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It’s been a busy month, and a busy year. We’ve had some great cleantech news, but also some challenging news. Below are 7 top stories to highlight this week, as well as another 20 honorable mentions.
California AB 942. Ugh. This is why we can’t have nice things. California is the leading state in the country for total installed solar power, and that’s thanks to years of strong, supportive policies. The Golden State has been a solar leader globally. However, there have been serious efforts to scale that back in recent years, and now Assembly Bill 942 (AB 942) is really going after the golden goose, also known as the Sun. Well, more specifically, it’s going after rooftop solar, by slashing 20-year net metering agreements in half. Not cool, dude. Not cool.
Tesla sales. They were a huge story when going up for years, and they’re a huge story right now with the drop they’ve seen. There are too many stories on this to include here, but you can scroll through the Tesla sales archives to find ones that interest you.
BYD blowing it up. Meanwhile, BYD is absolutely soaring. Actually, as one of our readers recently explained, BYD is delivering on many of the hype and promises Tesla (in particular, Elon Musk) had promoted for years. BYD is building Tesla’s dreams, you might say! You can read specific EV sales updates from BYD here, here, and here. And then there’s the story of BYD launching its 6th shipping vessel.
Our solar & EV dreams are coming true. Overall, when you take a step back and look at the last decade or two, the growth of solar power and electric vehicle deployment has been amazing. It’s been enormous. Also, for those of us who were forecasting and promoting this future one to two decades ago (or more!), it’s just refreshing and vindicating to see it has come true more or less as we imagined. I wrote about that in more length in our first Substack column this week, including covering the fact that 92.5% of new power capacity added around the globe last year came from renewable energy resources, mostly solar power, and less than half of US electricity came from fossil fuels in March.
Freight electrification report: Michael Barnard and Rish Ghatikar, currently an Open Charging Alliance Ambassador and visiting professor at the University of Southern Denmark, but with a background that includes GM’s Energy division, the Electric Power Institute (EPRI), and Berkeley National Laboratory, produced a report on freight electriciation. You can check out the summary there or jump right into the report: The New Logistics: Electrifying Freight with Microgrids.
EV sales reports: I published a series of reports on quarterly EV sales in the US, including looking at which auto brands are electrifying fastest, the auto brands that are leading the market in volume terms, the top selling EV models, and the non-Tesla EV market growing 472% since 2021! I also posed the question, “How long until 50% of Cadillac sales are electric in USA?”
There are a bunch of other monthly EV sales reports that are always fun to read and view as well.
Kia & Hyundai win big EV awards: Kia and Hyundai have been seen as EV leaders that create wonderful electric cars for he past decade, and they just keep doing it. Two of their recent EVs just won two big awards. The Hyundai INSTER won the “World Electric Vehicle” award, while the Kia EV3 won the “World Car of the Year” award. (Don’t ask me how the EV3 didn’t win the “World Electric Vehicle” award when it won the “World Car of the Year” award.)
Honorable mentions:
- A Tale of Two Countries: Bolivia’s EV Sales Are Booming Through A Gasoline Crisis, Whereas Ecuador’s EV Sales Are Also Booming Despite An Electricity Crisis
- V2G Program In California Kicks Off The Future
- Tesla Robotaxis — Profit Centers or Loss Centers?
- Geely Has Launched 48 New Models Since Tesla Revealed the Cybertruck!
- CATL Next Gen Batteries Coming Soon To An EV Near You!
- India Sells Over 2 Million EVs
- Franklin’s Charging Delivers The Fast Charging Experience The World Needs
- GM & Mary Barra Place A $35 Billion Bet On EVs
- Take Your Golf Cart into the Future with Lithium Batteries
- BYD Announces Price Cut on Seagull — Now $7,800
- Welcome to the Deepal SO7 — 1st Drive Review
- Community Solar Is Booming — And Bringing Big Economic Benefits With It
- Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check
- Cute, Quirky IONNA EV Charging Consortium Ain’t Here To Play
- Waymo’s Quickly Taking More Market Share Than I Expected
- Three Months with a Mercedes eVito Van (vs. Tesla Model Y)
- Tesla Solar Sales Declined for 4 Straight Quarters, Then Tesla Stopped Publishing the Numbers
- Tesla Proves Being A Stock Analyst Is Easy, Being A Good Stock Analyst Is Hard
- DOGE Savings Don’t Come Close To DOGE Costs (Or Trump Tax Cut Costs)
- Empathy & Humanity — Charting A Course Together Into The Future
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