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Getting Americans out of gasoline cars and into electric vehicles is central to the Biden Administration’s push to cut carbon emissions, and there was progress last year as EV sales hit a record 1.2 million units. But the pace is cooling so far this year, blunted by high prices, steep interest rates on loans and tighter federal rules on battery content that lets fewer models get a $7,500 tax credit. On the bright side, California, the country’s top EV market, trumpeted record EV sales in the first quarter, totaling 102,507 – 38% of the U.S. total in the same period. Importantly, that was 24% of all new vehicles sold in the state.
Availability of public charging is another hurdle for EV adoption – and the news on that front just took an unexpected turn. Tesla, the top EV seller and operator of the biggest charging network, with tens of thousands of Superchargers across the U.S., unexpectedly cut hundreds of people in that unit. The move was a head scratcher as the company recently signed deals to let nearly every automaker selling EVs use those stations and a surge in revenue from charging services was a bright spot amid the company’s otherwise glum first-quarter results.
After news of the cuts, CEO Elon Musk, who’s increasingly focused on shifting the company’s focus to robotaxis, tweeted that Tesla’s charger network was still going to grow, albeit at a slower pace. The impact that’s going to have on the broader EV market will unfold through the remainder of 2024.
The Big Read
Protein Evolution cofounder Connor Lynn
SHIRLEY YU/PROTEIN EVOLUTIONThis Startup’s AI Designs Enzymes That Eat Plastic Waste
In a lab tucked away in an old gun factory in New Haven, Connecticut, a machine heats plastic waste to 536 degrees Fahrenheit and spits out gloopy strings of material that start to harden when they hit the air. This substance — made of textiles and post-industrial scrap that were designed for a landfill — will be ground to bits to create as much surface area as possible.
It’s about to become food for an enzyme designed with the help of artificial intelligence, made by the startup Protein Evolution. The company’s ambition is to use AI to engineer new enzymes that are able to break down plastics and plastic-based textiles and recycle them into a material that it claims is indistinguishable from petroleum-derived polyester and can be used the same way in fabrics. Its big goal is to allow old clothes, sheets and textiles to become fully recyclable.
The world has a serious plastics problem with some 460 million tons total produced annually, a number that will only rise as we buy more stuff. Yet only 9% of plastic is actually recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or incinerated – and that’s what Protein Evolution cofounder Jonathan Rothberg wants to target. “You have to recycle the 91% that people don’t recycle: All this crap, all this mixed stuff, not the perfectly clean water bottles that have been rinsed,” said Rothberg, a serial inventor and entrepreneur who’s best known for inventing and commercializing high-speed DNA sequencing.
Hot Topic
Talus Renewables CEO Hiro Iwanaga
Talus RenewablesHiro Iwanaga, cofounder and CEO of Talus Renewables, on green ammonia
Why ammonia?
Ammonia is this critical raw material that feeds half the planet. Eighty percent is used for fertilizer and 20% for industrial uses like mining. The problem is that it is incredibly carbon-intensive with 2% of carbon emissions and it is produced in these giant ammonia plants in China and in Russia and then shipped around the world. It’s costly, carbon intensive and unreliable. The original philanthropic mission of Talus is that if you could have access to a basic nitrogen fertilizer in Africa, you could increase yields.
You started in Africa with your first commercial operation last year, but now you’re expanding to the United States. What changed?
If we had talked two years ago, I would have said that I would not deploy a system into the United States. We can sell a ton of ammonia for $800 to $900 per metric ton. The 20-year average in the corn belt of the United States is $500 to $550. With the tax credit worth around $500 per ton right now, we can sign with our customers for $400 to 500 a ton over the next five to seven years. The important question is, can we use the tax credit, which is provided for 10 years, to lower costs so we can stand on our own two feet when the tax credit goes away. We are pretty sure we can get there. Part of that will come from the price declines of energy. And we will lower the cost by scaling and improving the efficiency of our systems. If we can improve the efficiency of the system by 2% to 3% a year, that’s a 20% improvement over 10 years.
How does your process for making ammonia work?
Our modular system gets nitrogen from the air like a big plant would. There are two enabling technologies that make this economic. One is cheap renewable power. If you had high renewable power prices, it wouldn’t work. The second is that because we were interested in serving farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, we built a system from the ground up that’s modular. Our systems are built in shipping containers that are shipped on site and take less than one month to install.
What’s your plan for expansion?
We are deploying systems two, three and four in the U.S. and Europe this summer. In the United States, we have 74 sites we are preparing to deploy to over the next couple of years. We are really excited to improve access to the local production of a critical raw material that will be cheaper, more reliable and more sustainable on site. The goal was to get basic fertilizer into the hands of subsistence farmers in Africa cheaper, more reliably and more sustainably. The tax credit allows us to do that for American farmers now.
What Else We’re Reading
Lukas Walton’s climate-focused investment firm S2G raises $600 million in outside funding
Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk: Tesla’s chaotic robotaxi pivot
How startup Zanskar is using AI to unlock geothermal power
Biden aims to boost production of sustainable aviation fuel with tax credits
California retirement plan Calstrs reveals problems calculating carbon footprint of its $331 billion portfolio
How insurers game out disaster risk and drop customers
Methane emissions from gas flaring being hidden from satellite monitors
Marc Benioff wanted to save 1 trillion trees by 2030. It’s not going great.
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