Posted by Umair Irfan

https://www.vox.com/climate/409903/ai-data-center-crypto-energy-electricity-climate

https://www.vox.com/?p=409903

Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip. 

Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. “Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,” said Timothy Sherwood, a computer science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “When you do any computation, what’s happening inside the microprocessor is that there’s some one that transitions to a zero, or a zero that transitions to one. Every time that happens, a little bit of energy is used.”

When you add that up — across the billions of transistors on chips and then the billions of these chips in computers and server farms — they form a significant and growing share of humanity’s energy appetite.

According to the International Energy Agency, computing and storing data accounts for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of global electricity demand at the moment.

With the growth of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies that rely on industrial-scale data centers, that share is poised to grow. For instance, a typical Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours while a ChatGPT query consumes 2.9 watt-hours. In 2024, the amount of data center capacity under construction in the US jumped 70 percent compared to 2023. Some of the tech companies leaning into AI have seen their greenhouse gas emissions surge and are finding it harder to meet their own environmental goals.
How much more electricity will this computation need in the years ahead, and will it put our climate change goals out of reach?

AI is injecting chaos into energy demand forecasts

The IEA estimates that data center energy demand will double by 2030. McKinsey estimates somewhere between a tripling and a quintupling. As a result, major tech players are desperately trying to shore up their power supplies. Over the past year, they’ve been some of the largest purchasers of energy sources that produce few greenhouse gas emissions. Amazon is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. Companies like Microsoft are even reviving old nuclear plants while also investing in the next generation of nuclear technology.

But some of these companies aren’t picky about where their power is coming from. “What we need from you,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier this month, is “energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.”

Already, energy demand from data centers is extending a lifeline to old coal power plants and is creating a market for new natural gas plants. The IEA estimates that over the next five years, renewables will meet half of the additional electricity demand from data centers, followed by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power.

However, a lot of these energy demand forecasts are projections based on current trends, and well, a lot of things are changing very quickly. “The first thing I’ll say is that there’s just a lot of uncertainty about how data center energy demand will grow,” said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the tech sector and energy. 

Here is some context to keep in mind: Remember that data centers are less than 2 percent of overall electricity demand now and even doubling, tripling, or quintupling would still keep their share in the single digits. A larger portion of global electricity demand growth is poised to come from developing countries industrializing and climbing up the income ladder. Energy use is also linked to the economy; in a recession, for example, power demand tends to fall. 

Climate change could play a role as well. One of the biggest drivers of electricity demand last year was simply that it was so hot out, leading more people to switch on air conditioners. So while AI is an important, growing energy user, it’s not the only thing altering the future of energy demand. 

We’re also in the Cambrian explosion era of crypto and AI companies, meaning there are a lot of different firms trying out a variety of approaches. All of this experimentation is spiking energy use in the near term, but not all of these approaches are going to make it. As these sectors mature and their players consolidate, that could drive down energy demand too. 

How to do more with less

The good news is that computers are getting more efficient. AI and crypto harness graphical processing units, chips optimized for the kinds of calculations behind these technologies. GPUs have made massive performance leaps, particularly when it comes to the ability of AI to take in new information and generate conclusions. 

“In the past 10 years, our platform has become 100,000 times more energy efficient for the exact same inference workload,” said Joshua Parker, who leads corporate sustainability efforts at Nvidia, one of the largest GPU producers in the world. “In the past two years — one generation of our product — we’ve become 25 times more energy efficient.”

Nvidia has now established a commanding lead in the AI race, making it one of the most valuable companies in history. 

However, as computer processors get more efficient, they cost less to run, which can lead people to use them more, offsetting some of the energy savings. 

“It’s easier to make the business case to deploy AI, which means that the footprint is growing, so it’s a real paradox,” Parker said. “Ultimately, that kind of exponential growth only continues if you actually reach zero incremental costs. There’s still costs to the energy and there’s still cost to the computation. As much as we’re driving towards efficiency, there will be a balance in the end because it’s not free.”

Another factor to consider is that AI tools can have their own environmental benefits. Using AI to perform simulations can avoid some of the need for expensive, slow, energy-intensive real-world testing when designing aircraft, for example. Grid operators are using AI to optimize electricity distribution to integrate renewables, increase reliability, and reduce waste. AI has already helped design better batteries and better solar cells.  

Amid all this uncertainty about the future, there are still paths that could keep AI’s expansion aligned with efforts to limit climate change. Tech companies need to continue pulling on the efficiency lever. These sectors also have big opportunities to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chains for these devices, and in the infrastructure for data centers. Deploying vastly more clean energy is essential. 

We’ve already seen a number of countries grow their economies while cutting greenhouse gases. While AI is slowing some of that progress right now, it doesn’t have to worsen climate change over the long term, and it could accelerate efforts to keep it in check. But it won’t happen by chance, and will require deliberate action to get on track. 

“It’s easy to write the headline that says AI is going to break the grid, it’s going to lead to more emissions,” Parker said. “I’m personally very optimistic — I think this is credible optimism — that AI over time will be the best tool for sustainability the world has ever seen.”

https://www.vox.com/climate/409903/ai-data-center-crypto-energy-electricity-climate

https://www.vox.com/?p=409903

Posted by Kenny Torrella

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/409940/regenerative-agriculture-kiss-the-ground-common-ground

https://www.vox.com/?p=409940

On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a rather bold claim: By simply making a few tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse climate change and all but eliminate a host of other problems stemming from our modern food system. 

The two films — Kiss the Ground, which first came out on Netflix in 2020, and its follow-up, Common Ground, which premiered on streaming this week — are the most high-profile documentaries advocating for a widespread shift to “regenerative agriculture.” 

This organic-adjacent approach to agriculture focuses on using a few farming methods to improve soil health, which has been degraded over the last century in large part due to the industrialization of agriculture, with its bevy of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides. 

Deployed at scale, the films argue, regenerative agriculture would improve soil health so greatly that farmers around the globe could draw down massive amounts of climate-warming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them in soil, largely solving the climate crisis.

“By converting our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the soil could sequester all of the carbon dioxide that humanity emits each year,” actor Jason Momoa claims in Common Ground. “That would bring our carbon emissions to net zero. In other words, our planet’s soil could help stabilize our climate.”  

Regenerative agriculture, according to the films, could also boost biodiversity, enrich struggling farmers, clean up polluted waterways, and end the “human health crisis.” (It’s unclear which human health crisis they mean.)

This straightforward, all-encompassing plan to fix some of the world’s most wicked problems has been embraced by an eclectic set of US policymakers, A-list actors, celebrity doctors, and leading environmental organizations. (The films collectively also feature Rosario Dawson, Tom Brady, Laura Dern, and Donald Glover, among others.)

When Kiss the Ground was released, its sweeping claims drew criticism as overly simplistic and scientifically dubious — a kind of “magical thinking,” as one environmental scientist put it in a review of Kiss the Ground in the journal Biogeochemistry. The films feature no critics or skeptics, only fervent supporters.

Regenerative agriculture practices certainly have some environmental and social benefits. But the films engage in a kind of nostalgic utopianism, asserting that if it weren’t for greedy corporations and subservient lawmakers, we could go back to the old ways of farming, which would heal our broken relationship with nature and usher in a healthier future with a stable climate. 

In Kiss the Ground, actor-narrator Ian Somerhalder goes so far as to say that regenerative agriculture would “get the Earth back to the Garden of Eden that it once was.” Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. 

The benefits — and limits — of regenerative agriculture

Our food and farming system is, no doubt, in need of significant reform. 

It’s America’s largest source of water pollution and animal suffering and accounts for more than 10 percent of our carbon footprint. Many farmers overapply synthetic fertilizer to their crops, and federal regulators have been captured by corporations that wield enormous power in politics. Many large farmers turn a handsome profit thanks to nonsensical subsidies while small and midsized operations struggle to stay afloat in US agriculture’s “get big or get out” model. Farmworkers are treated as invisible cogs in a machine that pumps out unhealthy food.

The documentaries do a fine enough job cataloguing these problems, though at times they can be misleading and alarmist. For example, there’s no proof that the world has only 60 harvests remaining, as actor Woody Harrelson narrates in Kiss the Ground. Interview subjects, including supermodel Gisele Bündchen, repeatedly claim that healthier soils lead to healthier food, and thus healthier humans, though the science isn’t clear on how much soil health affects food’s nutrient content.

So, what exactly is regenerative agriculture? There’s no universal definition, but it boils down to a few key practices and goals:

• Drastically reduce or eliminate synthetic chemicals: Modern farmers routinely douse crops in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Significantly reducing or eliminating these chemicals can improve soil health, boost biodiversity, and reduce water pollution.
• Eliminate tillage: Most farmers till, or disturb, their soil to get rid of weeds and make the soil more porous, among other things. But tillage can also release carbon dioxide stored in the soil and harm overall soil health, so regenerative farmers swear against it.
• Plant cover crops: Regenerative farmers plant “cover crops,” like clover and rye, around fall harvest time, which improves soil health in a number of ways.
• Rotational grazing: “When cattle are left to their own devices on pasture, they overgraze — trampling on and eroding the soil, and destroying vegetation,” as I wrote last year. “But regenerative ranchers use rotational grazing…which entails periodically moving cattle between plots of land. This can help prevent overgrazing because vegetation is given time to regrow, resulting in healthier soil that [regenerative] advocates say can sequester large amounts of carbon.”

All of these practices have proven ecological benefits, and US regulators would be wise to incentivize more farmers to take them up. But agriculture, like other environmentally sensitive industries, is rife with tradeoffs, which Kiss the Ground and Common Ground entirely ignore.

For example, while chemical-laden agriculture has many drawbacks, it typically produces more food per acre, which means it requires less land. The same goes for conventionally raised cattle: grass-finished, regeneratively raised cattle require between two and two-and-a-half times more land than those finished on feedlots.

A nationwide shift to regenerative agriculture would massively increase demand for land — a critical downside to this style of farming. Agriculture is already extremely land-intensive, using up some 40 percent of US land, and each acre that can be spared from farming is an acre that can remain as habitat for wildlife.

Then there is the claim that healthier soil can draw down enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in farmland. Done on a large scale, the films say, regenerative agriculture could even draw down all the carbon dioxide humans emit each year. 

But this is highly improbable, as scientists don’t even have accurate and affordable tools to measure how much carbon regenerative farms can sequester. No-till farming likely doesn’t sequester much carbon, and if a farmer decides to eventually till that soil, a lot of the carbon they’d stored up would be released. The rate at which farmland can sequester carbon also diminishes over time. 

And while rotationally grazing cattle has the potential to sequester some of the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cattle, it’s far from all of a beef cattle’s emissions, as one source in Kiss the Ground suggests. Beef, whether produced regeneratively or not, is still the world’s most carbon-intensive food.

Meanwhile, the films fail to acknowledge the most effective approach to slashing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which accounts for up to one-third of global emissions. According to a survey of more than 200 climate and agriculture experts, the best way to do that is to reduce meat and dairy production. (These same experts rated carbon sequestration as one of the least effective approaches.) Reducing meat and milk intake in rich countries like the US would also reduce land demand, water pollution, and animal suffering, and likely improve human health.  

Despite the undisputed benefits of regenerative agriculture, Kiss the Ground and Common Ground misleadingly promote it as one weird trick that farmers everywhere can deploy to heal the planet and humanity. It uses a cast of celebrities, advocate-experts, and farmers who employ simplistic arguments and visuals to avoid the nuanced and difficult tradeoffs of agricultural production. 

Yet the grandiose claims made in these films have managed to gain serious traction in environmental and agricultural policy circles, often crowding out more evidence-based solutions.

You’ll find a decent analysis of what’s wrong with our food system, and plenty of hope on how to fix it, in these films. But when the solution to problems as complex as climate change, diet-related chronic disease, farmer debt, mass pollution, and biodiversity collapse is as simple as a few changes to how we farm, whoever’s promoting it is probably standing on shaky ground.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/409940/regenerative-agriculture-kiss-the-ground-common-ground

https://www.vox.com/?p=409940

Posted by Katherine Kelaidis

https://www.vox.com/politics/405869/jd-vance-conversion-religion-politics-divide

https://www.vox.com/405869/the-hidden-religious-divide-erupting-into-politics

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Without evidence, the second-in-command accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of settling “illegal immigrants” in order to access federal funds. Though largely used as fodder for internet “gotchas,” the scuffle pointed to a wider trend — one that could remake the country’s religious landscape and the fundamental way Americans think about how they believe and where they belong.

Vance is not just a Catholic. He’s a very specific type of Catholic, part of a group of young white men who, over the past decade, have found their way (often online) into both increasingly conservative politics and traditional religion — primarily Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, rather than the Protestantism that has been a common cultural feature in America. (For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy, sometimes called “Greek Orthodox” or “Russian Orthodoxy,” is essentially the Eastern equivalent of the Catholic Church, though significant differences have arisen).  

One recent study from the Orthodox Studies Institute suggests that conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy has increased 24 percent since 2021. These recent converts tend to be under 40 and single, and the majority are men. There is not a similarly comprehensive study of Catholic conversions, but dioceses are reporting increases in the number of converts anywhere between 30 percent to 70 percent since 2020. 

The absolute number of converts isn’t large, but as Vance shows, they can be influential. These people are entering religious communities that have not had many converts in the United States and have historically been associated with specific immigrant ethnic groups, the Irish in the case of Catholicism and the Greeks in the case of Orthodoxy. In fact, American anti-Catholicism has historically been buoyed not only by the centuries-old prejudice of a Protestant society, but also by a bias against foreignness. 

And — in part because of this “foreignness” and the ways it has insulated these groups — these ethnic and religious communities have remained politically moderate, or, more accurately, largely defiant of the usual political categorizations. For example, the majority of American Catholics now vote Republican, but a majority also support abortion rights in all or nearly all cases. Similarly, only a slight minority of American Orthodox Christians are Democrats, but a majority support marriage equality and access to legal abortions.

To understand this, consider that the conventional understanding of America’s contemporary religious and political landscape centers two other demographic groups for whom religion and politics are more neatly aligned. White evangelical Protestants are reliably conservative across a broad range of issues, both social and economic, and loyally Republican. Meanwhile, white secular atheists/agnostics are reliably progressive and loyally Democrats. 

This alignment is (at least in part) because they are both the descendants (ideologically and in some cases quite literally) of America’s English, Dutch, and German Protestant founding stock. These traditions are about believing correctly more than they are about belonging. And, in fact, fundamentally committed to separating out the elect from the community. 

On the other hand, traditionally Catholic and Orthodox communities represent different strands of American history, histories that sideline political identity in the name of big-tent community belonging. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are simply more embedded in their cultural contexts — part and parcel with an ethnic identity — and less ideologically driven than the Enlightenment era-born faith traditions of the US. Within these communities, belonging has been more important than believing correctly. This is not to say that the Pope doesn’t care about theological concerns. It means that your average Catholic grandmother in Spain is less likely to be a Catholic because she feels strongly about the Treasury of Merit than because Catholicism is simply part of who she is.

So how did someone like Vance, previously most famous for being “an Appalachian,” find his way into a tradition like that?

The online-to-convert pipeline

These converts are characterized by a simultaneous search for community and for answers. Nearly everyone recognizes that young men are in crisis. There is widespread disagreement as to why this crisis is happening, but it is difficult not to suspect that a lack of belonging, or rather a pervasive sense of loneliness, is at least part of the problem. Loneliness, and the desire to solve it, seems likely to be part of what drives these men into communities defined by nearly unconditional belonging. 

But belonging is clearly not enough. A lot of young men are looking for answers as well as community. And like lost generations before them, they are finding it in “ideology.” The new converts want their community and their ideology to fit.

What does this ideology look like? Many are disillusioned with what they see as the products of “modernity,” specifically the fruits of feminism and, in many cases, the civil rights movement. To their minds, feminism and racial equality have rendered white men — particularly working- and lower-middle-class white men — less socially and economically powerful. As a result, they have turned to “traditionalism,” a worldview that combines conservative views of gender and sexuality with fear of immigration and increasing multiculturalism, often overlaid with back-to-the-land living and large families. 

Their ideal is a white, English-speaking, Christian, American straight couple living on a homestead, raising a dozen children. Its public face online is largely female: the  “trad wife” influencers. But make no mistake: Despite its TikTok and Instagram aesthetics, this is primarily a men’s movement. It frames the personal and social crises facing white American men as part of an imagined broader crisis of “Western civilization,” a crisis that, in their view, inevitably includes a “crisis of Christianity” — an idea pushed by no less than the likes of right-wing celebrity Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist turned media pundit. 

But not a crisis of just any Christianity. For many of these young men, the perceived crisis of Christianity and of Western civilization itself has led them to question Protestantism as a whole, from far-right evangelicals to liberal mainline beliefs. If Christendom is in decline, they reason, how can its dominant tradition in American society not be to blame? 

This is shown by the fact that a lot of “trad” content is dedicated to how masculine the respective traditions are. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church website ran (on its English channel, notably) a piece titled “Why Orthodox Men Love Church.” The piece makes liberal use of the work of Leon Podles, whose work includes The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity. And even the relatively liberal, Jesuit-run Catholic magazine America has run an article titled “Men and boys are lost. The Catholic Church can give them a better model of manliness.”

The “crisis of Protestantism” is a reality that evangelicals themselves have been most apt to acknowledge.  There is also the example of Rod Dreher, the Protestant-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox convert and American Conservative editor whose book The Benedict Option is premised on the idea that society has devolved so completely that the only choice Christians have is to flee from it. 

This reasoning, combined with what one must imagine is not a little bit of video game and fantasy movie-inspired nostalgia for an imagined Middle Ages, has led many of these young men to Catholicism and others to Eastern Orthodoxy. By converting to these faith traditions, they wrongly think they are converting not only to a liturgically and theologically conservative tradition, but also to an explicitly politically conservative one in the American tradition.

And like the rest of the culture surrounding the Lost Young Men of Postmodernity, this religious dimension has taken place largely online, with many of these converts encountering the academic theology of these faith traditions on YouTube, TikTok, and forums, long before they become connected to any living communities. This is very evident this time of year in online Orthodox circles, as converts gather on Facebook and Reddit to discuss the nuances of how to apply medieval fasting rules in a way that would never occur to those from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds. There is also Matt Fradd’s YouTube series Pints With Aquinas that regularly brings obscure Catholic theology to upward of half a million viewers or Rev. Chad Ripperger’s channel Sensus Fidelium, where medieval theology meets anti-vax modernity.  

The mix of obscure academic theology and very modern politics doesn’t stay online. Vance, for example, has cited the influence of the French Catholic philosopher René Girard as an impetus for his own conversion. Vance has also referenced St. Augustine as a major source of his personal theology. And it was to Augustine that he turned to in his spat with the bishops, telling his X followers to “google ‘ordo amoris.’” A request one can only imagine most cradle Catholics (ones born into the faith) responded to with a resounding, “Huh?”

To save you the internet search, “ordo amoris” is a concept first attributed to Augustine and picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas, who laid out a list of the order in which we should love people and things, starting with God. But Aquinas doesn’t stop there. As the Pope — I know how absurd this sounds — explained in a letter to the American bishops following the clash with Vance, while there is an order in which we should direct our affections, any person’s pressing need should take precedence, so it is not a violation of Catholic teaching to help refugees and the poor. 

This is the way most cradle Catholics probably learned this (perhaps these days sans Latin). Whether Vance was personally aware of the normal way the ordo amoris is taught is irrelevant, because the entire incident demonstrates an important point about these new ideological converts: They have encountered largely medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities, made up of people for whom community is usually much more important than the medieval theology, they are frequently surprised. 

And when this happens the response has not been to change their views — Vance expressed “surprise” at the pushback from the Pope and then doubled down on his position. 

This is not the “done” thing.  It is, in fact, a very Protestant way of viewing church hierarchy, whereas one might argue that since the Reformation, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been defined by a refusal to break from the powers that be. The vice president of the United States and many of his fellow new converts have nonetheless sought to change the views of the hierarchs of institutions they have joined in no small part because of their hierarchical nature — and in doing so remake these organic communities in their own idealized, ideological image.

This dynamic won’t stay in the church

While many are not yet ready to put it in this stark of terms, the “cradle” vs. “convert” divide in Catholicism and Orthodoxy is very real and it can become a problem for those outside the traditions as well as inside. These emerging, highly politicized conflicts inside what were once communities largely bound together by family and cultural ties are only accelerating the political division of American religion. 

This is not a good development for civil society, because houses of worship were places where people once regularly and peacefully encountered those with different political views. Slavery and prohibition did cause schisms but, for the most part, until the middle of the 20th century, American churches were politically diverse. (While Protestantism was about believing correctly, the beliefs in question were nearly always about one’s theological beliefs. Over time, the requirement extended to political beliefs too.) This possibility has already largely vanished within most Protestant circles as evangelicals moved ever more right and mainline Protestants more left over the past 50 years, simply breaking apart (as in the case of the United Methodist Church) when their culture war differences became too grave. Now, largely as a result of these new converts, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are also becoming more polarized.

But perhaps even more important is the dangerous lesson these converts are learning from their challenges to the hierarchy and cultural traditions of their new faiths: Namely, that even some of the most ancient existent authorities do not have real control over them and that, with enough noise and obfuscation and with enough requests to “Google that,” they can create a version of reality where a recent convert’s opinion of Catholic theology is as valuable as the Pope’s. 

Thus, when the Pope declares a more kind approach to LGBTQ Catholics, online influencers like Taylor Marshall feel comfortable simply saying the Pope is wrong, that the successor of St. Peter “persecutes the good and promotes evildoers.” Or the pseudo-anonymous writers of the Orthodox Reflections blog can attack the decision of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America to march with Black Lives Matter. It’s why Michael Warren Davis, another Orthodox convert at the American Conservative, could directly call the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America a CIA asset without any evidence. 

Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.

This is not just a challenge to the institutional power of the Catholic Church but a reminder of the ways this milieu of young men seeks to challenge authority and to remake our institutions in the image of their ideological aims — the ecclesiastical wing of DOGE’s engineers if you will. It is not a great jump between Vance challenging the Pope on the meaning of St. Augustine to Vance challenging the Constitution on the meaning of citizenship. 

It can be difficult for many secular progressives to care much about the inner workings of religious — particularly Christian — institutions. “It’s all bad,” is a common refrain. But considering the central role religion continues to play in our politics, wishing it would just not is not a helpful way to approach the problem. This religious conflict between “cradle” and “convert”  is shaping America’s political institutional authority, as religious identity becomes yet another front in the battle over America’s political future — at a moment when that war could probably do without another front.

https://www.vox.com/politics/405869/jd-vance-conversion-religion-politics-divide

https://www.vox.com/405869/the-hidden-religious-divide-erupting-into-politics

Posted by Adam Clark Estes

https://www.vox.com/climate/408440/ev-charging-infrastructure-energy-transition-climate-progress

https://www.vox.com/?p=408440

There’s a bodega on the corner where I live in Brooklyn with a massive TikTok following and a thick cable almost always stretched out the front door and plugged into a Tesla. In a tiny parking lot around the corner, the local grocery store has a fast charger that looks like a mini gas pump. The parking garage down the hill has a line of public chargers.

Brooklyn looks different than the rest of America, but this mix of solutions for fueling up our battery-powered cars highlights an increasingly obvious fact about the future. As we continue to transition to electric vehicles, the gas station of the future won’t just be those big pavilions on the roadside with 20-foot-tall signs bearing an oil company’s logo. You’ll probably be able to buy fossil fuels at gas stations for decades, but you’ll also be able to charge your EV very quickly. And those familiar fueling destinations won’t be the only place you can charge.

The future of EV charging is already here. It’s everywhere and sometimes not where you’d expect it. 

There are already hundreds of thousands of chargers in people’s garages, in supermarket parking lots, in national parks, and yes, even in old-fashioned gas stations. In the near future, if you drive an EV, you won’t worry about finding a place to charge your car. You’ll get to choose between multiple experiences, based on your needs and desires, and you won’t even need to open an app or get out a credit card to charge up and get on your way.

This forecast probably sounds a little bit fantastic in light of recent developments. The Trump administration suspended the rollout of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, which was established by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and apportioned $5 billion for states to build public EV chargers. The goal was to ensure there were charging stations at least every 50 miles on certain corridors, especially those in rural or low-income areas. 

It’s unclear how long Trump’s NEVI halt will last. Democrats in Congress were quick to call the administration’s actions illegal, and some states were allowed to keep spending the program’s previously approved dollars to build chargers. The Trump administration has asked states to submit new plans for approval, although it’s not clear if or when they will be approved. Meanwhile, the funding freeze is being challenged in court. So for now, the future of that massive federally funded EV infrastructure project is in chaos. 

Several people in the EV charging industry told me that, with or without federal funds, progress in the charger space can’t be stopped. That should be good news to EV owners or potential EV owners who worry that they might end up stranded on the side of the road because they couldn’t find a charger before their battery dies — a condition commonly known as “range anxiety.”

“Every single day that goes by, there’s more and more public charging infrastructure that goes in the ground, literally every single day,” Mike Battaglia, CEO of Blink Charging, told me. “So each day that goes by, there is less and less range anxiety.”

There are currently over 210,000 EV charging stations in the United States, and that number was growing by about 1,000 per week towards the end of the Biden administration. (Those numbers still pale in comparison to the 1 million-plus gas pumps currently in operation.) The NEVI program aimed to get 500,000 public chargers online by 2030. Of course, exactly where those chargers are and how easy it is to use them matter a lot. 

The infrastructure buildout has historically focused on getting EV chargers built in affluent suburbs and along highways, leaving city centers and rural areas largely unserved. This inequality is worsening over time, according to a recent study led by the Department of Energy. That said, the vast majority of EV owners — 80 percent — have the ability to charge their vehicles at home, which complicates the question of how to build out America’s EV charging infrastructure.

If you own an EV or are thinking about getting one, the main thing you need to know is that you’ll probably do most of your charging at home. The gas station of the future is effectively your garage or your driveway. The cost per mile of range will vary depending on your local utility rates, but it’s safe to say charging at home is cheaper than charging on the go and, for most people, much cheaper than buying gas. 

EV chargers fall into three categories: level 1, level 2, and level 3. A level 1 charger plugs into a regular 120-volt wall outlet and charges slowly, like two to five miles of range per hour. A level 2 charger requires a 240-volt outlet, like the kind a washer-dryer uses, and provides 20 to 30 miles of range per hour. On average, a one-vehicle household drives about 50 miles per day, so charging overnight with either a level 1 or level 2 charger is probably sufficient.

“It’s way easier than actually going to a gas station,” said Ingrid Malmgren, senior policy director at Plug In America, an EV advocacy group. “People who charge it at home very rarely charge publicly, usually just on road trips.”

When you do go on road trips, you’ll probably encounter level 3 chargers, also known as DC fast chargers. These beasts use higher voltages, usually 400 or 800 volts, to pump EV batteries from a 10 percent charge up to 90 percent in about half an hour. This is as close as it gets to the present-day gas station solution, where you can pull off the road, plug in your car, grab a sandwich, and then get on your way with plenty of charge. Fully charging an EV with a DC fast-charger should still be a fraction of the cost of filling a car with gasoline — although you might end up spending more in the convenience store while you wait.

There are a couple of other variables you’ll encounter when venturing out into the world to charge an EV. First of all, not all EVs use the same kind of plug. The North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug, originally designed by Tesla, is quickly becoming, as the name suggests, the standard in North America as more and more carmakers adopt the style. Otherwise, most non-Teslas in the US will use Combined Charging System (CCS) plugs that can be made compatible with NACS charging stations thanks to an adapter. 

This standardization is simplifying the search for a compatible charging station. With NACS becoming the primary plug-in use, more and more drivers can use not only Tesla Superchargers but also growing networks of chargers made by companies like ChargePoint, Blink, Electrify America, and EV Connect. Even paying for a charge is getting streamlined thanks to software updates that are popularizing an international encrypted communication standard colloquially known as Plug and Charge. As the name implies, at stations with this feature, you simply plug in your EV, and the station recognizes your car and charges your payment option of choice. There’s no need to download an app or tap a credit card.

It’s very likely you will have this fast charging experience at a place that also sells gas and diesel. Many fossil fuel companies see the writing on the wall and are investing in EV charging infrastructure for all your energy needs. Shell has its Shell Recharge Brand, BP has BP Pulse, Pilot and Flying J have GM Energy co-branded stations. This is just good business sense. If people are already used to going to the gas station, why not provide their fuel of choice when they switch to an EV? And this year, EVs will account for 10 percent of all new vehicles sold in the US this year, according to Cox Automotive. 

Things could get even more interesting as the EV market grows and the need to keep giant tanks of explosive fossil fuels underground fades away. Those big holes in the ground could be filled with battery storage, and those familiar pavilions that keep drivers dry as they fill up their vehicles could be covered in solar panels. This type of design could turn EV charging stations into their own little power plants, where solar energy fills up those batteries, which contribute to grid stability as EVs draw large amounts of power. Electrify America has already opened one hub with this concept in mind and has ambitious plans to deploy more than 150 onsite battery systems nationwide.

As exciting as these futuristic gas stations sound, however, your best bet is almost certainly to find a way to charge your car at home and probably overnight. Then try to remember that you’re probably going to drive less than you thought the next day. Range anxiety is real, but it’s also irrational. 

“The mindset of ‘I need a vehicle that can do 400 miles and be recharged in 10 minutes.’ That has to change,” John Eichberger, executive director of the Transportation Energy Institute, told me. 

After all, most people don’t drive 400 miles in a week, much less a day. And once you start driving an EV, you’ll also start spotting charging stations everywhere. The parking garage down the hill, the local grocery store, the bodega on the corner — everywhere I turn in my Brooklyn neighborhood, there’s a place to plug in. Now if I only had an EV.

https://www.vox.com/climate/408440/ev-charging-infrastructure-energy-transition-climate-progress

https://www.vox.com/?p=408440