Ford Motor Co.’s is throttling back on plans to ramp-up electric vehicle production, pointing the finger at a price war for battery-powered vehicles.
The automaker on Thursday said it would need another year to meet a year-end target to reach an annual production rate of 600,000 EVs, which it now expects to reach in 2024. Ford also abandoned plans to be making 2 million EVs a year by the end of 2026.
It now expects to see losses from EVs hit $4.5 billion this year, up from an earlier estimate of $3 billion. That’s more than double the $2.1 billion the company lost on EVs last year.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Voting with their wallets: Why EVs Are ‘Piling Up’ at Dealerships, Despite Massive Taxpayer Subsidies
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
[T]here are days like these when I’m not thinking renewables, wind turbines, solar or subsidies at all, and danged if they don’t pop out of the woodwork and smack me right upside the head.
Like this infuriating – and that’s the only word – email I got from Florida Power & Light. It’s chirpy, it’s Green, and it’s kinda pissing me off the more I think about it.
End Of Oil
1) Data indicates that future demand for oil and gas is UNDERESTIMATED, while demand destruction is HYPED.
2) Global energy demand is increasing, making decarbonization more difficult to achieve, and the process of replacing fossil fuels slower.
3) Despite massive spending on renewables in the last two decades, fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy in the world, even in Europe.
4) Coal remains the dominant source of electricity in India and China.
5) Oil is rarely used in power generation in the OECD, China, and India. Doubling or tripling solar and wind energy sources will have a very limited impact on oil demand. However, the failure of renewable energy, and consequent power shortages, will have a significant impact on oil demand.
6) As LNG prices reached a record high in 2022, oil use in power generation increased. The level of substitution among various energy sources last year was unprecedented.
Other than that, the fossil fuel industry is finished.
Ban All The Things!
Gem Hunters Found the Lithium America Needs. Maine Won’t Let Them Dig It Up
Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
It couldn’t possibly be its complete and utter uselessness, no not that: Ford Slashes Price of Electric F-150 as Demand Weakens
Ford Motor on Monday reduced prices of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck by between $6,000 and nearly $10,000, the latest sign of sluggish demand for electric vehicles.
The price cuts come as inventories of unsold electric vehicles are rising on dealer lots, and follow several rounds of discounting by Tesla, the dominant seller of electric cars.
Ford is lowering prices after it temporarily halted production of the truck this year to upgrade its assembly line and increase output. By the fall, the company expects its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center near Detroit to be able to churn out 150,000 Lightnings a year, triple its current production capacity.
Competition in the electric vehicle business is growing more intense. Tesla said on Saturday that it had started producing its much delayed Cybertruck pickup, and General Motors is expected to soon begin delivering an electric version of the Chevrolet Silverado truck.
Ford began making the Lightning in the spring of 2022 and raised prices several times by a total of around $20,000, citing increasing cost of raw materials for its batteries.
It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Math
In 2021, Jeremiah Thoronka was making a name for himself in clean-energy technology. The then 21-year-old Durham University masters student had invented a device that uses kinetic energy from traffic and pedestrians to generate electricity. It certainly sounded groundbreaking. In a pilot project in Thoronka’s native Sierra Leone, two devices had apparently provided free electricity to 150 households and 15 schools.
Thoronka’s work clearly impressed awards panel judges. In 2021, he picked up the Commonwealth Youth Award and the Global Student Prize, which was presented to him by filmstar Hugh Jackman at a virtual ceremony, broadcast from the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Thoronka was the man of the moment. There was a profile by the BBC, an invitation to give TED talks and, in May 2022, an audience with the pope. He was celebrated as a green-tech innovator, someone setting a clean-energy example for the world to follow.
The accolades have continued to flow. Last month, at the Green Tech Festival in Berlin, he won the Youngster Green Award for 2023. It was this that prompted German journalists to ask if it might all be a little too good to be true. They contacted the organisers of the Youngster Green Award and Greentech Festival to find out a bit more about Thoronka’s pilot project. After all, it sounded incredible. But the organisers said that wouldn’t be possible because the pilot had since been dismantled. They asked if the device was being used anywhere else, and were told that it wasn’t. One journalist even asked if there were any videos, blueprints or other documentation of this unprecedented breakthrough. Again, nothing was forthcoming. In fact, no one could tell journalists much about the device or the pilot project at all.
It seems the Youngster Green Award and Greentech festival organisers, and potentially others, have been willing to take Thoronka’s achievement entirely at face value. Perhaps the pilot was a success; perhaps it wasn’t.
That no one really knows – or cares to know – is telling.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
When they tell you who they are, believe them. “This really isn’t about them driving an electric car,” Morano said, highlighting how this is a top-down decision not based on popular demand. “This literally is — the banning of gas-powered cars — is being done just like a COVID lockdown without a vote.”
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
One of P.E.I.’s biggest provincially owned wind farms is operating at less than 40 per cent of its design capacity.
The wind farm at Hermanville, near the eastern tip of the Island, came online with 10 turbines at a cost of $60 million in 2014.
On Tuesday, the P.E.I. Energy Corporation said only four of those turbines remain functional — with no reason given as to why.
“It’s something that needs to be rectified quickly, because it’s standing in the way of our goals,” said Steven Myers, P.E.I.’s minister of environment, energy and climate action.
Just put your lips together, Steve – and blow.
End Of Oil
We are inundated with claims about the “energy transition.”
In February, E&E News, reporting on the State of the Union speech said, “President Joe Biden laid out his vision for the energy transition Tuesday night.” In March, a reporter for Politico declared “The U.S. energy transition is well underway.”
Also in March, during a speech at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that “As this transition progresses, our energy mix will change.” Or consider the March 9 press release from the White House, which said “The Administration is continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already galvanizing our clean energy transition and making clean and energy efficient technologies more affordable for American families.”
I could list many more examples like the ones above. But the hard truth is this: the energy transition isn’t. The numbers from the just-released Statistical Review of World Energy show, once again, that despite rapid growth in wind and solar, those two forms of energy are not even keeping pace with the growth in hydrocarbons. That’s true both globally and in the U.S.
Related: Where has the wind gone?
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
To be fair, the fewer they sell, the less money they lose.
We Don’t Need No Shattered Giant Mirrors
Miraculously, the pumpjacks emerged unscathed: Baseball-sized hail took out a solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday. The hail shattered most of the panels on the 5.2-megawatt solar project, sparing an odd panel like missing teeth in a white smile.
(h/t Lee M)
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
Scholz’s three-party alliance agreed on an ambitious agenda to decarbonize the European Union’s biggest economy: getting coal out of the electricity system faster, filling the autobahns with electric vehicles and weaning households off natural gas heating.
Those goals are starting to look ever more distant as Germany’s political mood shifts. First, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turned the energy market upside down, forcing a dash to replace pipeline gas from Siberia and delaying the phaseout of coal. […]
Polls show Europe’s electorates still broadly support net zero goals, but faced with the pressure of higher inflation, that doesn’t mean they’re on board with the climbing costs of making the switch to a greener economy.
Germany’s right-wing and climate-skeptic AfD party has overtaken Scholz’s Social Democrats in popularity. In the UK, Rishi Sunak’s government is backtracking on the climate promises made by Boris Johnson. And France is reeling from riots that are likely to make the climate less of a priority.
The green revolution faces turbulence in Germany and beyond.
Shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
If Rodriquez literally could not see this coming, he’s not fit to fill the role of municipal dogcatcher, much less a federal cabinet post. Either that, or this was the desired outcome and he’s feigning indignation.
“Well, Meta, I always said it was complicated; Google we still have conversations as recent as this morning,” Rodriguez told CTV’s Power Play Thursday afternoon. “I’m a bit surprised by Google’s reaction.”
What’s more surprising about this mainstream news item is that, for once, it solicited comments that were actually critical of the government:
“The government made a big bet, seemingly just based on the notion that somehow this was all just a big bluff; I don’t think it read the room,” he said. “I don’t think it fully appreciated the current circumstances and it put a fundamental principle of the internet – the notion of free flow of information through linking – at risk.”
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
The left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient but more expensive doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.
Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV-makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.
Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, endless state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.
And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.[…]
In today’s real-world economy, though, Ford announced this week that it was firing at least 1,000 employees — many of them white-collar workers on the EV side. Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it. Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.
Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford — again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells — another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Ford around and find out.
"Ford isn’t in financial danger now, but its EV investments are squeezing profits and forcing layoffs. The auto maker last year lost $3 billion on EV sales. In the first three months of this year, its EVs posted a negative 102% operating margin" https://t.co/o4SgR2PB5o
— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) June 23, 2023
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Survey says!
Jevons Paradox
“Every molecule of fossil fuel produced worldwide will be burned by somebody somewhere, and local efforts to restrict consumption merely relocate the enjoyment of that privilege.”
Prior to the widespread proliferation of the steam engine, mining for coal was back-breaking work. The industry relied on human and animal strength, with laborers using primitive tools, to extract the stuff from hand-dug mineshafts. The work was as dangerous as it was dirty, and fatalities were commonplace. Then, a revolution unfolded. A step-change improvement to existing steam engine design, engineered by James Watt, allowed miners to leverage machinery such as pumps, hoists, and ventilation systems to alleviate significant portions of direct human effort. Pumps that used Watt’s engines were particularly effective at draining water from deep mineshafts, making vast and previously inaccessible coal reserves economically viable. The genius of his invention was in delivering far more work per quanta of fuel.
What did these advances in energy efficiency do to the demand for coal? Did society limit itself to doing the same amount of work as it had done before, just more economically so? Quite the contrary.
This is a good one, worth sharing around. More discussion here.