Tim Belzer – Page 51

The revolution starts now with Andor S2 teaser

Andor, culture, Disney Plus, Entertainment, streaming television, Trailers, TV trailers / Tim Belzer / February 25, 2025

Diego Luna returns as Cassian in the forthcoming second season of Andor.

The first season of Andor, the Star Wars prequel series to Rogue One and A New Hope, earned critical raves for its gritty aesthetic and multilayered narrative rife with political intrigue. While ratings were a bit sluggish, they were good enough to win the series a second season, and Disney+ just dropped the first action-packed teaser trailer.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the story begins five years before the events of Rogue One, with the Empire’s destruction of Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) homeworld and follows his transformation from a “revolution-averse” cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. S1 left off with Cassian returning to Ferrix for the funeral of his adoptive mother, Maarva (Fiona Shaw), rescuing a friend from prison, and dodging an assassination attempt. A post-credits scene showed prisoners assembling the firing dish of the now-under-construction Death Star.

According to the official longline, S2 “will see the characters and their relationships intensify as the horizon of war draws near and Cassian becomes a key player in the Rebel Alliance. Everyone will be tested and, as the stakes rise, the betrayals, sacrifices and conflicting agendas will become profound. “

In addition to Luna, most of the main cast from S1 is returning: Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma, a senator of the Republic who helped found the Rebel Alliance; Adria Arjona as mechanic and black market dealer Bix Caleen; James McArdle as Caleen’s boyfriend, Timm Karlo; Kyle Soller as Syril Karn, deputy inspector for the Preox-Morlana Authority; Stellan Skarsgård as Luthen Rael, an antiques dealer who is secretly part of the Rebel Alliance; Denise Gough as Dedra Meero, supervisor for the Imperial Security Bureau; Faye Marsay as Vel Sartha, a Rebel leader on the planet Aldhani; Varada Sethu as Cinta Kaz, another Aldhani Rebel; Elizabeth Dulau as Luthen’s assistant Kleya; and Muhannad Bhaier as Wilmon, who runs the Repaak Salyard.

The revolution starts now with Andor S2 teaser Read More »

This EV could reboot medium-duty trucking by not reinventing the wheel

Cars, electric trucks, Harbinger / Tim Belzer / February 22, 2025

Modest goals and keeping within the lines have done this startup well.

Harbinger’s rolling chassis, at the company’s factory in Garden Grove, California. Credit: Tim Stevens

GARDEN GROVE, Calif.—There’s no shortage of companies looking to reinvent the delivery experience using everything from sidewalk drones to electric vans. Some are succeeding, but many more have failed by trying to radically rethink the simple, age-old task of getting stuff from one place to another.

Harbinger likewise wants to shake up part of that industry but in a decidedly understated way. If you found yourself stuck in traffic behind one of the company’s all-electric vehicles, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t even notice. The only difference? The lack of diesel smoke and clatter.

From the outside, Harbinger’s pre-production machine looks identical to the standard flat-sided, vinyl-wrapped delivery vehicles that seemingly haven’t changed in decades. That’s because they really haven’t. Those familiar UPS and FedEx machines are built on common chassis like Ford’s F-59 or Freightliner’s MT45, with ladder chassis and leaf spring designs dating back to the earliest days of trucking.

Rather than discarding decades of learning and optimization, Harbinger is keeping its focus narrow, changing only what’s required to move the industry away from expensive and ugly combustion to cleaner and cheaper electric drive.

Harbinger is exclusively focused on medium-duty options right now, trucks that are significantly larger than the Rivians or Mercedes eSprinters of the world. “That’s basically everything 5 through 15 tons or thereabouts,” co-founder and Harbinger CTO Phillip Weicker said, “the dominant product for what’s called a strip chassis, essentially what in the passenger market is called a skateboard.”

Yes, Harbinger just builds the chassis. Everything on top comes from somewhere else.

“Most medium-duty vehicles are built by one company building the chassis [and] another company installing the body,” Weicker said. “So this made the perfect sense for our first product because we’re going to be focused almost entirely on the differentiated aspects. We don’t have to deal with the high capital investments for body in white, paint shop, [and] a lot of the things that have cost EV startups lots of money just to get to a table-stakes position with their incoming competitors.”

If you’re a company that wants a medium-duty vehicle like this, your dealer sources the chassis for you and then coordinates sending it to a company called an upfitter. The upfitter then builds the entire body on top of the chassis to your exact specifications.

Designs from upfitters have been defined and refined over decades of experience by the companies that operate them. Those giant white or brown delivery vans might look very similar from the outside, but there’s a lot of nuance to their design.

“The door handles work slightly differently. The locking logic works differently. The vehicles are about 2 inches narrower for one of those companies than the other,” Harbinger co-founder and CEO John Harris said. “These are all designed to get the driver in and out of the door one second faster at every stop, to get in and out of the depot and load the vehicle two or three minutes faster.”

A man drives a delivery van — Harbinger CTO Phillip Weicker demoing the delivery van. Credit: Tim Stevens

Harbinger’s solution fits the same template but operates in a very different way. It’s still a big, long ladder-frame, and it uses a leaf-spring rear suspension. But rather than slapping a big engine up front, Harbinger relies on a 330-kW (443 hp) electric motor that’s wound in-house and mounted between the rear wheels. It uses a De Dion arrangement, which isolates the heavy motor from the rear suspension.

The idea was to keep the whole thing simple and familiar so that any company that wanted to get off diesel could start ordering vehicles with a Harbinger chassis without radically changing its fleet management or driver training.

I got a chance to see just how familiar the two things are during my visit to Harbinger’s 5,000-square-foot headquarters in Garden Grove, California. I wish I could say driving the Harbinger was an evocative, world-changing experience, but the company’s ethos of not reinventing the wheel very much continues through to the experience of sitting behind the wheel that steers the thing.

I started by taking a lap of the Harbinger parking lot in a Ford F-59-based machine, a former delivery truck that had already lived a hard life before it was put out to pasture, becoming something of a test mule for Harbinger. I’d never driven anything exactly like this before, but I have spent many hours droning down the highway in various abused U-Haul trucks, and the experience is much the same.

The same, but louder. Yes, the 6.7-liter diesel certainly makes a lot of noise, but the creaking and crashing of the boxy body built on top of that aged ladder-frame chassis is deafening. The automatic transmission has a leisurely approach to its job, delivering the next gear only when absolutely needed. The throttle delivers the kind of precision response that had me slamming my foot to the floor just to get around the parking lot. Doing so made a lot more noise but not much more acceleration.

That part, at least, is radically different in the Harbinger. While the throttle pedal has the same long throw, you needn’t dip nearly so far into it. A light pedal brush had the empty Harbinger delivery truck leaping forward. It’s hardly a Lucid Air Sapphire, but it still surged forward with the sort of instant acceleration that makes EVs so addictive.

Braking, too, is far more sharp. I lurched against the racy orange seatbelt the first time I stepped on the left pedal, and the combination of regenerative braking and fresh disc brakes made for a far more effective slowing solution.

There’s no transmission to worry about here, either. Instead of slinging a giant column shifter downward, in the Harbinger, you just hit the D button and pull away.

Harbinger truck interior — It’s not the most stylish cabin we’ve sat in. Credit: Tim Stevens

In motion, though, the experience is much the same. You’re seated up high, deafened by the clatter and bangs from the empty, boxy body, which, again, is exactly like that built on a traditional truck. The feedback is so harsh that it’s actually difficult to separate the overall ride quality of the truck. Still, even unladen, and thus at its harshest, it’s a far smoother drive than the Ford.

It’s easier to turn, too. The Harbinger offers 50 degrees of steering angle at the front. I pulled off my first U-turn on a narrow, suburban LA street quickly enough to not get honked at by even a single impatient Angelino.

It ultimately wasn’t the plush, hushed experience offered by your average electric sedan, but that’s not the point. By keeping everything familiar, Harbinger CEO John Harris told me Harbinger can offer a product with price parity to those aged, diesel-powered machines. Harris declined to provide formal pricing, but its affordability is at least partially dependent on federal incentives.

Currently, alternatively fueled medium-duty vehicles like Harbinger’s are eligible for the Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit 45W, which provides incentives of up to $40,000, depending on vehicle size and propulsion type.

A shelf of battery cell assemblies — Battery modules. Credit: Tim Stevens

“Where we’re pricing the vehicles, we need that 45 W if we want to undercut diesel, and that’s what we’re doing,” Harris said. “With 45 W, we can undercut the typical diesel vehicle by a few thousand dollars.”

But even if that credit goes away under the current administration, Harbinger has some price flexibility to remain competitive, he added.

That’s doubly true if you factor in operating costs. Harris says the average cost to operate a medium-duty vehicle like this is $0.50 per mile for fuel, or $0.85 if you factor in all costs relating to the vehicle itself. Harbinger is aiming to halve that, targeting $0.40 per mile. But, Harris says, Harbinger doesn’t need to lean on that total cost of ownership (TCO) logic.

“On a TCO basis, it’s easy: We blow diesel trucks away. But the whole point is to have the right acquisition cost from day one, and then the simpler operating costs deliver savings every day,” he said.

A cast EV battery case — The cast battery pack enclosure. Credit: Tim Stevens

Still, that’s potentially a huge savings when you consider the hundreds of thousands of miles a machine will cover over its lifespan, which is expected to be measured in decades, not years. Many of the medium-duty delivery vehicles you see on the road today date from the last century. Harbinger’s chassis has been designed to last just as long, including its custom-made, gigacast battery packs, which were designed for durability.

“If you took the battery pack out of a Tesla Model 3, and you put it in a commercial truck, and you tried to operate it in that environment, even if the cells lasted, I think the rest of the battery system would kind of shake itself to pieces,” Weicker said.

Harbinger customers can specify their desired pack size, and there’s even a hybrid model with an onboard generator for extended running. Harris, Harbinger’s CEO, declined to say when the company’s chassis will be in full production other than “very soon.” The company has 4,000 preorders on the books, and it has already delivered pre-production models to customers like Thor.

It’s a modest start for the company, which today counts 330 employees, but in an age of EV startups promising the moon and delivering little more than hype, the Harbinger’s focus on the basics is refreshing—and encouraging.

This EV could reboot medium-duty trucking by not reinventing the wheel Read More »

Google’s cheaper YouTube Premium Lite subscription will drop Music

Google, music streaming, youtube / Tim Belzer / February 22, 2025

YouTube dominates online video, but it’s absolutely crammed full of ads these days. A YouTube Premium subscription takes care of that, but ad blockers do exist. Google seems to have gotten the message—a cheaper streaming subscription is on the way that drops YouTube Music from the plan. You may have to give up more than music to get the cheaper rate, though.

Google started testing cheaper YouTube subscriptions in a few international markets, including Germany and Australia, over the past year. Those users have been offered the option of subscribing to the YouTube Premium plan, which runs $13.99 in the US, or a new plan that costs about half as much. For example, in Australia, the options are AU$23 for YouTube Premium or AU$12 for “YouTube Premium Lite.”

The Lite plan drops YouTube Music but keeps ad-free YouTube, which is all most people want anyway. Based on the early tests, these plans will probably drop a few other features that you’d miss, including background playback and offline downloads. However, this plan could cost as little as $7–$8 in the US.

Perhaps at this point, you think you’ve outsmarted Google—you can just watch ad-free music videos with the Lite plan, right? Wrong. Users who have tried the Lite plan in other markets report that it doesn’t actually remove all the ads on the site. You may still see banner ads around videos, as well as pre-roll ads before music videos specifically. If you want access to Google’s substantial music catalog without ads, you’ll still need to pay for the full plan.

Bloomberg reports that YouTube Premium Lite is on the verge of launching in the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand.

“As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, we’ve been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets,” Google said in a statement. “We’re hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners’ support.”

Google’s cheaper YouTube Premium Lite subscription will drop Music Read More »

Robot with 1,000 muscles twitches like human while dangling from ceiling

AI, clone, Clone Robitcs, creepy, machine learning, Protoclone, robot, robot prototype, robotics, Tech / Tim Belzer / February 21, 2025

Plans for 279 robots to start

While the Protoclone is a twitching, dangling robotic prototype right now, there’s a lot of tech packed into its body. Protoclone’s sensory system includes four depth cameras in its skull for vision, 70 inertial sensors to track joint positions, and 320 pressure sensors that provide force feedback. This system lets the robot react to visual input and learn by watching humans perform tasks.

As you can probably tell by the video, the current Protoclone prototype is still in an early developmental stage, requiring ceiling suspension for stability. Clone Robotics previously demonstrated components of this technology in 2022 with the release of its robotic hand, which used the same Myofiber muscle system.

Artificial Muscles Robotic Arm Full Range of Motion + Static Strength Test (V11).

A few months ago, Clone Robotics also showed off a robotic torso powered by the same technology.

Torso 2 by Clone with Actuated Abdomen.

Other companies’ robots typically use other types of actuators, such as solenoids and electric motors. Clone’s pressure-based muscle system is an interesting approach, though getting Protoclone to stand and balance without the need for suspension or umbilicals may still prove a challenge.

Clone Robotics plans to start its production with 279 units called Clone Alpha, with plans to open preorders later in 2025. The company has not announced pricing for these initial units, but given the engineering challenges still ahead, a functional release any time soon seems optimistic.

Robot with 1,000 muscles twitches like human while dangling from ceiling Read More »

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy

altice, copyright infringement, Policy / Tim Belzer / February 20, 2025

Cable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs.

The subscribers “were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices,” said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber “of Altice’s intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order,” and telling the notified subscribers that they have 30 days to seek relief from the court.

If subscribers do not object within a month, Altice must disclose the subscribers’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. The judge’s order was issued on February 12 and reported yesterday by TorrentFreak.

The names and contact information will be classified as “highly confidential—attorneys’ eyes only.” A separate order issued in April 2024 said that documents produced in discovery “shall be used by the Parties only in the litigation of this Action and shall not be used for any other purpose.”

Altice, which operates the Optimum brand, was sued in December 2023 in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The music publishers’ complaint alleges that Altice “knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers.”

The lawsuit said plaintiffs sent over 70,000 infringement notices to Altice from February 2020 through November 2023. At least a few subscribers were allegedly hit with hundreds of notices. The lawsuit gave three examples of IP addresses that were cited in 502, 781, and 926 infringement notices, respectively.

Altice failed to terminate repeat infringers whose IP addresses were flagged in these copyright notices, the lawsuit said. “Those notices advised Altice of its subscribers’ blatant and systematic use of Altice’s Internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs’ copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services. Rather than working with Plaintiffs to curb this massive infringement, Altice did nothing, choosing to prioritize its own profits over its legal obligations,” the plaintiffs alleged.

ISPs face numerous lawsuits

This is one of numerous copyright lawsuits filed against broadband providers, and it’s not the first time an ISP handed names of subscribers to the plaintiffs. We have previously written articles about film studios trying to force Reddit to identify users who admitted torrenting in discussion forums. Reddit was able to avoid providing information in one case in part because the film studios already obtained identifying details for 118 subscribers directly from Grande, the ISP they had sued.

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy Read More »

“Truly a middle finger”: Humane bricking $700 AI Pins with limited refunds

AI, HP, Tech, wearables / Tim Belzer / February 19, 2025

After launching its AI Pin in April 2024 and reportedly seeking a buyout by May 2024, Humane is shutting down. Most of the people who bought an AI Pin will not get refunds for the devices, which debuted at $700, dropped to $500, and will be bricked on February 28 at noon PT.

At that time, AI Pins, which are lapel pins with an integrated AI voice assistant, camera, speaker, and laser projector, “will no longer connect to Humane’s servers,” and “all customer data, including personal identifiable information… will be permanently deleted from Humane’s servers,” according to Humane’s FAQ page. Humane also stopped selling AI pins as of yesterday and canceled any orders that had been made but not yet fulfilled. Humane said it is discontinuing the AI Pin because it’s “moving onto new endeavors.”

Those new endeavors include selling off key assets, including the AI Pin’s CosmOS operating system and intellectual property, including over 300 patents and patent applications, to HP for $116 million, HP announced on Tuesday. HP expects the acquisition to close this month.

Notably, Humane raised $241 million to make its pin and was reportedly valued at $1 billion before launch. Last year, Humane was seeking a sale price of $750 million to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

But the real failure is in the company’s treatment of its customers, who will only get a refund if they “are still within the 90-day return window from their original shipment date,” Humane’s FAQ page says. “All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024, are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.”

AI Pins “will no longer function as a cellular device or connect to Humane’s servers. This means no calls, texts, or data usage will be possible,” according to the startup, which noted that users can’t port their phone number to another device or wireless carrier. Some offline features “like battery level” will still work, Humane said, but overall, the product will become $700 e-waste for most owners in nine days.

“Truly a middle finger”: Humane bricking $700 AI Pins with limited refunds Read More »

Valve releases full Team Fortress 2 game code to encourage new, free versions

gaming, half life 2, half-life deathmatch, half-life: source, source code, Source Engine, steam, Team Fortress 2, valve / Tim Belzer / February 19, 2025

Valve’s updates to its classic games evoke Hemingway’s two kinds of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Nothing is heard, little is seen, and then, one day, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Day of Defeat, and other Source-engine-based games get a bevy of modern upgrades. Now, the entirety of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) client and server game code, a boon for modders and fixers, is also being released.

That source code allows for more ambitious projects than have been possible thus far, Valve wrote in a blog post. “Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend, or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible.” The SDK license restricts any resulting projects to “a non-commercial basis,” but they can be published on Steam’s store as their own entities.

Since it had the tools out, Valve also poked around the games based on that more open source engine and spiffed them up as well. Most games got 64-bit binary support, scalable HUD graphics, borderless window options, and the like. Many of these upgrades come from the big 25-year anniversary update made to Half-Life 2, which included “overbright lighting,” gamepad configurations, Steam networking support, and the like.

Valve releases full Team Fortress 2 game code to encourage new, free versions Read More »

Microsoft warns that the powerful XCSSET macOS malware is back with new tricks

Apple, Biz & IT, macOS, malware, Security, Xcode, xcsset / Tim Belzer / February 18, 2025

“These enhanced features add to this malware family’s previously known capabilities, like targeting digital wallets, collecting data from the Notes app, and exfiltrating system information and files,” Microsoft wrote. XCSSET contains multiple modules for collecting and exfiltrating sensitive data from infected devices.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Mac now detects the new XCSSET variant, and it’s likely other malware detection engines will soon, if not already. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t release file hashes or other indicators of compromise that people can use to determine if they have been targeted. A Microsoft spokesperson said these indicators will be released in a future blog post.

To avoid falling prey to new variants, Microsoft said developers should inspect all Xcode projects downloaded or cloned from repositories. The sharing of these projects is routine among developers. XCSSET exploits the trust developers have by spreading through malicious projects created by the attackers.

Microsoft warns that the powerful XCSSET macOS malware is back with new tricks Read More »

3D map of exoplanet atmosphere shows wacky climate

astronomy, astrophysics, exoplanet atmospheres, exoplanets, Science, spectroscopy / Tim Belzer / February 18, 2025

Last year, astronomers discovered an unusual Earth-size exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its other hemisphere tidally locked in perpetual darkness. And at about the same time, a different group discovered a rare small, cold exoplanet with a massive outer companion 100 times the mass of Jupiter.

Meet Tylos

The different layers of the atmosphere on WASP-121b.

This latest research relied on observational data collected by the European South Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope, specifically, a spectroscopic instrument called ESPRESSO that can process light collected from the four largest VLT telescope units into one signal. The target exoplanet, WASP-121b—aka Tylos—is located in the Puppis constellation about 900 light-years from Earth. One year on Tylos is equivalent to just 30 hours on Earth, thanks to the exoplanet’s close proximity to its host star. Since one side is always facing the star, it is always scorching, while the exoplanet’s other side is significantly colder.

Those extreme temperature contrasts make it challenging to figure out how energy is distributed in the atmospheric system, and mapping out the 3D structure can help, particularly with determining the vertical circulation patterns that are not easily replicated in our current crop of global circulation models, per the authors. For their analysis, they combined archival ESPRESSO data collected on November 30, 2018, with new data collected on September 23, 2023. They focused on three distinct chemical signatures to probe the deep atmosphere (iron), mid-atmosphere (sodium), and shallow atmosphere (hydrogen).

“What we found was surprising: A jet stream rotates material around the planet’s equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet,” said Julia Victoria Seidel of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, as well as the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France. “This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works—not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction.”

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08664-1

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2025. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202452405 (About DOIs).

3D map of exoplanet atmosphere shows wacky climate Read More »

Turning the Moon into a fuel depot will take a lot of power

chemistry, oxygen, oxygen production, Science, Space, Space exploration / Tim Belzer / February 17, 2025

Getting oxygen from regolith takes 24 kWh per kilogram, and we’d need tonnes.

Without adjustments for relativity, clocks here and on the Moon would rapidly diverge. Credit: NASA

If humanity is ever to spread out into the Solar System, we’re going to need to find a way to put fuel into rockets somewhere other than the cozy confines of a launchpad on Earth. One option for that is in low-Earth orbit, which has the advantage of being located very close to said launch pads. But it has the considerable disadvantage of requiring a lot of energy to escape Earth’s gravity—it takes a lot of fuel to put substantially less fuel into orbit.

One alternative is to produce fuel on the Moon. We know there is hydrogen and oxygen present, and the Moon’s gravity is far easier to overcome, meaning more of what we produce there can be used to send things deeper into the Solar System. But there is a tradeoff: any fuel production infrastructure will likely need to be built on Earth and sent to the Moon.

How much infrastructure is that going to involve? A study released today by PNAS evaluates the energy costs of producing oxygen on the Moon, and finds that they’re substantial: about 24 kWh per kilogram. This doesn’t sound bad until you start considering how many kilograms we’re going to eventually need.

Free the oxygen!

The math that makes refueling from the Moon appealing is pretty simple. “As a rule of thumb,” write the authors of the new study on the topic, “rockets launched from Earth destined for [Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1] must burn ~25 kg of propellant to transport one kg of payload, whereas rockets launched from the Moon to [Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1] would burn only ~four kg of propellant to transport one kg of payload.” Departing from the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point for locations deeper into the Solar System also requires less energy than leaving low-Earth orbit, meaning the fuel we get there is ultimately more useful, at least from an exploration perspective.

But, of course, you need to make the fuel there in the first place. The obvious choice for that is water, which can be split to produce hydrogen and oxygen. We know there is water on the Moon, but we don’t yet know how much, and whether it’s concentrated into large deposits. Given that uncertainty, people have also looked at other materials that we know are present in abundance on the Moon’s surface.

And there’s probably nothing more abundant on that surface than regolith, the dust left over from constant tiny impacts that have, over time, eroded lunar rocks. The regolith is composed of a variety of minerals, many of which contain oxygen, typically the heavier component of rocket fuel. And a variety of people have figured out the chemistry involved in separating oxygen from these minerals on the scale needed for rocket fuel production.

But knowing the chemistry is different from knowing what sort of infrastructure is needed to get that chemistry done at a meaningful scale. To get a sense of this, the researchers decided to focus on isolating oxygen from a mineral called ilmenite, or FeTiO₃. It’s not the easiest way to get oxygen—iron oxides win out there—but it’s well understood. Someone actually patented oxygen production from ilmenite back in the 1970s, and two hardware prototypes have been developed, one of which may be sent to the Moon on a future NASA mission.

The researchers propose a system that would harvest regolith, partly purify the ilmenite, then combine it with hydrogen at high temperatures, which would strip the oxygen out as water, leaving behind purified iron and titanium (both of which may be useful to have). The resulting water would then be split to feed the hydrogen back into the system, while the oxygen can be sent off for use in rockets.

(This wouldn’t solve the issue of what that oxygen will ultimately oxidize to power a rocket. But oxygen is typically the heavier component of rocket fuel combinations—typically about 80 percent of the mass—and so the bigger challenge to get to a fuel depot.)

Obviously, this process will require a lot of infrastructure, like harvesters, separators, high-temperature reaction chambers, and more. But the researchers focus on a single element: how much power will it suck down?

More power!

To get their numbers, the researchers made a few simplifying assumptions. These include assuming that it’s possible to purify ilmenite from raw regolith and that it will be present in particles small enough that about half the material present will participate in chemical reactions. They ignored both the potential to get even more oxygen from the iron and titanium oxides present, as well as the potential for contamination from problematic materials like hydrogen sulfide or hydrochloric acid.

The team found that almost all of the energy is consumed at three steps in the process: the high-temperature hydrogen reaction that produces water (55 percent), splitting the water afterwards (38 percent), and converting the resulting oxygen to its liquid form (five percent). The typical total usage, depending on factors like the concentration of ilmenite in the regolith, worked out to be about 24 kW-hr for each kilogram of liquid oxygen.

Obviously, the numbers are sensitive to how efficiently you can do things like heat the reaction mix. (It might be possible to do this heating with concentrated solar, avoiding the use of electricity for this entirely, but the authors didn’t analyze that.) But it was also sensitive to less obvious efficiencies. For example, a better separation of the ilmenite from the rest of the regolith means you’re using less energy to heat contaminants. So, while the energetic cost of that separation is small, it pays off to do it effectively.

Based on orbital observations, the researchers map out the areas where ilmenite is present at high enough concentrations for this approach to make sense. These include some of the mares on the near side of the Moon, so they’re easy to get to.

A map of the lunar surface with locations highlighted in color. — A map of the lunar surface, with areas with high ilmenite concentrations shown in blue. Credit: Leger, et. al.

On its own, 24 kWh doesn’t seem like a lot of power. The problem is that we will need a lot of kilograms. The researchers estimate that getting an empty SpaceX Starship from the lunar surface to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point takes 80 tonnes of liquid oxygen. And a fully fueled starship can hold over 500 tonnes of liquid oxygen.

We can compare that to something like the solar array on the International Space Station, which has a capacity of about 100 kW. That means it could power the production of about four kilograms of oxygen an hour. At that rate, it’ll take a bit over 10 days to produce a tonne, and a bit more than two years to get enough oxygen to get an empty Starship to the Lagrange Point—assuming 24-7 production. Being on the near side, they will only produce for half the time, given the lunar day.

Obviously, we can build larger arrays than that, but it boosts the amount of material that needs to be sent to the Moon from Earth. It may potentially make more sense to use nuclear power. While that would likely involve more infrastructure than solar arrays, it would allow the facilities to run around the clock, thus getting more production from everything else we’ve shipped from Earth.

This paper isn’t meant to be the final word on the possibilities for lunar-based refueling; it’s simply an early attempt to put hard numbers on what ultimately might be the best way to explore our Solar System. Still, it provides some perspective on just how much effort we’ll need to make before that sort of exploration becomes possible.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2306146122 (About DOIs).

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Turning the Moon into a fuel depot will take a lot of power Read More »

Despite court orders, climate and energy programs stalled by Trump freeze

climate change, environmental justice, EPA, Policy, Science, syndication, trump administration / Tim Belzer / February 17, 2025

Chief of the EPA is also trying to claw back $20 billion, citing alleged wrongdoing.

President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding shows little sign of thawing for climate, energy and environmental justice programs.

Despite two federal court orders directing the administration to resume distributing federal grants and loans, at least $19 billion in Environmental Protection Agency funding to thousands of state and local governments and nonprofits remained on hold as of Feb. 14, said environmental and legal advocates who are tracking the issue.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to seek return of an additional $20 billion the agency invested last year in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, calling for a Department of Justice investigation into what he characterized as a “scheme… purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

Environmental advocates said Zeldin was unfairly smearing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or “green bank,” program, on which EPA worked for more than a year with the Treasury Department to design a standard financial agent arrangement—the kind the government has used many times before to collect and distribute funds.

Critics believe the Trump administration, thwarted last week in its effort to get an appeals court to reinstate its sweeping government-wide freeze on federal funding, is resorting to a new tactic—labeling individual programs as nefarious or fraudulent. Although that approach has met with some success—a federal judge last week allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to freeze $80 million in funding from a migrant shelter program in New York—legal experts said courts will be looking for specifics and evidence, not broad assertions that programs are improper.

“They cannot challenge an entire program based on charges of fraud and waste,” said Jillian Blanchard, a vice president of the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government. “If they had actual concerns about fraud or waste, they would need to follow clear procedures and protocols in the regulations, going grant by grant to address this, but that’s not what’s happening here. They are challenging entire programs whole cloth without evidence.

“The executive does not have the authority to change policies simply because they don’t like them,” Blanchard said at a virtual briefing for reporters on Friday. “Congress makes the law, not the president and certainly not Elon Musk,” she said, referring to the billionaire donor whom Trump has deputized to cut government spending.

Feeling the freeze

Across the country, the spending freeze has thrown into chaos the environmental, resilience and community improvement programs that Congress authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among the efforts on hold: clean drinking water, air monitoring, hurricane recovery and electric school buses.

“Real people on the ground are being hurt by the stop-start situation,” said Blanchard, whose group is working with the Natural Resources Defense Council on the cases of 230 grantees in 44 states.

Grantees are in a state of confusion because they have not heard directly from EPA, she said.

Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a coalition of former EPA employees that is also working with Lawyers for Good Government, said many grantees are not sure what is happening because the agency’s employees have been forbidden to talk to people outside of the agency.

Several grantees reached by Inside Climate News said that they were not talking to the press, or did not want to say whether or not they could access their funding.

MDC, a nonprofit in Durham, North Carolina, along with the Hispanic Federation, was supposed to receive a $3 million environmental justice community change grant for disaster recovery and resilience programs in Latino areas of eastern North Carolina.

“We were thrilled to receive federal support to do this work, but unfortunately, like many others, we have experienced an interruption in accessing this funding,” said Clarissa Goodlett, MDC’s director of communications.

Many neighborhoods, especially those that are home to low-income, Black and Latino residents, are still rebuilding from hurricanes that hit in 2016 and 2018.

During the storms, rural counties in eastern North Carolina did not provide real-time emergency alerts or evacuation orders in Spanish, according to Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language digital news outlet.

The MDC grant would help Latinos connect with local governments to ensure their communities are included in discussions and decisions about the impact of climate disasters.

“We are investigating and pursuing whatever options and channels are available to us to ensure we can follow through on our commitment to communities in eastern North Carolina,” Goodlett said.

Dorothy Darr, executive director of the Southwest Renewal Foundation in High Point, near Greensboro, North Carolina, said she doesn’t know if the group’s $18.4 million grant is frozen. Southwest Renewal is teaming up with eight partners to support not only environmental projects—tree planting, water testing and building an urban greenway—but also workforce training and infrastructure improvements. These include upgrades to old, leaking sewer lines and inefficient HVAC systems and a new energy-efficient “cool” roof at a Guilford County school.

The money would also pay for nine new public electric vehicle charging stations, anti-littering campaigns and other improvements in historically Black and low-income neighborhoods in the southwest part of the city.

Darr said the foundation only recently received an account number from the EPA, and she plans to try to access the funds Monday.

“The grant title”—Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants—”has the words ‘environment’ and ‘justice’ in it,” Darr said. “If you’re just slashing programs based on words, then we’re a sitting duck.”

In Texas, the nonprofit group Downwiders at Risk received word in a Feb. 4 letter that it had received a $500,000 EPA environmental justice “collaborative problem-solving” grant it had applied for last year. The money was to be used to install community air monitors in neighborhoods near Dallas. But the notification didn’t provide instructions on how to access the money, and no followup ever came.

Executive Director Caleb Roberts called around his local EPA office, but no one could give answers.

“People are still unsure. Our project officer at the EPA has no idea. I’ve emailed people higher up,” Roberts said. “They have no idea if things are funded or not. They are just as in the dark as we are.”

Downwinders’ award letter said they had 21 days to pull their first block of funding. If no instructions to access the money arrive before then, Robert worries they may lose it.

The city of New Haven, Connecticut, only received word on Jan. 21—the day after Trump’s inauguration—that it and its local nonprofit partners had received a $20 million environmental justice community change grant, according to Steve Winter, who heads up the city’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. But he had never been able to access the funds; the online system originally said “unavailable for payment;” that changed on Feb. 10 to “suspended.”

The money was supposed to help fund whole-home energy efficiency retrofits in a city where one-quarter of the population lives in poverty and where energy costs have skyrocketed since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Winter said. Connecticut, like much of New England, relies heavily on heating oil in winter—not only the most expensive home heating fuel, but the most polluting. The grants also would have helped with asbestos and mold remediation in the homes, which are necessary before energy efficiency upgrades can be done.

Winter said the city has warned its partners that they now may need to lay off staff that they’ve hired for outreach for energy efficiency programs, and the future of a community geothermal project is at risk. Also up in the air: a local food rescue organization’s plans to increase staff and food storage capacity.

“People might say, oh this environmental justice grant is some frivolous thing, but it’s about helping people with quality affordable housing, with lowering their energy bills, alleviating hunger in the community, providing affordable transportation options,” Winter said. “These are all trying to meet basic needs that also have an environmental impact.”

A “rush job” accusation

The Trump administration’s drive to root out “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI programs, throughout the government has swept up environmental justice programs at EPA, even though the two are distinct policy initiatives similar only in that they often involve people of color. After taking office two weeks ago, the first employees that Zeldin announced he was eliminating from the agency were those in DEI and environmental justice programs.

“The previous Administration used DEI and Environmental Justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity,” Zeldin said in a statement. “This ends now. We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”

Last week, as thousands more employees at EPA and other federal agencies were placed on administrative leave or accepted the deferred retirement offer, Zeldin escalated his critiques on environmental justice and climate programs.

In a video first posted on X, Musk’s social media platform, on Wednesday night,

Zeldin called out $20 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that he said had been “parked at an outside financial institution,” suggesting that the money was given away in a “rush job” in the waning days of the Biden administration. In fact, the money in question was awarded to eight recipients in August, well before the election. The program’s defenders say it went through a rigorous selection process that began more than a year before the awards were announced.

The $20 billion falls under two programs within the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and is intended to support nonprofits and financial institutions to serve as green banks. The eight recipients, which received between $400,000 and $7 billion, are supposed to use that money to finance projects by businesses and nonprofits around the country that would cut climate pollution. Much of the money is dedicated to low-income communities, where it is often harder for businesses to raise private financing.

The recipients have already begun using the funding to support businesses, including $250 million for an electric truck financing program beginning at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, $31.8 million in financing for a solar project for the University of Arkansas System and $10.8 million for solar projects on Tribal lands in Oregon and Idaho.

Unlike most of the grant recipients under the IRA, who draw down their money over time as work is completed, the green banks already received their money. Zealan Hoover, who administered IRA programs at EPA during the Biden administration, said the money was placed into bank accounts at Citibank under terms of financial agreements worked out with the Treasury Department.

Although EPA had never used such an outside financial agent before, the Treasury Department had made such agreements with outside institutions many times in the past to distribute or collect money. The system used for electronic federal tax payments, for expanding access to retirement savings and for getting money to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic are just a few of the examples he cited.

“What is underway is not a good-faith effort to fight fraud,” Hoover said. “If it was, federal agencies would not be firing thousands of employees who are hired to conduct robust management and oversight of these programs.”

Zeldin said he was calling for termination of the financial agent agreement for the green bank program, and for the immediate return of the entire fund balance to the United States Treasury. He also said he was referring the issue to the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General and Congress and would “work with the U.S. Department of Justice.” In fact, EPA’s inspector general was dismissed in the early days of the Trump administration along with those at 16 other agencies. EPA’s press office said the agency currently has an acting inspector general but when asked, did not respond with that person’s name. EPA did not answer further questions on the financial agent program, referring only to Zeldin’s video post.

“The American public deserves a more transparent and accountable government than what transpired the past four years,” Zeldin said in the post. “We take our obligations under the law as seriously as it gets. I’ve directed my team to find your ‘gold bars’ and they found them. Now we will get them back inside of control of government as we pursue next steps.”

Citibank declined to comment. Each of the eight recipients of the green bank funds either declined to comment or did not reply to requests for comment.

“Hard for courts to catch up”

What happens next for the grant recipients is not entirely clear. Courts have issued temporary restraining orders to halt the funding freeze until the issue can be argued on its merits. In a five-page order issued Feb. 10, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island said that it was clear that the administration had in some instances continued “to improperly freeze federal funds.”

McConnell ordered the administration to “immediately end any funding pause,” but EPA and other agencies that are administering IRA climate programs, like the Department of Energy, are continuing to hold back funds.

“We’re talking about funding for families to make upgrades that help them save on their monthly energy bill, funding for people to buy energy efficient appliances and to retrofit their home so that cold air stays out in the winter and hot air stays out in the summer,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. “Those programs aren’t just important to tackling the climate crisis. They are saving our families money.”

“What is painfully clear is that Trump’s illegal funding freeze is causing chaos and confusion,” Murray said.

But Murray and other Democrats, who helped shepherd the IRA to passage in 2022 with no Republican votes, now have little power to force a showdown in a Congress controlled by Republicans. And although multiple studies have shown that most of the $379 billion Congress devoted to funding the clean energy transition in that legislation has flowed to Republican districts, there has been little sign so far that GOP leaders are inclined to clash with the administration. In a few instances, Republicans have sought protection for individual programs that affect their own states.

Blanchard and other legal experts said the courts will have the final say on whether the Trump administration can continue to selectively freeze federal funds. But the decisions may not come soon enough for the programs that are relying on the money they were promised.

“The problem is, as a practical matter, it’s very hard for the courts to catch up,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School. “And the impact on these communities is immediate. The place is closed down, the services aren’t provided for these communities. So the impact can be immediate and devastating, and the practical remedy may be illusory.”

Lazarus was one of the legal scholars writing about environmental justice in the 1990s, before President Bill Clinton signed the first executive order to address communities that suffer a disproportionate burden of pollution. He said that although these communities now “have a fight on their hands,” it is not a new situation for them.

“It’s not as though the government turning against their hardship is something the EJ communities don’t know,” he said. “They don’t welcome it, but they know what this is. It’s how they’ve lived their lives for decades. They fought, and they’ll continue to fight. And that’ll be fighting in cases and lawsuits, and it’ll be fighting politically.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Despite court orders, climate and energy programs stalled by Trump freeze Read More »

Trump has thrown a wrench into a national EV charging program

Cars, electric car charging stations, electrify america, EVs, Policy, syndication, trump administration / Tim Belzer / February 15, 2025

Electric charging projects have been thrown into chaos by the administration’s directive.

A row of happy EVs charge with no drama, no phone calls to the support line, and no one shuffling spots. Credit: Roberto Baldwin

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

For now, Priester’s will have to stick to its famous pecans in Fort Payne, Alabama. But maybe not for long.

Priester’s Pecans, an Alabama staple, is one of more than half a dozen sites across the state slated to receive millions of dollars in federal funding to expand access to chargers for electric vehicles.

Across the country, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law under then-President Joe Biden, is set to provide $5 billion to states for projects that expand the nation’s EV charging infrastructure.

But in a February 6 letter, a Trump administration official notified state directors of transportation that, effectively, they can’t spend it. The Federal Highway Administration rescinded guidance on the funds, which had been allocated by Congress, and “is also immediately suspending the approval of all State Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment plans for all fiscal years,” the letter said.

“Therefore, effective immediately, no new obligations may occur under the NEVI Formula Program until the updated final NEVI Formula Program Guidance is issued and new State plans are submitted and approved.”

POLITICO reported on Wednesday that a DOT spokesman said in an email that states were free to use a small portion of the funding—about $400 million—because that was money the states had already “obligated,” or awarded to subcontractors. But that would still leave close to 90 percent of the funding up in the air.

Even before the administration had issued its letter, some Republican-led states, including Alabama, had already announced pauses to their states’ implementation of the national EV charging program.

“In response to Unleashing American Energy, one of several Executive Orders that President Trump signed on January 20, 2025, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs has paused the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Program as of January 28, 2025,” the Alabama agency responsible for implementing NEVI posted on its website. “In addition, for applications for funding that were originally due on March 17, 2025, ADECA has closed the application window until further notice.”

Despite the announcement by the Trump administration, however, legal experts and those familiar with the electric charging program at issue say the president does not have the power to permanently nix the NEVI program.

“NEVI funding was appropriated by Congress as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, and it cannot be canceled by the executive branch,” said Elizabeth Turnbull, director of policy and regulatory affairs at the Alliance for Transportation Electrification, a trade group for the electric vehicle industry. “It’s not clear that the secretary of transportation has the authority to revoke states’ NEVI plans, and it’s quite clear that the executive branch lacks the authority to withhold the funding for any sustained period. So, we expect recent executive branch actions to be successfully challenged in court.”

Even under the most aggressive arguments for a strong executive branch, the Supreme Court has stated clearly that the Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate and legislate.

Lawmakers, too, have weighed in on the legality of the Trump administration’s NEVI directive, saying officials acted with “blatant disregard for the law.”

In a letter to administration officials, Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works urged the Department of Transportation to retract its February 6 letter and “implement the law according to your responsibilities.”

The Democrats’ letter also asked for responses to questions about the legal basis for the action and for information about the involvement of individuals associated with Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” DOGE is not an official department, and multiple reports show that Musk’s team has been dismantling parts or all of some federal agencies.

Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, currently has the largest network of fast chargers in the country. It’s not yet clear if any new policies on NEVI, or the pause on building out a more robust network for all EV drivers, could benefit Tesla.

The Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration’s parent agency, did not respond to a request for comment.

With or without NEVI, the move toward the electrification of transportation is inevitable, experts say. But they warn that although the administration’s pause of the program will likely be reversed by the courts, even a temporary delay in EV charging infrastructure can harm the nation’s ability to quickly and efficiently transition to electric vehicles. And the Trump administration ignored an earlier court order to lift a broad freeze on federal funds, a federal judge ruled this week.

Meanwhile, Trump’s NEVI freeze has sown confusion across the country, with EV stakeholders and state governments scrambling to figure out what the funding pause will mean and how to respond.

Beyond Alabama, interviews across the country found officials in deep red Wyoming contemplating a possible return of funds, while those in progressive states like Illinois and Maryland remain firmly committed to the EV buildout, with or without federal funding. In purple North Carolina, officials are in limbo, having already spent some NEVI funds, but not sure how to proceed with the next round of projects.

Alabama

In Alabama, officials had already announced plans to fund more than a dozen chargers at sites across the state along interstates and major highways, including installing two dual-port chargers at eight Love’s Travel Stops and another at Priester’s Pecans off I-65 in Fort Deposit.

At the time, state officials, including Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, praised the funding.

“Having strategic electric vehicle charging stations across Alabama not only benefits EV drivers, but it also benefits those companies that produce electric vehicles, including many of them right here in Alabama, resulting in more high-paying jobs for Alabamians,” Ivey said when the funding allocation was announced in July 2024. “This latest round of projects will provide added assurance that Alabamians and travelers to our state who choose electric vehicles can travel those highways and know a charging station is within a reliable distance on their routes.”

In total, Alabama was set to receive $79 million in funding through the program, including $2.4 million to expand training programs for the installation, testing, operation, and maintenance of EVs and EV chargers at Bevill State Community College in the central part of the state. The college did not respond to a request for comment on whether the money had been disbursed to the institution before the announced pause.

In an email exchange this week, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs confirmed what the agency had posted to its website in the wake of Trump’s inauguration—that the state would pause NEVI projects and await further guidance from the Trump administration.

Even with a pause, however, stakeholders in Alabama and across the country have expressed a commitment to continuing the expansion of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

For its part, Love’s Travel Stops, a 42-state chain that had been set to receive more than $5.8 million in funding for EV chargers in Alabama alone, said it will continue to roll out electric chargers at locations nationwide.

“Love’s remains committed to meeting customers’ needs regardless of fuel type and believes a robust electric vehicle charging network is a part of that,” Kim Okafor, general manager of zero emissions for Love’s, said in an emailed statement. “Love’s will continue to monitor related executive orders and subsequent changes in law to determine the next steps. This includes the Alabama Department of Transportation’s Electric Vehicle charging plan timelines.”

The state of Alabama, meanwhile, has its own EV charger program apart from NEVI that has already funded millions of dollars worth of charging infrastructure.

In January, even after its announced pause of NEVI implementation, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs announced the awarding of six grants totaling $2.26 million from state funds for the construction of EV chargers in Huntsville, Hoover, Tuscaloosa, and Mobile.

“The installation of electric vehicle charging stations at places like hotels are investments that can attract customers and add to local economies,” ADECA Director Kenneth Boswell said at the time.

North Carolina

In North Carolina, the full buildout of the state’s electric charging network under NEVI is in limbo just four months after the NC Department of Transportation announced the initial recipients of the funds.

NC DOT spokesman Jamie Kritzer said that based on the federal government’s directive, the agency is continuing with awarded projects but “pausing” the next round of requests for proposals, as well as future phases of the buildout.

If that pause were to become permanent, the state would be forced to abandon $103 million in federal infrastructure money that would have paid for an additional 41 stations to be built as part of Phase 1.

Last September the state announced it had awarded nearly $6 million to six companies to build nine public charging stations. Locations include shopping centers, travel plazas, and restaurants, most of them in economically disadvantaged communities.

NEVI requires EV charging stations in the first phase to be installed every 50 miles along the federally approved alternative fuel corridors, and that they be within one mile of those routes. The state has also prioritized Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) stations, which can charge a vehicle to 80 percent in 20 to 30 minutes.

The NEVI program is structured to reimburse private companies for up to 80 percent of the cost to construct and operate electric vehicle charging stations for five years, after which the charging stations will continue to operate without government support, according to the state DOT.

The state estimated it would have taken two to three years to finish Phase 1.

Under Phase 2, the state would award federal funds to build community-level electric vehicle charging stations, farther from the major highways, including in disadvantaged communities.

That is particularly important in North Carolina, which has the second-largest rural population in the US in terms of percentage. A third of the state’s residents live in rural areas, which are underserved by electric vehicle charging stations.

There are already more than 1,700 public electric charging stations and 4,850 ports in North Carolina, according to the US Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center. But they aren’t evenly dispersed throughout the state. Alleghany and Ashe counties, in the western mountains, have just one charging station each.

Vickie Atkinson, who lives in the country between Chapel Hill and Pittsboro in central North Carolina, drives a plug-in hybrid Ford Escape, which is powered by an electric engine or gas, unlike full electric models, which have no gas option. Plug-in hybrids typically have fully electric ranges of 35 to 40 miles.

“I try to drive on battery whenever possible,” Atkinson said. But she’s frustrated that she can’t drive from her home to downtown Siler City and back—a 60-mile round trip—without resorting to the gas engine. There are two chargers on the outskirts along US 64—only one of them is a fast charger—but none downtown.

“I really hope the chargers are installed,” Atkinson said. “I fear they won’t and I find that very frustrating.”

Former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, advocated for wider adoption of electric vehicles and infrastructure. In a 2018 executive order, Cooper established a benchmark of 80,000 registered zero-emission vehicles in the state by 2025.

North Carolina met that goal. State DOT registration data shows there were 81,658 electric vehicles and 24,457 plug-in hybrids as of September, the latest figures available.

Cooper issued a subsequent executive order in 2022 that set a more aggressive goal: 1.2 million registered electric vehicles by 2030. At the current pace of electric vehicle adoption, it’s unlikely the state will achieve that benchmark.

The electric vehicle industry is an economic driver in North Carolina. Toyota just opened a $13.9 billion battery plant in the small town of Liberty and says it will create about 5,100 new jobs. The company is scheduled to begin shipping batteries in April.

Natron Energy is building a plant in Edgecombe County, east of Raleigh, to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Experts say they are cheaper and environmentally superior to lithium-ion batteries and less likely to catch fire, although they store less energy.

The global company Kempower opened its first North American factory in Durham, where it builds charging infrastructure. Jed Routh, its vice president of markets and products for North America, said that while “the rapidly shifting market is difficult to forecast and interest in electric vehicles may slow at times over the next four years, we don’t expect it to go away. We believe that the industry will remain strong and Kempower remains committed to define, produce, and improve EV charging infrastructure throughout North America.”

North Carolina does have a separate funding source for electric charging stations that is protected from the Trump administration’s program cuts and cancellations. The state received $92 million from Volkswagen, part of the EPA’s multi-billion-dollar national settlement in 2016 with the car company, which had installed software in some of its diesel cars to cheat on emissions tests.

The Department of Environmental Quality used the settlement money to pay for 994 EV charging ports at 318 sites in North Carolina. The agency expects to add more charging stations with $1.8 million in unspent settlement funds.

Electrify America was created by the Volkswagen Group of America to implement a $2 billion portion of the settlement. It required the car company to invest in electric charging infrastructure and in the promotion of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Electrify America operates 20 charging NEVI-compliant, high-speed stations in North Carolina, using the settlement money. However, the funding pause could affect the company because it works with potential site developers and small businesses to comply with the NEVI requirements.

The company is still reviewing the details in the federal memo, company spokeswoman Tara Geiger said.

“Electrify America continues to engage with stakeholders to understand developments impacting the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program,” Geiger wrote in an email. “We remain committed to growing our coast-to-coast Hyper-Fast network to support transportation electrification.”

Wyoming

In Wyoming, Doug McGee, a state Department of Transportation spokesperson, said the agency is taking a wait and see approach to NEVI moving forward, and is not ruling out a return of funding. About half a dozen people at the department handle NEVI along with other daily responsibilities, McGee said, and it will be easy for them to put NEVI on hold while they await further instruction.

The department was in the process of soliciting proposals for EV charging stations and has not yet spent any money under NEVI. “There was very little to pause,” McGee said.

Across 6,800 miles of highway in Wyoming, there are 110 public EV charging stations, making the state’s EV infrastructure the third-smallest in the country, ahead of charging networks in only North Dakota and Alaska.

Illinois

More progressive states, including Illinois, have explicitly said they will redouble their efforts to support the expansion of EV charging infrastructure in the wake of the Trump administration’s NEVI pause.

The state of Illinois has said it remains committed to the goal of helping consumers and the public sector transition to EVs in 2025 through state funding sources, even if some NEVI projects are halted.

Commonwealth Edison Co. (ComEd), the largest electric utility in Illinois and the primary electric provider in Chicago, also announced a $100 million rebate program on Feb. 6 at the Chicago Auto Show, funds that are currently available to boost EV adoption throughout the state.

The funds are for residential EV charger and installation costs, all-electric fleet vehicles, and charging infrastructure in both the public and private sectors.

According to Cristina Botero, senior manager for beneficial electrification at ComEd, the rebate is part of a total investment of $231 million from ComEd as part of its Beneficial Electrification plan programs to promote electrification and EV adoption.

While the $231 million won’t be impacted by the Trump administration’s order, other EV projects funded by NEVI are halted. In 2022, for example, $148 million from NEVI was set to be disbursed in Illinois over the course of five years, focusing on Direct Current Fast Charging to fulfill the requirement to build charging stations every 50 miles, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

“We are still in the process of reviewing the impacts of last week’s order and evaluating next steps going forward,” said Maria Castaneda, spokesperson at IDOT, in an emailed statement.

The NEVI funds were also set to help achieve Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s goal to have 1 million EVs on Illinois roads by 2030. Officials estimated that at least 10,000 EV charging stations are needed in order to achieve this 2030 goal. Last fall, there were 1,200 charging stations open to the public.

In January, Illinois was awarded federal funds totaling $114 million from the US Department of Transportation to build 14 truck charging hubs, adding to the statewide charging infrastructure.

According to Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs for the Respiratory Health Association, most of that funding is either frozen or at risk.

However, programs like the recent ComEd rebate will not be impacted. “This is at the state level and not dictated by federal policy,” Botero said.

Maryland

In Maryland, state officials are trying to assess the fallout and find alternative ways to keep EV infrastructure efforts alive. The outcome hinges on new federal guidance and potential legal battles over the suspension.

Maryland is allocated $63 million over five years under NEVI. The Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) launched the first $12.1 million round last summer to build 126 fast-charging ports at 22 sites across many of the state’s counties. At least some are expected to be operational by late 2025.

In December, MDOT issued a new call for proposals for building up to 29 additional highway charging stations, expecting stable federal support. At the time, senior MDOT officials told Inside Climate News they were confident in the program’s security since it was authorized under law.

But Trump’s funding pause has upended those plans.

“The Maryland Department of Transportation is moving forward with its obligated NEVI funding and is awaiting new guidance from the U.S. Department of Transportation to advance future funding rounds,” said Carter Elliott, a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore, in an emailed statement.

The Moore administration reaffirmed its commitment to EV expansion, calling charging essential to reducing consumer costs and cutting climate pollution. “Gov. Moore is committed to making the state more competitive by pressing forward with the administration’s strategy to deliver charging infrastructure for clean cars to drivers across the state,” the statement added.

In written comments, an MDOT spokesperson said the agency is determining its options for future funding needs and solicitations.

Katherine García, director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All program, said that freezing the EV charging funds was an unsound and illegal move by the Trump administration. “This is an attack on bipartisan funding that Congress approved years ago and is driving investment and innovation in every state,” she said.

She said that the NEVI program is helping the US build out the infrastructure needed to support the transition to vehicles that don’t pollute the air.

The Sierra Club’s Josh Stebbins lamented the slow pace of the EV charger buildout across the state. “We are not sure when Maryland’s NEVI chargers will be operational,” he said. “States must move faster and accelerate the installation of NEVI stations. It has been frustratingly slow, and the public needs to see a return on its investment.”

Maryland EV ambitions are high stakes. Transportation remains the state’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and public officials and advocates see EV adoption as critical to meet its net-zero carbon goal by 2045. NEVI is also a key plank of the state’s broader Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Planning initiative, designed to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.

What happens next

As litigation is brought over the Trump administration’s pause on NEVI funds, experts like Turnbull of the Alliance for Transportation Electrification believe the United States remains, despite this bump, on the road toward electrification.

“We are not shifting into reverse,” Turnbull said. “The EV market will continue to grow across all market segments driven by market innovation and consumer demand, both within the United States and globally. By pretending the EV transition doesn’t exist, this administration risks the US’s global competitiveness, national security, and economic growth.”

Trump has thrown a wrench into a national EV charging program Read More »

Author name: Tim Belzer