The Download: EVs’ charging problem, and tackling climate change with heat
The US government is pushing for many more electric vehicles to hit the roads in the next few years. The problem is, the country doesn’t have nearly enough chargers to power them all.
There are only about 130,000 public chargers currently installed across the US, and just a small fraction of them are fast chargers. That’s a 40% increase since 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, but it’s still not enough. The US will need to build millions of new chargers within a decade.
What we don’t know is how many, and how quickly. But even though the logistics are daunting, the government isn’t alone in trying to build out charging infrastructure. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
How heat could solve climate problems
Having heat on demand is necessary for making pretty much everything that makes up the building blocks of our lives.
The problem is, temperature control in industry has historically relied on fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, and it’s a bit of a climate nightmare: industrial heat alone is responsible for about 20% of emissions globally.
A growing number of enterprises are looking for new ways to fiddle with industrial thermostats. Let our climate reporter Casey Crownhart take you through the technologies on the table and where we go from here. Read the full story.
Casey’s story is from The Spark, her weekly newsletter covering climate and energy breakthroughs. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
