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Electric vehicle sales just hit an all-time high in the U.S. — but don’t expect the boom to last long.
For every 10 cars that automakers sold from July through September, one was an EV, according to fresh data from Cox Automotive. In other words, nearly 440,000 new battery-powered vehicles hit the nation’s roads during the third quarter of 2025. The previous single-quarter record, set in the final three months of last year, isn’t even in the same ballpark.
But the sales surge has a catch. Buyers flocked to EVs last quarter because it was their final opportunity to take advantage of a $7,500 federal tax credit that disappeared at the end of September under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The incentive was previously slated to last until 2033.
Under these conditions, “the all-time sales and share records in Q3 were all but certain,” Cox wrote in a blog post accompanying the data. This quarter, by contrast, the company expects EV sales to “drop notably.”
Still, the U.S. electric vehicle market isn’t dead in the water without the tax credit. Already, automakers that have invested huge sums in the EV transition are making changes to try and keep sales going in America. Hyundai, for example, announced in early October that it will cut the price of its popular Ioniq 5 EV by nearly $10,000 next year. One week later, General Motors unveiled a $29,000 version of its Chevy Bolt.
Some state and local governments are taking action, too: Colorado boosted the discounts it offers for both new and used EVs. Burlington, Vermont, launched a similar program.
Meanwhile, the country’s public EV charging network is growing steadily, and the Trump administration is moving ahead with a $5 billion Biden-era program to build out charging infrastructure.
It’s clear, as Cox points out, that electrified vehicles are the future of transportation. Indeed, some countries are already living in that era: In Norway, more than eight in 10 new cars sold are fully electric. The roadblocks set up by the Trump administration might delay progress in the U.S., but it can’t stave off the inevitable.
Earlier this year in tiny Liberty, North Carolina, a multibillion-dollar Toyota plant began shipping batteries for use in the auto giant’s hybrid and electric vehicles. Expected to ultimately create at least 5,000 jobs, the facility is the largest investment to date in the Southeast’s burgeoning “battery belt,” which leads the nation in plans for the manufacturing of electric vehicles and their components.
The Liberty plant — along with other projects in the EV supply chain — was a bright spot in a recent assessment of the region’s electric transportation sector, which also highlighted record growth in EV sales and rapid deployment of fast chargers. The question is whether that momentum can survive gale-force federal headwinds, including today’s expiration of tax credits for EV buyers.
The two groups behind the report, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Atlas Public Policy, say the answer now depends on key players outside of Washington, from utilities to consumers to automakers. But the organizations cast themselves as cautiously optimistic.
That may seem counterintuitive given that congressional Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have dealt blow after blow this year to the policies meant to hasten the nation’s shift to clean transportation.
Generous tax credits for purchasing new and used electric passenger cars now end Sept. 30 instead of in 2032, as do inducements to buy commercial EVs, thanks to the GOP budget bill signed into law this summer. The measure also scales back incentives for manufacturing EVs and their components, like batteries.
In May, Congress voted to revoke California’s long-held authority to set its own tailpipe pollution standards, which have nudged automakers away from combustion engines and created demand for EVs nationwide. Trump signed the legislation in June.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to roll back the national version of those tailpipe rules and stalled the nationwide buildout of electric vehicle charging infrastructure — which was authorized in bipartisan fashion in 2021.
There are few state policies in the Southeast to counteract this federal backsliding. In fact, due to added registration fees and the like, EV owners across the region pay more into state coffers than do owners of combustion vehicles who drive the same amount. Of the six states covered in the new report, from North Carolina to Alabama to Florida, only the latter has no such punitive fees.
Advocates involved with the analysis are clear-eyed about these roadblocks for passenger EVs. But they also say there is cause for guarded hope — starting with consumer behavior.
The fact remains that EVs are gaining popularity in the region, growing in market share in each of the six years that the report has been produced. EV sales in Florida — hardly a bastion of clean-energy policy — have led the way, making up more than a tenth of new car purchases in the first half of 2025, above the national average. The state’s mild temperatures and flatlands are especially conducive to EV driving, but the growth is still telling.
What’s more, drivers appear relatively undeterred by state EV taxes. Florida leads the region, but Georgia and North Carolina are neck and neck in EV adoption, even though the former has higher fees.
“There’s no clear correlation between those taxes and buying an EV,” said Stan Cross, electric transportation program director at Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a report author.
Publicly accessible charging ports are also rising sharply across the region, with fast chargers jumping 41% and slower Level 2 chargers increasing by 24% over the last year, according to the study. That growth appears poised to continue. After what critics said was an illegal pause by the Trump administration, money for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program is set to start flowing again. As soon as it does, Cross predicts quick action.
“States have already done the planning, and EV charging companies and the businesses hosting the chargers are chomping at the bit to compete for contracts, get the stations in the ground, and meet the charging demands of eager EV drivers,” Cross said.
The deployment of EVs aligns with the self-interest of the investor-owned monopoly utilities that dominate the region: Electric vehicles can both increase their sales and provide other benefits to the grid. For instance, plug-in cars and buses can act as batteries, storing power that can be discharged during times of high demand. Outlays by Southeastern utilities experimenting with these uses have lagged behind those in the rest of the country — representing just 7% of the nation’s $6.6 billion in approved investments. But utilities in the region, say advocates, are at least moving in the right direction.
Perhaps more than any other player, the automakers themselves will make the biggest difference in how EV deployment unfolds — in the Southeast and across the U.S.
One decision automakers face is on the front end: Do they retreat from, or double down on, the investments they’ve already made in battery and electric vehicle production? The report notes that companies have already canceled plans for seven facilities in the region, worth a total of $3.5 billion, in the last year. But others are proceeding more or less as planned, including the Toyota facility in Liberty.
If major carmakers continue their commitment to produce vehicles and their components in the United States, consumers will likely benefit from lower prices.
“The most expensive part of an EV is the battery,” said Matthew Vining, policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy and an author of the report. The Liberty plant, he noted, has already made Toyota cars produced in the U.S. more affordable.
That trend could persist since Congress spared incentives for battery manufacturing from devastating cuts in this summer’s budget law.
“From the federal government, there’s actually a good amount of support for the battery and the critical minerals industry,” Vining said. “That will have a downward pressure on the price of the vehicles, making them more appealing to drivers.”
Automakers also face choices on the back end. Riding high off a burst in sales from buyers rushing to take advantage of the expiring tax credit, they may keep their prices low for a while longer.
No matter what, transportation is electrifying across the globe. One in four new cars purchased this year will be electric, Vining said, and China already has about 60% of the market. The question is whether carmakers in the United States will try to catch up or retrench to fossil fuels, he said.
“Are these automakers going to rise to the challenge?”
Electric trucks can beat diesel-fueled ones on the cost of moving freight from California’s seaports to its inland distribution hubs — as long as the battery-powered vehicles can reliably recharge at both ends of their route. That fact is spurring a boom in the construction of truck-charging depots across the state.
On Thursday, EV Realty, a San Francisco-based charging site developer, broke ground on what will be one of California’s biggest fully grid-powered, fast-charging depots for electric trucks so far.
The company’s site in San Bernardino, located in a region known as the Inland Empire that’s crowded with distribution warehouses, will pull about 10 megawatts of power from the grid once it’s up and running in early 2026. It will be equipped with 76 direct-current fast-charging ports, including a number of ultra-high-capacity chargers capable of refilling a Tesla Semi truck in 30 minutes or less.
EV Realty has more large-scale depots in the works, including another in San Bernardino, one in Torrance near the Port of Long Beach, and a fourth in Livermore in Northern California. Thursday’s groundbreaking was accompanied by the announcement that the company had raised $75 million from private equity investor NGP, which also led a $28 million investment in 2022.
With that cash infusion, along with last year’s debut of a joint venture with GreenPoint Partners to develop $200 million in charging hubs, “we are fully capitalized against an underwritten, five-year business plan,” EV Realty CEO Patrick Sullivan told Canary Media.
That plan includes “five to seven more projects of the scale we have in San Bernardino, plus some smaller, more built-to-suit projects,” he said.
EV Realty does build and operate sites for passenger vehicles, such as the chargers it installed in a parking garage in Oakland, California, backed by power provider Ava Community Energy. But the company isn’t in the business of setting up open public charging sites that depend on drive-by traffic to earn money back, Sullivan said.
Instead, it’s signing deals with major freight carriers and fleet owners that want a dedicated spot to get their trucks charged and back on the road as quickly as possible.
That’s why EV Realty’s 76 chargers at its San Bernardino site are all dedicated to specific customers, he said. Of those, 72 are committed to those paying monthly rates on multiyear contracts. “Our customers will have stalls and amounts of power that are theirs 24/7, and we will have customers basing their operations out of that site,” he said.
The remaining four chargers, including those offering high-voltage megawatt charging systems, are “pull-through” slots where trucks towing trailers can get a quick recharge. “That pricing will be more of a pay-as-you-go, per kilowatt-hour — but all those trucks are registered at our site,” he said.
EV Realty is far from the only business building megawatt-scale truck-charging sites in California. Big EV truck depots are springing up around Southern California’s massive port complexes and along its major freight corridors, built by startups such as Terawatt Infrastructure, Forum Mobility, Voltera, WattEV, and Zeem; freight haulers like NFI Industries and Schneider National; and logistics operators such as Prologis.
Most of these depots are providing dedicated service to customers under contracts, but a few are starting to offer charging on a first-come, first-served basis. Greenlane, a joint venture of Daimler Truck North America, utility NextEra Energy, and investment firm BlackRock Alternatives, opened a 10-megawatt truck-charging site in Colton, a city neighboring San Bernardino, that’s meant to provide a more traditional “truck stop” service to vehicles needing to charge.
If anything, EV Realty has been “a little bit more slow and purposeful than others” in building its charging hubs, Sullivan said. But he insists that the broader truck-electrification project remains economically viable, despite the challenges erected by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.
There’s no doubt that electric trucking is experiencing a tough moment in California and across the country. The megalaw passed by Republicans in July cut short tax credits for commercial EVs and EV chargers that had been put in place by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. This has weakened support for purchasing battery-powered vehicles, which still cost two to three times more than their fossil-fueled counterparts, even if EVs’ lower fueling and maintenance costs can make them cheaper in the long run.
This summer, Republicans and the Trump administration also revoked Clean Air Act provisions that permitted California and 10 other states to set mandates forcing manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of zero-emissions trucks. Last month, major truck manufacturers sued California, seeking to extricate themselves from a clean-vehicle partnership agreement.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s trade policies have thrown “sand into the works” of the U.S. freight industry, Sullivan said. Imports are set to decline significantly under President Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign-made goods, and the on-again, off-again nature of his taxes has scrambled long-term planning.
“Carriers, trucking, transportation companies are at the very front lines of a global trade war,” Sullivan said. “You have no predictability on how you can utilize your assets.”
In the face of that uncertainty, cementing charging for electric trucks along established routes becomes more important than ever, he said. Like many of its charging depot competitors, EV Realty is inking partnerships with other parties in the broader freight-hauling industry, such as its August agreement with Prologis to share and streamline access and software systems across both companies’ networks.
With dedicated charging in hand, freight companies and their customers can start to realize the underlying competitive economics of electric trucks, Sullivan said. “A carrier bidding on freight on a lane is bidding whatever their marginal operating cost is, above or below the cost of fuel,” he said. “If you can move short and regional haul, point to point, with an EV, you’re bidding on a marginal cost that’s lower than diesel.”
Hyundai’s huge EV manufacturing facility in Georgia became the latest target of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown last week, with federal agents detaining 475 workers, most of them from South Korea.
The raid has delayed the opening of the complex’s battery factory, which the automaker is building with LG Energy Solution in the Southeast’s growing “battery belt.” And experts, including South Korea’s president, have warned the move could have a much broader chilling effect on foreign investment in U.S. factories — much of which has flowed to clean energy projects in recent years.
Hyundai broke ground on its Georgia complex three years ago after securing $2.1 billion in subsidies from the state and nearby counties, with strong support from Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. But that investment came with conditions, namely that Hyundai and its suppliers would hire at least 8,500 long-term workers by 2031.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement alleges those arrested were working illegally. But an attorney for several detained South Koreans says they have valid visas and were only working for a short time to get the facility’s battery operations up and running. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung defended the workers in a Thursday statement.
“When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians. But the United States doesn’t have that workforce, and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work,” he said. “If that’s not possible, then establishing a local factory in the United States will either come with severe disadvantages or become very difficult for our companies. They will wonder whether they should even do it.”
That could be an especially big problem for Georgia, which is home to about 100 Korean-owned facilities employing 17,000 people. That includes an SK Battery America EV battery factory, Hanwha Qcells’ solar panel plant, and a Kia EV manufacturing facility.
Last week’s raid is already having tangible ripple effects on U.S. manufacturing. Reuters reports that South Korean workers at other LG Energy Solution production sites and an LG/General Motors plant are preparing to depart due to visa worries — or already have.
Revolution Wind decision is imminent, Burgum says
Three weeks after the Trump administration halted work on a nearly complete offshore wind farm near Rhode Island, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested that his department will soon decide whether Revolution Wind can restart construction. The administration is “in discussions” with state governors and the project’s developers, and is finishing its required reviews, he told CNBC on Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee (D) later told the Rhode Island Current that the governor hadn’t secured a meeting with President Donald Trump as of Wednesday, but McKee and Burgum have been texting. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) has meanwhile said that he is open to discussing power projects involving natural gas if the administration lets Revolution Wind construction resume.
Meanwhile, the future is clearer for the wind farm that Virginia utility Dominion Energy is currently building off the state’s coast. The New York Times reports that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is quietly lobbying the Trump administration to let the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind continue, and is so far finding success. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that he has also lobbied Cabinet secretaries in support of the project.
Pairing solar with sheep, canals, and far-flung communities
This week, Canary Media reporters showcased solar power’s innovative potential. Jeff St. John started us off in California, where wildfire risks are making it harder for utilities to maintain the power lines that serve remote areas. But a 3,200-acre nature reserve now has reliable power at its far-flung guest house thanks to a solar-plus-battery-storage microgrid — an example of the “remote grids” PG&E has begun installing.
Also in California, the state’s first solar array covering an irrigation canal has come online, Maria Gallucci reports. Researchers hope the project will also help reduce evaporation in the drought-prone Central Valley.
And in Illinois, Kari Lydersen has the story of how grazing sheep have become the perfect partner for solar panels. There’s just one problem: The U.S. lamb market isn’t strong enough for the idea to take off.
An inconvenient truth: A new report finds that when it comes to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, major companies are largely leaning on methods that are ineffective in the long term. (Grist)
Storage, multiplied: Tesla unveils the Megablock — a product that packages together four Megapack batteries and a transformer into an easy-to-deploy grid storage product. (Canary Media)
Derailing rural solar: In a South Dakota county, misinformation about solar power led to an ordinance that blocked a fourth-generation farmer from installing an array that would have supplied him with extra income — a scene that’s playing out across rural communities in the U.S. (The Guardian)
Catching a wave: No company has yet commercialized power generation from waves, but Eco Wave Power thinks it’s cracked the code with technology it just installed at the Port of Los Angeles. (Canary Media)
Solar’s dimming future: Solar and storage make up the vast majority of new power plant construction in the U.S., but face a“seismic shift” due to hostile Trump administration policies, which could ultimately lead to 21% less solar installed through 2030. (E&E News)
Tesla keeps falling: After years of accounting for over half of the U.S. EV market and reaching a more than 80% high, Tesla made up just 38% of total EV sales in August, marking an eight-year low, according to Cox Automotive data. (Reuters)
This article was copublished with The Daily Yonder, a newsroom covering rural America.
YARMOUTH, Maine — At a dock along the banks of the Cousins River, Chad Strater loaded up his small aluminum workboat with power tools and a winch. Strater, who owns a marine construction business, was setting out to tinker with floating equipment at a nearby oyster farm. On the quiet morning in August, with the sun already beating down hard, his vessel whirred to life, only without the usual growl of an oil-guzzling motor. The boat is all electric.
Just north of where the Cousins River meets Casco Bay, Willy Leathers was powering up his own electric watercraft, which had its first outing in July. Leathers uses his 28-foot boat for cultivating oysters at Maine Ocean Farms, where roughly 3 million of the animals grow in dozens of floating cages.
Both Strater and Leathers said they switched to electric workboats for several reasons. Their new watercraft are a cleaner alternative to the smelly, polluting petroleum-powered vessels that dominate Maine’s 3,500 miles of coastline. Electric propulsion is also significantly quieter than a gas or diesel motor. For Leathers, whose 10-acre sea farm is a significant presence in the cove where he operates, the swap is about being a good neighbor to the shoreside community.
“It’s an innovation born from necessity for us,” said Strater about his electric boat, which he docks each night at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, the nonprofit boatyard and aquaculture innovation hub he runs with several other small business owners. “[The boat] really works well for what we do with it, and we’re letting farmers use it to see how it could work for them.”
Battery-powered vessels are starting to catch on in the United States and worldwide as companies and maritime authorities work to reduce emissions and improve the experience of cruising waterways. The technology ranges from small outboard motors on workboats and recreational watercraft to powerful inboard systems on ferries, tugboats, and supply vessels for offshore wind farms and oil rigs.
In recent decades, Norway, with its extensive coastline and ample government funding, has spearheaded the transition globally. China, which is both the world’s largest shipbuilder and battery manufacturer, has rapidly deployed hundreds of battery-powered vessels over the last several years. Falling battery costs, better technology, and stricter environmental rules are compelling some vessel owners to install partial or fully electric systems, primarily for watercraft that operate near the shore or on fixed routes. For commercial fishing in particular, customers are helping to drive the push to clean up.
“Everyone’s more concerned now with where their food comes from, and we’ve seen that [consumers] are looking for that complete sustainable supply chain,” said Ed Schwarz, the head of marine solutions sales in North America for Siemens Energy, which has built electric propulsion systems for U.S. ferries.
Electrification has only very recently come to America’s aquaculture sector. In Maine, the small but fast-growing segment includes nearly 200 farms for shellfish, fin fish, and edible seaweed. Strater and Leathers are among the first in their business to trade gas motors for electric propulsion — a switch they say they’re hoping to accelerate. Oil-guzzling motors are among the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions for the state’s multibillion-dollar seafood sector.
Still, electrifying commercial watercraft can be a difficult course to navigate, given the higher up-front costs of electric motors and the lack of charging infrastructure — and grid infrastructure in general — in rural waterfront communities.
Early adopters like Strater and Leathers said they hope the experiences gained from their demonstrations can help pave the way for decarbonizing Maine’s blue economy. With the help of the Island Institute, a Maine-based nonprofit that works on marine-related energy transitions, Leathers is collecting performance data from his vessel to share more broadly with the industry.
“People say it looks cool and shiny and looks like it operates great,” Lia Morris, the Island Institute’s senior community development officer, said of electric boats. “But we really want to be able to prove out the [business] case.”
Electric boats can cost between 20% and 30% more than a gas- or diesel-powered vessel of a comparable size. However, owners can save on maintenance and fuel over the long term, Strater’s business partner Nick Planson said.
“The high-level math that we’ve come up with” is a financial break-even point of “about four to five years, and then over a 10-year time span, you’re definitely coming out way ahead based on the vastly reduced maintenance cost, replacement cost of failed equipment, and fuel costs,” said Planson.
But the initial price tag presents a significant hurdle. Strater and Planson’s sleekly designed, no-frills watercraft cost $100,000 to build and outfit with a single electric outboard motor. Leathers’ boat, called Heron, cost about four times more. It has two electric outboards and a ramp for unloading and hauling more than 10,000 oysters at a time from the sea farm to distributors waiting on the dock. Its hull is also equipped with a small cabin and toilet.
Both operations relied on grant funding to defray the expense of going electric.
For their part, Strater and Planson used about $50,000 from a larger U.S. Department of Agriculture small business grant they got in 2024 to establish a use case for electric workboats in the aquaculture industry. Leathers’ business, Maine Ocean Farms, was included on a collaborative $500,000 U.S. Department of Energy grant last year that earmarked about $289,000 for boat building and propulsion systems, in addition to other funds for charging infrastructure and data collection.
The prospects for funding future projects are now much murkier under the Trump administration, maritime policy experts say.
The DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which awarded the money to Maine Ocean Farms and its partners, is facing significant budget cuts in the next fiscal year. The GOP-backed spending law that passed in July rescinded some unobligated grant funding for cleaning up marine diesel engines. While other programs were spared, it’s unclear whether the current Congress will approve new funding for initiatives ranging from electrifying huge urban ports to deploying low-emissions ferries in rural communities.
But federal grants aren’t the only way to address the higher cost of electric boats. Strater and Planson also worked with Coastal Enterprises Inc., a Maine-based community development financial institution focused on climate resilience, to establish a “marine green” loan program that can make the up-front costs of switching to electric propulsion more accessible to small businesses.
“The more electric engines that are being employed in Maine helps lift the whole tide for everyone,” said Nick Branchina, director of CEI’s fisheries and aquaculture program. As part of its marine green lending, CEI offers loans starting at $25,000 for small businesses to make the switch to electric propulsion and comfortably afford the cost of batteries or a shoreside charging installation.
Planson said that as electrification moves beyond initial grant-funded projects, the challenge is keeping systems affordable. He said he wants to see other small business owners able to “take a reasonable swing” at electric propulsion.
Buying a boat, of course, is only the first obstacle. Electric vessel owners must also learn how to use their new propulsion systems and find a place to charge them.
This summer, Leathers said he’s had no trouble making the nearly two-mile round trip from the slip where he docks Heron in South Freeport, Maine, to his farm on Casco Bay. With a full charge, he can make trips slightly farther to meet distributors closer to Portland. But as temperatures drop this winter, Leathers said he’s not sure how far the outboards’ two batteries will take him. Cold weather can reduce battery capacity and impact performance, shrinking an electric motor’s range. It’s a part of Leathers’ demonstration to find out what the impacts are in practice.
Like Leathers, Strater and Planson also work year-round. They said they’re both impressed with how their boat performed last winter after launching in the fall of 2024. For Planson, who markets battery-powered equipment to aquaculture farmers as part of his startup, Shred Electric, a boat’s ability to run through the year’s coldest months is a key selling point.
“The proof is in the pudding,” said Planson. “When you’re working with … waterfront applications, it really needs to work every day and all year.”
Strater and Planson said their boat’s range was an important consideration when they partnered with the startup Flux Marine to build the electric outboard motor. With limited shoreside charging infrastructure in place, the boat has to make it out and back on a single charge, sometimes to aquaculture operations seven miles away. In the 10 months since the boat’s launch, Strater has learned range correlates to speed. He can modulate the boat’s pace depending on how far he wants to go.
“We can go really fast for a short distance. We can go really slow for a long distance, and it works for what we do with it,” he said.
Soon, Maine’s early adopters will have shared access to a higher-capacity Level 2 charger that will be installed at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation and can charge batteries in little over two hours, or three times faster than the current system. The startup Aqua superPower was awarded a portion of the DOE funding last year to install additional marine chargers there and at a wharf in Portland owned by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. Island Institute also helped with grant funding for the charger at the Sea Meadow boatyard.
Maine will need much more high-capacity charging infrastructure for the marine industry to transition to electric propulsion, said the Island Institute’s Morris. As the state’s aquaculture and fisheries industries look to grow beyond small-scale operations, other businesses will need to charge more frequently to make longer, farther trips up and down the coast.
Expanding charging stations north of Casco Bay represents what Morris calls a “chicken and egg” problem: a dynamic where chargers are either installed before demand gets high, and sit unused, or electric boats hit the water and there’s not enough charging infrastructure, stalling future adoption.
This challenge is compounded by both New England’s aging grid infrastructure and the remote nature of some of the region’s waterfront access points. Getting the right amount of power to a charging station on the shore can be costly, even in Yarmouth, which sits on Casco Bay. Often it’s the last mile that can be the most expensive. At Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, three-phase power, which can accommodate higher loads, is limited by the dirt road that separates the boat launch from the more heavily trafficked U.S. Route 1.
“There are a lot of complicated questions,” Morris said. “I don’t think it’s unique to Maine, it’s any rural area, but complicated questions and conversations with the utilities and the rural municipalities are going to have to be solved for.”
Back on the water, Leathers docked his electric boat, Heron, alongside the sea farm’s barge, where thousands of oysters pass through for processing on harvest days. He switched the motor off and hopped onto the floating platform. For a moment, the bay was calm to the point of near silence. Then Leathers picked up an oyster cage with a rattle, turning it over in his hands as water splashed out. The sounds of the workday began.
“As a whole industry, I think it’s going to take proving that someone like us can do it,” Leathers said. “And then the next person kind of snowballing after that.”
It’s no Route 66.
But the roughly 80-mile stretch of U.S. Route 50 that snakes across Virginia from the nation’s capital to the West Virginia border is rich in American history and culture. The mostly two-lane, winding mountain road features vineyards, battlefields, high-end resorts, and more. And just like the iconic route from Chicago to California, U.S. 50 is increasingly making way for the future of American road trips: electric vehicles.
The tiny town of Middleburg, Virginia, is a case in point: Officials there installed a fast charger nearly 18 months ago to serve EV drivers in the wealthy, bucolic region just 45 miles west of Washington, D.C.
Named for its equidistance between Alexandria and Winchester, Middleburg has long been at the center of foxhunting and steeplechases. These days, the town of less than 1,000 people is also surrounded by wineries and boasts a film festival, a 168-room five-star resort, and a Christmas parade replete with horses and hound dogs.
“Since colonial times it has been a stopping place, and it’s continued to be a place where people come from all over the world, as well as from the greater D.C. area,” said Lynne Kaye, chair of Middleburg’s sustainability committee.
As electric vehicles have become more prevalent, so too has “EV tourism”: towns off the beaten path seeking to lure travelers with charging infrastructure. While visitors juice up — often for free at relatively slow Level 2 chargers – they might browse local art galleries and shops, grab some dinner, or visit another attraction they may have otherwise missed.
But Middleburg is part of Loudoun County, the nation’s richest, with some of the most robust EV adoption numbers in Virginia. The town has ample attractions, so the idea to install a charger was less about drawing in new visitors than it was about keeping those already passing through happy.
“When we walked around town, we were noticing a bunch of EVs,” said Kaye. “We wanted to make sure that we didn’t accidentally become unappealing to people who were driving them.”
Reducing the town’s climate footprint was also a consideration. Kaye and others reason that cars driven by visitors and residents are the leading contributor to its planet-warming emissions.
“We only have 673 residents. We can only create so much carbon,” she said. “But when you have 20,000 people come to an event, that’s a lot of carbon all at once.”
When town leaders were in the planning stages of adding their charger, they also noticed a lack of devices in the region that could fill up a car battery in an hour or less. “Not everybody wants to spend however many hours getting their EV charged,” Kaye said.
For all these reasons, the decision to install a fast charger in the heart of town was an easy one. But bringing that choice to fruition wasn’t as simple.
An expansive bay with 10 or more chargers, an increasingly common feature at gas stations, wasn’t logistically feasible in the tiny Town Hall parking lot. And most charging companies Middleburg approached wanted to install no fewer than six fast chargers.
“Getting this huge bank of chargers didn’t fit a historic town,” Kaye said. “There wasn’t really space for it, and we weren’t sure that we were going to get enough traffic to use the chargers effectively.”
XCharge North America came to the rescue. The charger manufacturer was “willing to work with us and come up with a way to have the one charger,” Kaye said. “And it’s been a success.”
Initially called Current Electric, the startup had recently been acquired by a European equipment maker. Its business proposition: making fast chargers cheaper by using a 208-volt system rather than the global standard of 480V.
While Middleburg had already wired its new Town Hall to accommodate the industry standard, XCharge still leapt at the opportunity to showcase its hardware, said company cofounder Alex Urist.
“This was very much a way for us to get early applications in the U.S.,” said Urist, who lives in New York City. “The proximity to D.C. is great as well. Selfishly, I go to D.C. to visit the in-laws frequently enough, so I can always check in on the charger. I like to take them over there and show off that I actually have a job,” he quipped.
Typical direct-current fast-charging units can run between $30,000 and $120,000. In Middleburg’s case, XCharge provided its hardware for free while the town covered the installation. The two entities share the revenue from charging sessions, and the company can learn from how the fast charger performs as it explores other markets.
“It’s not really a charger on a high-throughput area,” Urist said. “But what is interesting about it is, it’s kind of dead in the middle of Virginia wine country. It’s along this rural corridor where the perceptive availability of chargers is very important.”
Between March 2024, when the charger was installed, and February 2025, 181 sessions were logged. Since then, there’s been an uptake, with 268 sessions logged as of May 2025, according to XCharge.
“It’s a really interesting use case for us to see. How does it help with the local economy? Are they going to also see any ancillary impacts of it beyond just the revenue coming in?” Urist said.
Indeed, that’s one of the expectations behind an initiative called Virginia Green Travel, which helps the state’s towns, especially those with carbon-reduction goals, attract environmentally minded tourists, said Alleyn Harned, executive director of Virginia Clean Cities.
“Electric vehicle chargers have been part of green tourism in Virginia,” said Harned, whose group is among the backers of the Green Travel initiative.
Virginia Clean Cities, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded entity that’s based at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, is what brought Middleburg and XCharge together. The town’s success with its fast charger was a bright spot for the organization after President Donald Trump stalled the rollout of $5 billion for charging infrastructure launched under his predecessor.
“This is a positive story in getting something done,” Harned said, “because this stuff really improves our economy.”
As the Trump administration moves toward releasing National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funds after losses in court, more towns across Virginia may have the chance to follow Middleburg’s lead.
Kaye says they should know that fast charging is possible for them. “I think it’s important for other small towns to realize that there is an opportunity, if they want to take it,” she said.
NEW YORK — Just off the chaotic coastline of Lower Manhattan sits Governors Island, a tranquil oasis of tree-lined paths that the city is transforming into a hub for climate change research. Getting there, however, has long meant riding on a diesel-burning ferry that spews soot and planet-warming gases as it zips across the New York Harbor.
A new ferry now provides visitors a much cleaner way to reach the 172-acre island.
Harbor Charger, a hybrid-electric vessel, entered into service last week. The boat is the first of its kind in New York state — and it’s one of only a handful of hybrid-electric ferries to operate nationwide. On Aug. 12, elected officials and other leaders joined the ferry’s inaugural cruise around the harbor, roasting in the late-summer heat on the outside car deck.
“We’re proud to be charting the course for sustainable maritime transportation,” said Clare Newman, president and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island, a nonprofit created by New York City to redevelop the island. Later, Newman smashed a champagne bottle on the stern to christen the new vessel.
The $33 million Harbor Charger operates like an incredibly robust Toyota Prius. The boat’s diesel-fueled generators charge up the 870-kilowatt-hour battery system, allowing the vessel to run partly or fully on electricity during the eight-minute trip to or from the island. The ferry will eventually plug in directly to a shoreside rapid-charging station, using the generators only as emergency backup, but the charging infrastructure hasn’t yet been built.
Harbor Charger, which can fit up to 1,200 people and 30 vehicles, will replace its 69-year-old predecessor named Lt. Samuel S. Coursen. The older ferry guzzles an average of 420 gallons of diesel per day, so switching to the hybrid vessel is expected to save the city over $200,000 per year in fuel costs, according to the Trust for Governors Island.
The new boat will also significantly reduce air pollution and slash carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 600 tons per year when running in hybrid mode. Once it can plug in, the vessel will curb CO2 by an additional 800 tons.
Nationwide, many of the nearly 620 ferries plying waterways rely on decades-old, inefficient diesel engines, making them some of the largest emitters among commercial harbor craft. The vessels also typically operate around densely populated communities, exposing people to health-harming pollutants such as particulate matter and nitrogen oxide emissions.
“Diesel ferries are an important part of our transportation system, but continuing to spew the fumes that diesel leaves and … burn that fuel in the middle of our cities does not make any sense,” New York state Sen. Brian Kavanagh (D) said from the gently humming Harbor Charger. Skyscrapers towered in the distance as helicopters and seaplanes soared noisily overhead.
The newly built Harbor Charger is the second hybrid-electric ferry to launch in the U.S. this summer. In July, Washington State Ferries began running the renovated Wenatchee — a 27-year-old diesel ferry that underwent a $96 million conversion to become a Prius of the seas. The giant ferry can carry nearly 2,500 passengers and over 200 vehicles on a route between Seattle and Bainbridge Island.
Siemens Energy outfitted both ferries with its hybrid technology. The German manufacturer recently equipped a new hybrid-electric ferry in Galveston, Texas, and is in the process of retrofitting another vessel there. It’s also working to deliver two similar vessels to Louisiana’s department of transportation later this year, said Ed Schwarz, the company’s head of marine solutions sales in North America.
“We really think that this is the direction the industry is going,” Schwarz said in an interview as the Harbor Charger cruised past the Statue of Liberty.
For now, the industry will have to chart that course without key federal funding. The GOP megalaw that President Donald Trump signed last month rescinds millions of dollars in unobligated grant money from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to help local governments and others slash diesel pollution from ports by modernizing and electrifying equipment.
New York City itself received a $7.5 million federal grant in 2023 to fund the installation of Harbor Charger’s shoreside charging infrastructure, which is currently in the design phase. U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who helped to secure the grant, lamented the loss of federal subsidies for projects like this one. “It is a very fraught time for our cleantech and our renewable energy,” he said during the launch ceremony.
Still, Goldman added, Harbor Charger “is such a critical example of what the future can be and will be.”
The Trump administration appears to be backing away from its fiercely contested efforts to freeze a $5 billion federal funding program for electric vehicle chargers.
On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled revised guidance for states to access their remaining share of $5 billion in formula grants from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. NEVI was created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to establish reliable charging along major highways, particularly in underserved parts of the country.
“Our revised NEVI guidance slashes red tape and makes it easier for states to efficiently build out this infrastructure,” Duffy said in a statement. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.”
Groups representing industries involved in EV charger deployments welcomed the decision, which could allow states to restart projects that have in some cases been paused for months due to orders from the federal government. But environmental advocates warned that the move is just another delay tactic from an administration that’s exceeding its lawful authority by blocking money appropriated by Congress, for EV charging and beyond.
Monday’s announcement comes after months of legal challenges to the Department of Transportation’s February decision rescinding guidance for states to access their NEVI funding. That withdrawal, part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on Biden-era climate and clean energy initiatives, forced states to halt work underway on contracts and projects representing roughly half of the $5 billion in program funding.
Litigation hasn’t panned out in the administration’s favor so far. In June, a federal judge ordered the Transportation Department to release about $875 million for the states that had contested the freeze, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Some of those states have been able to access NEVI funding since then, said Daniel Wilkins, a policy analyst at research firm Atlas Public Policy.
However, a chunk of the funding remains unavailable, and the District of Columbia and 20 states are continuing their fight in court in the hopes of getting the Trump administration to unfreeze the rest. The federal government’s actions have disrupted ongoing contracts with EV charging developers and caused “costly delays in project implementation,” according to an August court filing.
The 20 states suing the Transportation Department are led by Democratic governors, but the NEVI program sets aside money for red and blue states alike. Texas is set to receive nearly $408 million, more than any other state, and Ohio opened the first NEVI-funded charging station.
Under Monday’s order, states can now reapply for funding within the next 30 days.
Getting the NEVI program back up and running will “help to ensure that EV drivers can find charging when and where they need it,” Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a trade group that includes automakers, battery manufacturers, mining companies, charging manufacturers, and electric utilities, said in a Monday statement. In that light, the new guidance “provides important regulatory certainty for the companies and state departments of transportation that are implementing this program on the ground.”
But the Sierra Club, one of seven nonprofit groups that have joined the legal challenges against the NEVI funding freeze, noted that the department’s guidance does not reinstate those plans, but instead requires states to resubmit them, “further delaying the nationwide EV charging buildout.”
“While the Trump administration has moved away from anti-EV rhetoric in this guidance in response to federal litigation filed by over a dozen states, Sierra Club, and other nonprofit organizations, it is still illegally withholding billions Congress dedicated to EV charging,” Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign, said in a Monday statement. “We will continue to work towards the recovery of nationwide NEVI funding.”
A spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general’s office, one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit by the 20 states and D.C., said the office is reviewing the revised guidance.
Monday’s announcement also weakens the program’s support for lower-income and disadvantaged communities. It removes requirements that the funding “ensure that the deployment, installation, operation, and use of EV charging infrastructure achieves equitable and fair distribution of benefits and services,” and eliminates Biden-era Justice40 requirements that at least 40% of the benefits of the projects be targeted toward disadvantaged communities.
Duffy justified these changes in Monday’s statement. “If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” he said.
The NEVI program has made slow progress. The Biden administration hoped to spur the buildout of 500,000 public charging stations by 2030, up from about 206,000 today. But just 378 NEVI fast chargers have come online as of this month, according to Wilkins at Atlas Public Policy. And of the $5 billion in funds, only about $615 million was under contract for constructing almost 1,000 charging sites as of February, according to EV-charging data firm Paren.
Monday’s announcement highlighted that slow start as a “clear signal of the program’s failure.” Both Republicans and Democrats have criticized the pace of deployment under the Biden administration.
The NATSO and SIGMA trade groups, which represent truck stops and fuel retailers, respectively, praised the Transportation Department’s new guidance, saying in a Monday statement that it “marks a constructive step toward addressing the ongoing challenges associated with deploying EV charging infrastructure while also ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and effectively.”
But Sierra Club’s García said the Trump administration’s freeze has only further delayed the work that Monday’s order purports to streamline. “It’s ironic that this guidance was sold as cutting red tape, yet all it has accomplished is more than half a year of needless delay,“ she said.
The country doubled its number of public charging ports between 2020 and last year, and over 7,100 public fast-charging ports came online in the first half of this year, according to Atlas Public Policy. Still, only 23 NEVI chargers have opened since February.
That delay is particularly harmful to parts of the country that lack the EV adoption to make charger investments worthwhile for private-sector developers — a hurdle NEVI was meant to help overcome. Rural communities in particular are lagging in fast-charger deployments.
Loren McDonald, Paren’s chief analyst, noted that Monday’s revised guidance does give individual states more flexibility and control over how they spend NEVI dollars, which could speed project selection and construction.
However, it could also make the program less effective at serving “charging deserts,” he said — a term for places where EV charging companies like Tesla, EVgo, and Electrify America were “not deploying stations because utilization would be low.”
“One of the main factors holding many people back from getting an EV is they dream of that one road trip in rural Wyoming and won’t get an EV because they’ve heard there are no charging stations,” he said. “NEVI was designed to fix that perception in reality. But I worry that if states have complete control over locations, they may not focus on solving the charging-desert issue.”
It’s getting easier and easier to find a public EV charger in the U.S.
Between 2020 and 2024, the number of public EV charging ports available to U.S. drivers doubled, reaching nearly 200,000 by the end of last year, according to International Energy Agency data. Northeast states have the highest charger density by far, with Massachusetts at the top of the list.
It’s solid growth, though significantly slower than other regions that have embraced EVs more wholeheartedly. In Europe and China, both of which are adopting EVs much faster than the U.S., public chargers roughly quadrupled over the same period.
Even though an estimated 80% of charging happens at home in the U.S., concerns about a lack of public charging infrastructure have dogged EV adoption for years. American drivers consistently cite the issue, or its close cousins, like a fear that EVs are no good for road trips, as among the top reasons they are unlikely to get an electric car.
That’s why widely available public EV charging ports are so important to the transition to electric vehicles — a shift that needs to happen for the U.S. to clean up transportation, its biggest source of carbon emissions.
If the number of public plugs continues to grow at the rate observed in recent years, the industry would have over half a million public charging ports available by 2030, enough to meet a goal set by the Biden administration years ago.
That might be a big “if” under President Donald Trump.
Since taking office in January, Trump has tried to freeze billions of dollars’ worth of federal funding for public EV charging authorized by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. A judge ruled last month that the administration must turn the spigot back on. The program was already sluggish to begin with, having funded the installation of just a couple hundred charging ports over the last four years, and the Trump turmoil has only thrown more sand in its gears.
Then there’s the possibility that EV sales slow down in the U.S. after Sept. 30, when Trump’s megabill eliminates federal tax credits for consumers. Fewer EVs hitting the road could undermine the economic case for companies to build new charging stations.
Still, it’s true that chargers are becoming a more familiar sight for drivers — especially those in the Northeast. As time goes on, that familiarity should help erode the stubborn perception that EVs are unworkable, and help push more and more people to embrace electric, emissions-free driving.
So far, 2025 has been a mixed bag for EV sales in the U.S. A record 607,089 EVs left the lot in the first six months of the year, Cox Automotive reports, but sales in the second quarter were still lower than in Q2 2024.
A big part of that Q2 decline has to do with Tesla, which remains the U.S.’s top EV seller but has suffered stateside and around the world thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s stint in the White House. This week, Tesla reported its profits dropped 16% in Q2 compared to the same period last year. Tesla doesn’t report its sales, but it delivered nearly 60,000 fewer vehicles in Q2 compared to a year ago.
General Motors, meanwhile, had better news to share. It sold 46,280 EVs in Q2, more than double its sales in the same period last year. That’s still a far cry from Tesla’s 380,000-plus deliveries, but it was enough to make GM the No. 2 EV brand in the U.S. And slower EV sales across the industry aren’t deterring GM CEO Mary Barra, who said the company sees EV production as its “North Star.”
Rivian reported a delivery decline in the second quarter but still plans to build new headquarters and an EV factory in Georgia. Smaller EV company Lucid says it delivered a record 3,309 cars in Q2.
Be prepared, though, for a rollercoaster in the next few months now that the “Big, Beautiful Bill” has sent EV tax credits to an early grave. Cox Automotive predicts EV sales will hit a new record in Q3 as buyers race to use federal incentives before they expire at the end of September. After that? “A collapse in Q4, as the electric vehicle market adjusts to its new reality.”
Trump calls off loan for major transmission line
The Trump administration this week canceled a $4.9 billion federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, putting its future in jeopardy, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports.
The planned transmission line, which was granted its loan guarantee under the Biden administration, is meant to bring wind and solar power generated in the Great Plains to cities further east. It has been in the works for more than a decade, and construction on its first phase was slated to start next year.
While the Grain Belt Express had support from utility regulators and large electricity consumers along the line’s route, Missouri Republicans turned against it in recent weeks. The state’s Republican attorney general launched an investigation into the project earlier this month, and Sen. Josh Hawley said he made a direct appeal to President Trump to pull back federal support.
Can the EPA revoke all its emissions rules at once?
The U.S. EPA is planning to demolish the bedrock of many of its climate change-fighting regulations, The New York Times reports. The agency is reportedly preparing a rule that would rescind the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases harm human health. That finding underpins many of the EPA’s landmark emissions rules, including regulations targeting pollution from cars, factories, and power plants. If the finding is revoked, it would immediately end all those limits and make it harder for future presidential administrations to reinstate them.
The draft of the rule change doesn’t dispute that climate pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane drive global warming or put people’s health at risk, according to the Times. Instead, it claims the endangerment finding oversteps the EPA’s authority. The new rule is almost certain to face legal challenges if it’s finalized.
A “shadow ban” on renewables? Democrats, advocates, and industry groups push back on the Trump administration’s decision to heighten reviews for proposed solar and wind projects on federal land, saying it could lead to a clean energy “shadow ban.” (E&E News)
Shaving solar costs: Solar industry veteran Andrew Birch says cutting non-equipment costs like permitting and project management can reduce the price of rooftop solar installations as federal incentives expire. (Canary Media)
Reeling in the deep: The U.S. government’s step toward issuing The Metals Co. deep-sea mining permits conflicts with an international treaty, leaving the startup’s partners abroad wary of continuing to work together. (New York Times)
Can SMRs succeed? Nuclear industry leaders say there’s enough momentum and funding behind small modular reactor development to propel the sector beyond its past failures. (Canary Media)
Data center downgrade: OpenAI’s Stargate project softens its ambitious plans and is now only looking to build one small data center this year, which could have fallout for energy developers who would have powered the projects. (Wall Street Journal)
Carbon capture’s secret supporters: The oil and gas industry has played a big role in crafting an Ohio carbon-capture bill that could help keep fossil fuel operations running. (Canary Media)
Rates on the rise: U.S. utilities have requested or secured a record $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of the year, more than double the total reached halfway through 2024. (Latitude Media)
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