogen said. It also allows customers to earn money for power they send back to the grid from batteries attached to their rooftop solar systems — or, more recently, from EVs in fleets owned by businesses, schools, or governments.
Tapping into the collective flexibility of batteries, EV chargers, rooftop solar, remote-controllable thermostats, and other devices to create “virtual power plants” could unlock gigawatts of capacity across the country. Companies targeting these opportunities have given ConnectedSolutions high marks for its relatively straightforward rules and lucrative payments.
Right now, the program doesn’t allow residential EVs to send power back to the grid, Woogen noted. But it could allow homes to reduce their grid draw by supplying part of their own electricity use during times of peak demand, or explore other opportunities to reward households for making their vehicles available when power demand is highest.
A handful of other utility V2X programs are paying households for their EV battery power. California utility Pacific Gas & Electric has a V2X pilot that pays participants and recently expanded it to support up-front installation costs for General Motors EV-compatible bidirectional chargers. But PG&E’s compensation structure is tied up in a more complicated dynamic pricing pilot program with less certain long-term prospects than the ConnectedSolutions initiative, Woogen said.
Other programs offer easy-to-understand and lucrative payments to customers but don’t take on the high up-front cost of setting up bidirectional charging. Maryland utility Baltimore Gas & Electric launched a program last year that offers up to $1,000 a month for owners of Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickups who let the utility tap their batteries during grid peaks. But few customers have installed the necessary bidirectional charger and control systems, which cost roughly $9,000.
Government incentives can’t keep bankrolling EV owners to install V2X equipment forever, of course. But they’re vital to getting enough customers to sign up so that utilities can test the real-world effects, costs, and benefits of tapping those EV batteries at a scale that really affects the grid.
Incentives also encourage automakers, charging system manufacturers, and software providers to work with utilities on making V2X technologies ready for prime time, Woogen said. “We’re at an early stage of the market — and we don’t yet have that competition to drive down costs for customers.”
The Vehicle-Grid Integration Council’s role in the MassCEC pilot is to organize all these industry participants and to track progress. The first and most fundamental goal, Woogen said, is determining whether bidirectional chargers can “safely and reliably connect with the grid in a way that’s reasonably low-cost and reliable and fast.”
That’s a work in progress, he said. Over the past decade or so, a growing list of charging equipment has been approved for installation by a subset of U.S. utilities working on V2X. New developments are making it possible for EVs themselves to push power back to the grid without a bidirectional charger, although automakers and utilities haven’t gotten to the point of allowing EV customers to use that technology outside of strictly controlled settings.
Utilities have to be sure that hooking high-voltage EV batteries into buildings and the grid is safe before they can let it happen at large scale, Helfrich said. Resource Innovations has longstanding relationships with National Grid and Eversource, and is working with the state’s other investor-owned and municipal utilities as well, she said.
MassCEC has also partnered with an experienced V2X technology partner to select and install the 100 bidirectional chargers. That’s The Mobility House, a German company with technology now in use in large-scale fleet charging projects as well as in Europe’s first mass-market residential V2G program.
“For this project, we’re acting as the technology expert,” said Russell Vare, Mobility House’s vice president of vehicle-grid integration. “That means bringing the right hardware and the software to do both the control for the energy and the aggregation and optimization.”
It also means tracking some far more prosaic data points that are important for V2X, he said. Take the inherently mobile nature of an EV battery — ”Is the car driving around, or is it plugged in?” That’s a big deal when a utility needs to know exactly how much EV battery capacity it can rely on for an upcoming demand peak.
Then there’s the to-be-collected data on how much money it takes to convince customers to use their EV as a backup battery or to allow it to be used to help the grid, Vare said. “How large does that value need to be to encourage them to participate?”
That’s important information for state agencies and utilities to have on hand as they plan out the next phases of their V2X efforts, Woogen said — and it’s an important part of the pilot project. The Vehicle-Grid Integration Council and consultancy Converge Strategies will collect feedback from automakers, charging vendors, utilities, local governments, community members, and the customers who get the 100 bidirectional chargers over the course of the pilot.
That work is meant to inform a guidebook by the end of next year that can inform policymakers and utilities looking at how to build V2X into their clean energy strategy, Helfrich said — not just in Massachusetts but around the country.
“It’s going to be a documentation of everything we designed for this two-year program,” she said — “what went well, what did not go well, and what should be considered in moving these programs to a more mature scale.”
Republicans are looking to roll back key electric-vehicle incentives passed under the Biden administration. Doing so would kneecap the EV transition for years to come.
Under current policies, the number of light-duty EVs sold annually is forecast to climb to 7 million by 2030, according to a new analysis from the REPEAT Project at Princeton University. But if those policies — specifically the consumer EV tax credit and tailpipe emissions rules — are repealed, that figure is forecast to be 40% lower in 2030, at around 4.2 million.
Despite Detroit’s pleas, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are seeking to eliminate the $7,500 EV tax credit as well as vehicle efficiency rules that incentivize automakers to stop making gas-fueled cars.
It would be a blow to a U.S. EV industry that’s already coming off a year of mixed success. On the one hand, consumers bought a record number of EVs in 2024 as models from automakers other than Tesla caught on. On the other hand, sales grew by just 7% compared with the year prior — a sluggish rate compared to the nearly 50% leap that occurred in 2023 — and automakers began walking back from their EV commitments even prior to President Donald Trump’s election.
Should Republicans succeed in repealing the tax credits and efficiency rules, it would further slow EV adoption — and in the process destroy jobs at EV and battery factories. The REPEAT Project analysis found that eliminating these policies would threaten plans to expand U.S. EV factories and potentially lead to the cancellation or closure of half of existing EV factory capacity. The moves would have a similar effect on the burgeoning battery belt.
More than 80% of announced investments in U.S. EV manufacturing are located in congressional districts represented by Republicans, according to a January report from the Environmental Defense Fund and WSP USA.
Beyond the economic ramifications of the potential repeal, the climate consequences are dire. Gas-powered vehicles are one of the largest sources of planet-warming carbon emissions in the U.S.; they also cause a significant amount of smog-forming pollution that can contribute to respiratory diseases like asthma. Slowing down the transition to electric vehicles would only serve to exacerbate these problems.
A handful of school buses in northern Illinois will soon have a new summer job.
ComEd is the latest utility to explore whether electric school buses could help manage the grid when school is out of session and air conditioners are humming.
Under such vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, arrangements, electric school buses charge up at night when power is cheap and plentiful, then discharge electricity to the grid when local power demand is high. This infusion can alleviate the need to fire up natural gas peaker plants, buy expensive power on the market, or even build new power plants.
The buses basically act as batteries attached to the grid, in a win-win situation where school districts are paid for the service and utilities get power that is cheaper and possibly cleaner than what they could otherwise acquire during peak hours.
V2G projects are still in nascent and pilot-project stages, and significant challenges exist. The grid needs to communicate seamlessly with the bus charging station, and operators must make sure bus batteries are ready when needed and that the grid isn’t overloaded by local bursts of energy. Standards and certifications for V2G technology and practice are also still in early stages.
“It takes a lot of effort to do those communications properly,” said Greggory Kresge, senior manager for utility engagement and transportation electrification at the World Resources Institute, a research and advocacy nonprofit focused on environmental and economic issues. “You have communication about speed, power level, how many kilowatts, how fast, what’s the duration — all these different packets of information going back and forth. It’s a fragile ecosystem. If one of those communication links breaks, it doesn’t function.”
ComEd has proposed a pilot project launching this spring and running through 2025 in partnership with the San Diego-based company Nuvve, which also has led V2G pilots in California, Delaware, and New York as well as in Europe and Asia. While the ComEd pilot will only involve four electric school buses in three different northern Illinois school districts, it could pave the way for widespread V2G in an area with hot summers, air pollution problems, and lots of students.
“The main idea is to look at this from a technology-demonstration standpoint,” said Sri Raghavan (Raghav) Kothandaraman, ComEd manager of emerging technology, smart grid, and innovation. “How does the charger work in connection with the bus? How does it work with the grid? How do we send commands to these chargers to be able to discharge during particular times? We’re trying to look at it from a win-win-win scenario for school districts and [electric bus] manufacturers as well as the utility.”
Kothandaraman said he could not say whether the buses are already owned by the districts or would be provided by ComEd. Nuvve CEO and cofounder Gregory Poilasne said the vehicles would be made by Blue Bird, one of the country’s leading electric-bus manufacturers.
Electric school buses cost about three times as much upfront as traditional diesel school buses, though the savings on fuel and maintenance can make the total cost of ownership lower over time.
School districts have had access to electric school bus funding from the Volkswagen emissions-cheating settlement and the Biden administration’s $5 billion Clean School Bus Program, but the federal initiative ends next year. Clean energy advocates say V2G programs could provide a new revenue source that makes electric school buses more financially viable for districts while slashing the air pollution and noise that students and drivers are exposed to with diesel buses.
A 2022 WRI report counted at least 15 utilities across 14 states with electric school bus V2G programs. Kresge noted that school districts can earn high payments for power from their buses during peak demand or “emergency load reduction program” times designated by utilities. In California pilot programs, utilities pay $2 per kilowatt-hour during emergency load reduction periods, whereas market prices in the state hover around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Along with feeding the grid, electric school buses can act as behind-the-meter batteries that give schools emergency power during blackouts, Kresge said. In California, they can also power school buildings when utilities shut down transmission lines because of wildfire risk.
“We’re really looking at these buses as resiliency assets, for potential emergency backup power,” said Kresge. “You’re not powering an entire school but just the gymnasium or cafeteria,” which could serve as a community shelter during a disaster, he said. “If a tornado comes through, kids are not going to school, and the buses are available unless they got picked up and moved by the tornado.”
ComEd’s pilot is part of its Beneficial Electrification program, wherein state regulators required the utility to invest in vehicle electrification, including spending $5 million a year for three years on pilots to explore the most efficient and equitable ways to do so.
Kothandaraman said the participating school districts will likely be announced in the coming weeks after contracts are finalized. ComEd’s service territory includes Chicago as well as surrounding suburbs and several other cities. Last year, Chicago announced federal funding for up to 50 electric school buses for the district.
Poilasne noted that grid battery storage and innovations like V2G are increasingly necessary in part because of the extra demand that more and more electric vehicles will put on grids.
“We’re in an environment where for the first time in 25 years, the load on the grid is increasing, driven by heat pumps, data centers, [and] EVs,” Poilasne said. “It’s not just load increasing; it’s the volatility of these loads. The generation is volatile; the load is volatile. You need to design a system for peaks” that last a short time but can skyrocket electricity costs.
“The utilities love to upgrade infrastructure. That’s how they’re making money, but in this environment, they can’t just upgrade the system because the cost would be prohibitive,” Poilasne added. “It’s all about keeping the cost of energy equitable in this fast-changing environment.”
A school district participating in V2G has to install bidirectional charging stations, which are significantly more expensive than traditional ones. However, utilities may be willing to subsidize this infrastructure. Utilities additionally need to be able to handle two-way flow of power on their grids. This also happens when rooftop or other distributed solar panels send power to the grid, so utilities in solar-heavy states are especially prepared for this dynamic.
A third-party company like Nuvve typically provides the software and manages the charging stations for a school district, whether it is doing V2G or not.
“Vehicle readiness is the number one priority,” said Poilasne. “There’s a lot of work on forecasting when the EV will be there, when it will come back, what’s the level of charge when it comes back.”
WRI hosts a utility working group on V2G programs and advises that utilities structure rates specifically to make such initiatives more attractive for school districts. WRI also recommends school bus V2G programs prioritize communities with disadvantaged populations facing disproportionate air pollution, since electric buses can directly improve the air students breathe each day.
Even though school bus V2G programs are still small, Kresge thinks they will become commonplace and financially beneficial in coming years.
“We’ve been recommending if you have the opportunity to buy bidirectional-capable bus chargers, even if you’re not moving forward with V2G right at this moment, you should go ahead and get it,” Kresge said. “We’re anticipating that we’re going to see huge advancements and a lot more opportunity within the next four to five years on the technology side that will make [V2G] more scalable, more deployable. These programs are coming, so don’t hold back.”
This story was first published by CalMatters.
California’s push to electrify its cars is facing a potentially serious problem: People aren’t buying electric cars fast enough.
After three straight years of strong growth, sales have stabilized in California, raising questions about whether the state will fail to meet its groundbreaking mandate banning sales of gas-powered vehicles.
About a quarter — 25.3% — of all new cars registered in California in 2024 were zero emissions, just slightly more than 25% in 2023, according to new California Energy Commission data. The flat sales follow several years of rapid growth; in 2020, only one in 13 cars sold was zero-emissions. Their share of California’s market is now three times larger than four years ago.
But the slowed pace of growth in the market puts the state’s climate and air pollution goals at risk. Under California’s mandate, approved in 2022, 35% of new 2026 car models sold by automakers must be zero-emissions. That leaves considerable ground to make up as some 2026 models begin rolling out later this year.
The requirement ramps up to 68% for 2030 models, and in 2035, California’s rule bans all sales of gasoline-powered cars.
David Simpson, who owns three car dealerships in Orange County, said he is not seeing increased demand for electric cars. While the initial rollout of some models, such as the GMC Hummer EV, did well at first, the demand did not continue. Sales of the Chevrolet Equinox and Blazer EVs do alright but aren’t strong, either, he said.
“The sales are declining,” Simpson said. “We’ve filled that gap of people who want those cars — and now they have them — and we’re not seeing a big, huge demand. I don’t see households going 100% EV.”
Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board, which oversees the electric car mandates, said in an email that while sales of zero-emission vehicles in California are “less dramatic than in years past,” the flat sales occurred in the context of an overall plateauing of car sales last year.
Although the rules limit what automakers can sell, Californians are not required to buy electric cars. That means if consumer demand doesn’t increase, it could be a major black eye for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has made electric cars a cornerstone of his agenda to fight climate change and clean the air. A spokesman for Newsom declined to comment.
The state mandate, however, has some flexibility, Clegern said. First of all, it’s a multi-year formula: Each manufacturer’s sales of 2026 zero-emission vehicles must be 35% of its total sales averaged for model years 2022 through 2024.
Manufacturers also can buy credits from automakers that have exceeded the target — companies that only sell electric models, such as Tesla or Rivian. To enforce compliance with California’s sales requirements, state officials could impose steep penalties of $20,000 per vehicle on manufacturers that fall short of quotas.
“Manufacturers may still be in compliance even if they do not achieve these specific sales volumes,” Clegern said.
Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association, said automakers could seek to avoid the fines by reducing the number of gas-powered cars they send to California dealers. He said that could leave fewer options for buyers, drive up prices, and push some consumers to Nevada or Arizona to find the car they want, while others will hold on to their older, more polluting vehicles.
“We’re just not going to make the mandate as presently drafted,” so automakers will have to take action, Maas said. “The most rational is to constrain inventory.”
The auto industry group Alliance for Automotive Innovation has been raising these concerns since at least December, when it published a memo entitled “It’s gonna take a miracle: California and states with EV sales requirements.” The group warns the mandate could depress auto sales in California — as well as in other states that adopt its rules.
Last month, John Bozzella, the group’s chief executive, called California’s rules “by any measure not achievable” after President Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing federal rules promoting electric vehicles.
“There’s a saying in the auto business: You can’t get ahead of the customer,” Bozzella said.
The outgoing Biden administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted California a waiver in December that allows the state to enforce its requirements phasing out new gas-powered cars. Many experts believe the Trump administration is likely to challenge the waiver through the courts.
Experts also anticipate that Trump could eliminate the $7,500 federal tax credit for zero-emission vehicle purchases, which would increase the cost of buying some electric cars. Newsom vowed last year to continue offering the incentive through state funding, although that promise came before Los Angeles faced devastating wildfires and the state released its fragile budget earlier this year.
Californians have purchased more than 2 million electric cars, leading the nation. The number has doubled in about two years.
But electric vehicle sales, which make up the majority of zero-emission cars, grew by only 1.1% in 2024, with 378,910 sold compared to 374,668 in 2023. Plug-in hybrids, once considered a potential alternative to a purely electric model, remained relatively stable. And sales of hydrogen-powered cars all but collapsed last year, with sales plummeting to a meager 600 in 2024 from 3,119 in 2023.
The slower growth comes amid overall market sluggishness, with all auto sales in California dipping slightly last year to 1,752,030.
Loren McDonald, chief analyst for the charging app Paren, said a major contributor is a shift in consumer demographics.
The state’s market has moved beyond early electric car adopters — affluent, environmentally motivated buyers willing to overlook challenges like limited charging infrastructure and higher costs — and into the mainstream.
He said these new buyers, often from middle-income households or who live in apartment buildings without easy access to charging, are far less forgiving when it comes to electric cars. Concerns about range, broken chargers, and upfront costs are deal-breakers.
Tesla’s market dominance has exacerbated the issue. Many left-leaning California consumers, who were once loyal to Tesla, appear to have distanced themselves because of CEO Elon Musk’s controversial public persona and alliance with Trump.
As Tesla sales have softened, dropping 11% in California last year, the decline has disproportionately affected overall EV registration data in California because of the company’s significant market share, McDonald said.
Affordability remains a crucial hurdle, though McDonald sees signs of improvement. Automakers have ramped up production, leading to competitive pricing and aggressive lease deals — many under $400 per month.
But mainstream consumers are largely unaware that electric vehicles offer long-term savings in fuel and maintenance, McDonald said, adding that better education is needed to convince consumers to take the leap, especially as electric car prices increasingly approach parity with gas-powered vehicles.
McDonald remains optimistic about 2025. The market will benefit from new electric models priced under $50,000 and technological advancements, such as faster charging and vehicle-to-home power capabilities.
Canary Media’s Electrified Life column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power.
Andrew Garberson isn’t worried about his electric vehicle handling cold winters.
He recently drove his EV to the gym when the temperature where he lives in Des Moines, Iowa, was a biting 4 degrees Fahrenheit. A polar vortex had brought a brutal wind, “the kind that whistles in the cracks of the car doors when you drive.”
Garberson relies on his electric truck, a graphite-gray Rivian, for year-round family road trips to see his parents, who live a few hours away. “My car will drive 200 miles in freezing conditions in the Midwest,” said the head of growth and research at Recurrent, a company that aggregates data on battery health from more than 29,000 EVs across the United States.
Switching from a gas car to an EV is one the biggest actions an individual can take to reduce their emissions. But EVs have gotten something of a bad rep in cold weather. It’s true that they, like gas cars, lose range as temperatures fall: Depending on the EV, the drop can be 16% to 46%. That loss may be anxiety-provoking, especially for EV owners-to-be.
From Garberson’s perspective, the criticisms are overblown. EVs work even in the most bone-chilling climates across the continental U.S., he said. In any case, Recurrent has found that knowledge and experience go a long way toward relieving those fears.
Plenty of frosty regions are embracing electric cars. Just look at Chicago. Despite its freezing winters, it’s one of the top cities for EV registrations, with more than 25,000 in the 12 months ending in June 2024, according to Experian’s most recent available data. Outside the U.S., the trend holds, too: In Norway, where temperatures can drop below -4˚F, nearly 9 out of 10 new cars sold in 2024 were fully electric.
In this article, we’ll dive into how to get the most winter range out of an EV. First up is a key EV feature to look for if you’re still shopping. Then, for those who already have an electric car, Garberson shares his top range-extending strategies.
EV range shrinks in the cold partly because the chemical reaction in their massive lithium-ion batteries slows down. But the biggest reason for winter range decline is the need to keep passengers warm, Garberson said.
Gas cars use the waste heat generated from the internal combustion engine for cabin heating. EVs don’t have an engine (they have a motor), so they don’t produce enough accidental heat to keep occupants cozy in frigid weather. Instead, EVs siphon energy from the battery to heat the cab, leaving less for propulsion. EVs can either make heat with an electric-resistance heater, which is like turning on a toaster, or much more efficiently move heat from the outdoors into the car using a heat pump.
Heat pumps are famous for their critical role in decarbonizing space heating in buildings. They don’t burn fossil fuel, and they’re typically two to three times as efficient as gas and electric-resistance systems, even below freezing. But the tech has also made its way into clothes dryers and water heaters. Now found in some EVs, heat pumps improve range by 8% to 10% in cold conditions, according to Recurrent.
According to Recurrent’s analysis, electric vehicles with the best winter range tend to have heat pumps, including the Tesla Models X, S, 3, and Y; Audi e-tron; and Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kona.
It’s worth pointing out that heat pumps themselves are less effective as temperatures drop. Even so, EVs with heat pumps offer better range than those with electric-resistance heating. Recurrent points out that at 55˚F, a heat pump reduced range by 20% while a resistance heater lowered it by 33%. As the weather gets colder, the difference in range between EVs with heat pumps and those with resistance heaters shrinks.
To be clear, EVs work well in the winter even without heat pumps, Garberson said. His Rivian truck doesn’t have one, and on a day-to-day basis, he doesn’t even notice the decline in range. He charges at home, which makes topping up easy. For longer road trips, cold weather might mean he needs one more charging stop than he normally would.
Heating technology aside, drivers can take steps to get more out of their EVs in the cold. Recurrent’s Garberson offered his top three range-saving strategies for winter EV drivers.
Prewarm your EV while it’s plugged in. Garberson’s garage isn’t climate-controlled, so his vehicle gets chilly when the weather does. About 10 minutes before he hops in, he uses his car’s app to warm up the cabin. Pulling electricity from the wall outlet means he won’t have to use the battery to bring his car from 4˚F to a toasty 70°F.
Set your charging limit higher. Batteries are happiest when balanced at 50% charge, Garberson said. Because huge charge-level swings are harder on the battery, Recurrent recommends keeping it between 20% and 80% full. But “let’s eliminate anxiety from the discussion and just charge cars a bit more in cold conditions,” he advised. If you normally charge to 70% to keep the battery healthy, as Garberson does, increase it to 80% in the winter.
When you’re headed to a fast charger, set the destination in the car’s GPS, a feature in most modern EVs. Letting the EV know will allow it to start preconditioning the battery so it’s ready to charge when you get there. Otherwise, you may need to wait 15 to 20 minutes at the charger for the battery to warm up sufficiently, Garberson said. “It’s just amazing how [electric] vehicles have been designed over the last few years to help drivers without them even knowing.”
One more tip for your kit? Turning on the heated steering wheel and heated seats “is a far more efficient way” to warm yourself and passengers than heating up the air in the car’s cabin, Garberson said. Once the car is prewarmed and you’re on the road, you could dial down the thermostat and use the targeted heat features to keep you cozy.
But most importantly, Garberson added, do what you need in order to keep yourself and your passengers happy. He’s father to a one-year-old, so “relying on heated seats is not part of my driving equation.”
Besides, “I will admit I am kind of a sucker for creature comforts,” Garberson said. “I need heat any way I can get it.”
Manufacturers provide even more advice on how to extend the winter range of your particular EV model, so be sure to check out their online guides.
A little planning and know-how can go a long way toward a smooth EV experience in frosty weather, Garberson said. Winter takes a bite out of his EV’s range, yes, but “I get by just fine.”
As the Trump administration attempts to block billions of dollars in federal funds for electric vehicle charging, an Illinois utility is moving forward with a massive investment to promote wider EV adoption.
At a press conference last Thursday ahead of the 2025 Chicago Auto Show, ComEd announced $100 million in new rebates designed to boost EV fleet purchases and charging stations across northern Illinois. The program helps meet the mandate for the state’s Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, which calls for 1 million EVs on the roads by 2030.
Of the $100 million, $53 million is available for business and public-sector EV fleet purchases, while nearly $38 million is designated to upgrade infrastructure for non-residential charger installations. An additional nearly $9 million is intended for residential charging stations.
The money is in addition to $87 million announced last year for similar incentives.
Funding for the rebate programs comes from distribution charges and “has nothing to do” with the federal government, Melissa Washington, senior vice president of customer operations and strategic initiatives at ComEd, said during an interview. This means that there is no risk of withholding or reductions from the Trump administration.
Washington anticipates continued high levels of interest and engagement in the programs.
“Based upon what we saw last year, there was a quick demand. Applications came right away the minute we opened it up. I would imagine people will be going on [ComEd’s website] and immediately trying to see what we have available for them,” Washington said.
Since launching its EV rebate program last year, ComEd has funded projects in more than 300 ZIP codes, including nearly 3,500 residential and commercial charging ports, and provided funding for municipalities, businesses, and school districts to purchase more than 200 new and pre-owned EV fleet vehicles. The utility designated more than half the available rebate funds for low-income customers and projects in environmental justice communities.
ComEd also partners with the Chicago-area Metropolitan Mayors Caucus on the EV Readiness Program, which helps local governments create ordinances and safety and infrastructure plans to accommodate the growing demand for EVs in their communities. Since its initiation, more than 41 northern Illinois municipalities have participated in the program.
The importance of utility funding for the rebate programs was highlighted by Susan Mudd, senior policy advocate for the Environmental Law and Policy Center, who noted that a St. Louis-area school district is still waiting on 21 electric school buses that had been promised and ordered. The district has been unable to access the online portal to receive its federal funding, due to an executive order issued by the Trump administration.
“During the last four years, the federal government was a reliable partner with policies and programs that helped propel electric vehicle production and implementation and updated standards to save consumers money while cleaning up the air,” Mudd said at the press conference. “That order has already meant that students who would already be riding quiet zero-emission buses are still on old, dirty diesel ones, and the business that was to deliver them can’t get paid.
“While the new administration is willing to sacrifice the health of people across the U.S. and the world, thankfully, we in Illinois can continue to improve things,” Mudd said.
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