The business of charging: While most of the electrification industry has had its eyes fixed on electric vehicle makers and battery companies, some other, low-profile actors backed by big money have been looking for other angles to earn a fortune. Among them are EV charging network companies and recyclers. San Francisco-based TeraWatt Infrastructure falls generally into the former category: With $100 million in investment capital, TeraWatt is setting out to finance and build gigantic charging centers for the cargo industry — serving everything from Amazon delivery vans to semi-trucks.

In a video conversation yesterday, CEO Neha Palmer told me TeraWatt…

For seven months, lithium-metal darling QuantumScape has enjoyed an often-fanatical following as the front-runner in the attempt to commercialize next-generation electric vehicle batteries. Now, though, its arch enemy, Denver-based Solid Power, has unexpectedly emerged with a big, $130 million investment led by Ford and BMW on the promise of an industrial-size scaleup of its technology next year.

Which is to say: It’s a race.

Only a little over four months ago, Solid Power announced that it had produced a 22-layer pure lithium-metal test cell at a size of 20 amp-hours, an attempt to capture the much higher energy density possible…

For a little over half a year, the battery and electric vehicle communities have been in ferment: Companies that no one thought twice about have gone Spac and are worth hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars. New gigafactories have been announced by the week. Legacy automakers have torn up and remade their five-year plans, only to do so again within weeks or months. In total, they have announced hundreds of new EV models.

But no episode amid the general mayhem has generated more whiplash than the discovery this week of the industry’s sudden, wholly unannounced recalculation of the…

The Next Zeitgeist highlights reader articles on Medium, comments, and updates.

The future $40-an-hour wage

This blog launched last week with the unifying principle of identifying the next-next big idea of the moment — the next zeitgeist. Thanks to readers who have hit the follow link above, and those who took the time to write a comment below the piece. I’m excerpting some comments below.

The inaugural story looked at the problem of people falling out of the middle class. It argued that the national conversation, now centered on achieving a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, is likely to turn next to a fixation on…

The astonishing $60/kWh battery: I exchanged tweets with Eyvind Aven about yesterday’s piece on the U.S. Energy Department’s startling update of its target for lithium-ion battery costs. Until now, the industry — and Energy Department — Holy Grail has been to reach $100 per kWh, thought to be the inflection point for sticker-price parity with internal combustion. But the goal posts have moved: Tesla, Volkswagen and now the standard-creating Energy Department are all looking to $60/kWh as the new parity point.

For the automakers, $60/kWh is not a mere number, but a metaphorical bomb: Tesla and VW appear determined to…

Just last summer, the much-watched lithium-ion industry finally reached sight of a long-sought super-stretch goal — a battery pack costing $100 per kWh, allowing the price of electric vehicles to drop to that of conventional combustion. But in September, Tesla CEO Elon Musk held “Battery Day,” at which he declared that, to penetrate the mass market, EVs needed a crash diet, and proposed a roadmap to bring down battery prices another 40%, to about $56 per kWh. In March, Volkswagen, too, seemed to promise a battery costing around $60/kWh.

Now, the Energy Department — which tends to define standards across…

If electric vehicles are going to crack the mass market in a big way, an article of faith is that ordinary motorists — at least in the industry’s early mainstream years — must be confident they can charge up when they want, and do so fast. That means a speed somewhere at the high-end of their accustomed gas station experience — say 15 to 20 minutes for 80% charge. No one is yet offering such rates, but that’s the goal.

Which is what interested me in Nyobolt, a startup co-founded by Clare Grey, a long-time leading battery researcher at the…

One of the most surprising recent additions to the American political bedrock is the $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. Only a few years ago derided as a deranged notion of socialist radicals, the campaign for a $15 hourly has assumed outsized, totemic stature across parties, a proxy for a right to a bare, dignified existence.

But while the proposed wage, twice the 12-year-old current federal minimum, has been a boon to many bottom-of-the-rung workers already receiving it at Amazon, Walmart and elsewhere, there is a big thing it is not: A ticket to the middle class.

Yet both major parties, driven…