How Sam Bankman-Fried swindled $8 billion in customer money, according to federal prosecutors
Before his surprise Monday night arrest, Sam Bankman-Fried had apologized for everything he could think of, to everyone who would listen. In a leaked draft of his aborted House testimony, he wrote that he was truly, for his entire adult life, “sad.” He “f—– up,” he tweeted, and wrote, and said.
He told Bahamas regulators he was “deeply sorry for ending up in this position.” But when Bankman-Fried was escorted out of his penthouse apartment in Nassau in handcuffs, it still wasn’t clear what he was apologizing for, having stridently denied committing fraud to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, and across Twitter for weeks.
related investing news
But the day after his arrest, federal prosecutors and regulators unsealed dozens of pages of filings and charges that accused Bankman-Fried of not just having perpetrated a fraud, but having done so “from the start,” according to a filing from the Securities Exchange Commission
Far from having “f—– up,” SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulators, alongside federal prosecutors from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, allege that Bankman-Fried was at the heart — indeed, the driver — of “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history,” in the words of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. The allegations against Bankman-Fried were assembled with stunning speed, but offer insight into one of the highest-profile fraud prosecutions since Enron.
Bankman-Fried founded his crypto hedge fund Alameda Research in November 2017, renting office space in Berkeley, California. The scion of two Stanford law professors, Bankman-Fried had graduated from MIT, worked at the prestigious quantitative trading firm Jane Street Capital, and had broken into cryptocurrencies with a MIT classmate, Gary Wang.
Alameda Research was essentially an arbitrage shop, purchasing bitcoin at a lower price from one exchange and selling it for a higher price at another. Price differences in South Korea versus the rest of the world allowed Bankman-Fried and Wang to profit tremendously from what was nicknamed “the kimchi swap.”
In April 2019, Bankman-Fried and Wang — along with U.C. Berkeley graduate Nishad Singh — founded FTX.com, an international cryptocurrency exchange that offered customers innovative trading features, a responsive platform, and a reliable experience.
Federal regulators at the CFTC say that just a month after founding FTX.com, Bankman-Fried, “unbeknownst to all but a small circle of insiders,” was leveraging customer assets — specifically, customers’ personal cryptocurrency deposits — for Alameda’s own bets.
Rehypothecation is the term for when businesses legally use customer assets to speculate and invest. But Bankman-Fried didn’t have permission from customers to gamble with their funds. FTX’s own terms of use specifically forbade him, or Alameda, from using customer money for anything — unless the customer allowed it.
And from FTX’s inception, there was a lot of customer money. The CFTC cited 2019 reports from FTX which pegged the futures volume alone as often exceeding $100 million every day.
Using customer money for Alameda’s bets constituted fraud, the CFTC alleges. In the Southern District of New York, where Bankman-Fried was indicted by a grand jury, Bankman-Fried faces criminal fraud charges as well. From the very genesis of FTX, regulators allege, Bankman-Fried was using customer funds to bankroll his speculative investments.
It is a swift fall from grace for the one-time king of crypto, who as recently as two months ago was hailed as the savior of the industry. Now, Bankman-Fried heads to a Bahamian court on Monday to surrender himself to the U.S. extradition process, according to a person familiar with the matter. A criminal trial awaits him once he is back on U.S. soil.
Attorneys for Bankman-Fried, and attorneys for his former companies, did not immediately return requests for comment. A representative for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.
The rise of the Alameda-FTX empire
FTX quickly rose, launching its own token, FTT, in July 2019 and snagging an equity investment from Binance in November of that year.
By 2021, according to the CFTC filing, FTX and its subsidiaries held roughly $15 billion worth of assets, and accounted for 10% of global digital transaction volume, clearing $16 billion worth of customer trades every day.
The firm’s “years-long” fraud didn’t just extend to playing with customer money, according to the SEC.
FTX was able to operate so effectively, clear such massive volume, and generate such interest because it had a designated market maker (DMM) of its own. In traditional finance, a DMM is a firm that will buy and sell securities to and from customers, hoping to clear a profit in any difference in price, called the spread.
From FTX’s 2019 founding, Alameda was that market maker, snapping up and releasing cryptocurrencies on the exchange. Alameda and FTX’s symbiotic relationship proved advantageous for both ends of Bankman-Fried’s growing empire.
As FTX matured, other market makers came online to offer liquidity. But Alameda was, and remained, FTX’s largest liquidity provider, easing platform function at “Bankman-Fried’s direction,” the SEC alleges.
Unlike those other market makers or power users, Alameda had a set of powerful tools at its disposal.
In August 2019, the SEC alleges, Bankman-Fried directed his team at FTX to program an exception into the exchange’s code, allowing Alameda to “maintain a negative balance in its account, untethered from any collateral requirements.”
“No other customer account at FTX was permitted to maintain a negative balance,” the SEC filing continues. The negative balance meant that Alameda was allegedly effectively backstopped by customer assets while making trades.
Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison once alluded to this in a widely disseminated interview.
“We tend not to have things like stop losses,” Ellison said.
In traditional finance, a stop-loss order helps traders limit exposure to a potentially losing trade. When an asset (a stock, for example) reaches a pre-determined lower limit, the stop-loss order will automatically sell off the asset to prevent losses from spiraling out of control.
Not content with what would eventually become a “virtually unlimited” line of credit from investors — his own customers — Bankman-Fried conspired to stack the deck in Alameda’s favor, regulators say.
FTX offered power users access to an API — an interface that allowed the user to bypass FTX’s front-end platform and communicate directly with FTX’s back-end systems. Normal users were still subjected to common-sense checks: verifying that they had enough money in their account, for example.
Alameda traders could access a fast-lane which let them shunt past other users and shave “several milliseconds” off their trade execution times, according to the CFTC. The kind of high-frequency trading that FTX users engaged in made that invaluable.
A lousy crypto hedge fund
Despite the deck being stacked in Alameda’s favor, the hedge fund offered terrible returns. A court filing indicated that Alameda lost over $3.7 billion over its lifetime, despite public statements by FTX leaders touting how profitable the trading arm was.
Alameda’s losses and lending structure were a critical component of FTX’s eventual collapse.
Alameda didn’t just play fast and loose with customer money. The hedge fund borrowed aggressively from multiple lenders, including Voyager Digital and BlockFi Lending. Both those companies entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings this year, and FTX targeted both for acquisition.
Alameda secured its loans from Voyager and BlockFi with FTT tokens, which FTX minted itself. Bankman-Fried’s empire controlled the vast majority of the available currency, with only a small amount of FTT actually circulating at any time.
Alameda should have acknowledged the fact that its tokens couldn’t be sold at the price that they claimed they were worth, the CFTC alleges in its complaint.
This was because any attempt by Alameda to sell off their FTT tokens would crater FTT’s price, given how much of the available supply Alameda controlled.
Instead of correctly marking its tokens to market, though, Alameda recorded their entire hoard of FTT as being worth the prevailing market price.
Alameda used this methodology with other coins as well, including Solana and Serum (a token created and promoted by FTX and Alameda), using them to collateralize billions in loans to other crypto players. Industry insiders even had a nickname for those tokens — “Sam coins.”
The tables turned after the collapse of Luna, a stablecoin whose implosion and subsequent crash devastated other lenders and crypto firms and sent crypto prices plunging. Major Alameda lenders, like Voyager, declared bankruptcy. Remaining lenders began to execute margin calls or liquidate open positions with customers, including Alameda.
The CFTC alleges that between May and June 2022, Alameda was subjected to “a large number of margin calls and loan recalls.”
Unbeknownst to investors, lenders, or regulators, Alameda lacked enough liquid assets to service its loan obligations.
But while Alameda was illiquid, FTX’s customers — who had been constantly reassured that the exchange, and Bankman-Fried, were determined to protect their interests — were not.
The fraud — exposed
Bankman-Fried stepped down from his leadership position at Alameda Research in Oct. 2021 in what CFTC regulators claim was a calculated bid to cultivate a false sense of separation between FTX and the hedge fund. But he continued to exercise control, regulators claim.
Bankman-Fried allegedly ordered Alameda to increase its use of customer assets, drawing down massively on its “unlimited” credit line at FTX.
“Alameda was able to rely on its undisclosed ordinary-course access to FTX credit and customer funds to facilitate these large withdrawals, which were several billion dollars in notional value,” the CFTC filing reads.
By the middle of 2022, Alameda owed FTX’s unwitting customers approximately $8 billion. Bankman-Fried had testified before the House that FTX boasted world-class risk management and compliance systems, but in reality, according to the firm’s own bankruptcy filings, it possessed almost nothing in the way of record-keeping.
Then, on Nov. 2, the first domino fell. Crypto trade publication CoinDesk publicized details on Alameda’s balance sheet which showed $14.6 billion in assets. Over $7 billion of those assets were either FTT tokens or Bankman-Fried-backed coins like Solana or Serum. Another $2 billion were locked away in equity investments.
For the first time ever, the secretive inner workings of Alameda Research were revealed to be a modern-day Potemkin village. Investors began to liquidate their FTT tokens and withdraw their holdings from FTX, a potentially calamitous situation for Bankman-Fried.
Alameda still had billions of collateralized loans outstanding — but if the value of their collateral, FTT, fell too far, their lenders would execute further margin calls, demanding full repayment of loans.
Allegedly, Alameda had already been unable to fulfill loan obligations over the summer without accessing customer funds. Now, with money flowing out of the exchange and FTT’s price slipping, Alameda and FTX faced a liquidity crunch.
In a now-deleted tweet, Bankman-Fried continued to claim FTX was fully funded and that customer assets were safe. But on Nov. 6, four days after the CoinDesk article, the crack widened into a chasm, thanks to an old investor-turned-rival, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao.
Zhao founded Binance in 2017, and it was the first outside investor in FTX, funding a Series A round in 2019. It had exited the investment by July 2021, the same year that FTX raised $1 billion from big names like Sequoia Capital and Thoma Bravo.
FTX bought out Binance with a combination of BUSD, BNB, and FTT, according to Zhao.
BUSD is Binance’s exchange-issued stablecoin, pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. BNB is their exchange token, similar to FTX’s FTT, issued by Binance and used to pay transaction and trading fees on the exchange.
Zhao dropped the hammer with a tweet saying that because of “recent revelations that have came [sic] to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books.”
FTX executives scrambled to contain potential damage. Ellison responded to Zhao offering to purchase Binance’s remaining FTT position for $22 per token.
Privately, Bankman-Fried ordered Alameda traders to liquidate Alameda’s investments and positions “to rapidly free up capital for FTT buybacks,” the CFTC filing states. Bankman-Fried was preparing to bet the house in an effort to maintain Ellison’s public support level of $22.
Alameda traders managed to fend off outflows for two days, holding the price of FTT at around $22.
Publicly, Bankman-Fried continued to operate as if all was well. “FTX is fine. Assets are fine,” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 7 that has since been deleted. Bankman-Fried asserted that FTX did not invest client assets and that all redemptions would be processed.
But at the same time Bankman-Fried was tweeting reassurances, internally, executives were growing more and more alarmed at the increasing shortfall, according to prosecutors. It was “not merely a matter of having sufficient liquid funds on hand to cover customer withdrawals,” the CFTC alleges.
Rather, Bankman-Fried and other executives admitted to each other that “FTX customer funds were irrevocably lost because Alameda had appropriated them.”
It was an admission that flew in the face of everything Bankman-Fried would claim publicly up through the day of his arrest, a month later.
By Nov. 8, the shortfall had grown from $1 billion to $8 billion. Bankman-Fried had been courting outside investors for a rescue package. “Numerous parties declined […] regardless of the favorable terms being offered,” the CFTC filing alleges.
FTX issued a pause on all customer withdrawals that day. FTT’s price plummeted by over 75%. Bankman-Fried was in the midst of a high-tech, decentralized run on the bank. Out of options, he turned to Zhao, who announced that he’d signed a “non-binding” letter of intent to acquire FTX.com.
But just a day later, on Nov. 9, Binance said it would not go through with the acquisition, citing reports of “mishandled customer funds” and federal investigations.
Two days later, Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO of FTX and associated entities. FTX’s longtime attorneys at Sullivan & Cromwell approached John J. Ray, who oversaw Enron through its bankruptcy, to assume Bankman-Fried’s former position.
FTX filed for bankruptcy that same day, on Nov. 11. A month later, Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities, pending extradition on charges of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.
Bankman-Fried, a devotee of a philosophy known as “effective altruism,” was apparently driven by an obsessive need to quantify the impact he had on this world, measured in dollars and tokens. He drafted a spreadsheet which measured the influence that Alameda had on the planet (and determined it was nearly a net wash).
Billions of dollars of customer money are now floating in venture funds, political war chests and charitable coffers — money now at risk of being clawed back, thanks to Bankman-Fried’s alleged crimes.
Almost a decade ago, Bankman-Fried posed a hypothetical question to his friends and family on his personal blog: Waxing poetic on effective altruism, he asked rhetorically, “Just how much impact can a dollar have?”
“Well, if you want a one-sentence answer, here it is: one two thousandth of a life,” he said.
The CFTC alleges that over $8 billion dollars of customer funds are missing. Some customers have doubtless lost their life savings, their kid’s college funds, their future down payments. By Bankman-Fried’s own math, his alleged misdeeds were worth four million lives.
Even if you’re not knee-deep into electric bikes like many of us, you very likely may have heard of the e-bike brand SUPER73. The company’s motorcycle culture-inspired electric bikes have proven incredibly popular among teens and young adults, but the heyday of fast and questionably (or clearly) illegal e-bike modes seems to be coming to an end for the brand.
SUPER73 didn’t invent the moped-style electric bike, but it is often credited for kickstarting the boom. The name has become so ubiquitous that even other brands of moto-inspired electric bikes are often erroneously referred to as SUPER73 e-bikes.
Technically, SUPER73s were always intended to be perfectly street-legal electric bikes, and they always shipped in what was known as “Class 2 Mode”. That meant the bikes could top out at 20 mph (32 km/h) and largely met most electric bicycle regulations around the US for the last few years.
However, SUPER73 e-bikes could be quickly and easily unlocked via the company’s own smartphone app, letting riders access Class 3 mode of up to 28 mph (45 km/h) on pedal assist, or even an Off-Road Mode that basically removed all restrictions and allowed faster speeds on throttle-only riding as well. Despite the name, Off-Road Mode was largely used for street riding and turned the bike into something of a mini-motorcycle.
But those days of easily unlocking higher performance are officially gone, with SUPER73 now reacting to new California regulations that put stricter interpretations of e-bike classification laws on the books. Those new regulations, which took effect on January 1, 2025, required any e-bike with a functional throttle to limit its motor assist to just 20 mph. If an e-bike was designed to be modified for faster speed or higher power (such as via a setting change on the bike’s display or in the smartphone app), the bike would no longer be considered a street-legal electric bicycle in California.
SUPER73, which has often found itself at the center of the debate around faster e-bikes, reacted quickly. A major change now results in the higher performance modes being removed from SUPER73’s app. According to a notice on the company’s website, “In light of newly implemented regulations, customers who download and pair the SUPER73 app after January 1, 2025, will not have the ability to access modes other than the Class 2 mode in which the product is sold.”
While the bikes still have the mechanical ability to go faster, SUPER73’s new update basically removes the ability to access that higher performance, essentially limiting its e-bikes to 20 mph on both throttle and pedal assist.
Is there a workaround?
No, SUPER73 has developed an ironclad solution to prevent their e-bikes from being operated in illegal ways.
Just kidding. No, of course this isn’t a perfect solution, but not really due to any fault by SUPER73. There are multiple apps already available that can be used instead of the company’s app, which allow riders to re-access that higher performance. I won’t list them here, but it’s not exactly hard for anyone with an e-bike and internet connection to figure it out.
That doesn’t mean that every SUPER73 e-bike out there is going to be back in its former 30 mph form, and a significant number of riders will likely simply be stuck with new 20 mph speed limits. But we shouldn’t pretend like this is a foolproof system that can’t be defeated. As long as the e-bikes are built in a way that they are physically capable of higher performance (like a chunky 2,000W motor that is software-limited to 750W and 20 mph), the possibility remains that they will be somehow unlocked to access that performance.
It should be noted that such unlocking would still fall outside the regulations of California’s new electric bike laws, but at that point the punishment would likely fall upon the riders themselves instead of the e-bike maker, if it did its part to remove performance unlocking from its native app.
Electrek’s Take
I think that a lot of us could see this as an inevitability, though I’m not sure we expected to see companies come around this quickly, or rolling out updates that covered their e-bikes nationwide instead of just in California.
I agree that in the short term, this will likely have a positive effect on the few bad apples who ruin it for everyone – basically the roving gangs of teens on illegally fast e-bikes. People who ride e-bikes in dangerous ways around other cyclists and pedestrians are a danger, plain and simple.
In the long run though, I still don’t think this is the proper route to go. When you can buy a 125 mph car that weighs as much as a military vehicle and yet it is simply the responsibility of each driver to never exceed barely half of its performance, it seems silly to put so much effort into reducing the speed of bicycles from 28 mph to 20 mph. Is this really the major public safety threat to spend our time and legislative resources on?
I still believe that the better solution combines education and enforcement. It’s simply not that hard. If some snot-nosed kid is riding dangerously in the bike lane, street, or sidewalk, confiscate the bike and slap a fine on his or her parents. But don’t tell me that a responsible adult who is simply trying to get to work efficiently is a menace to society on an e-bike that goes 28 mph instead of 20 mph.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Volkswagen U.S. assembly of all-electric ID.4 flagship in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2022.
Volkswagen
The new Republican-majority Congress has wasted no time in making its energy priorities clear. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said from the House floor minutes after his reelection, “We have to stop the attacks on liquefied natural gas, pass legislation to eliminate the Green New Deal. … We’re going to expedite new drilling permits, we’re going to save the jobs of our auto manufacturers, and we’re going to do that by ending the ridiculous E.V. mandates.”
Data from the auto industry shows a more complicated story. There are more investments in EVs and related battery technologies in states under the control of Republican governors than in states run by Democrats. The top 10 states for total investments in EV technology, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, are either solidly red or swing states such as Michigan, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada. Far from help the fortunes of automakers, Trump confidante Elon Musk is on record as saying that repealing EV incentives would be a pill he could swallow, even as CEO of Tesla, because it would hurt other automakers even more.
Amending or possibly repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s sweeping 2022 law that allocates approximately $369 billion over the next decade to clean-energy and climate-related projects, has been a talking point for President-elect Trump and many members of the GOP. Not a single Republican voted in favor of the bill — saying its subsidies, tax credits, grants and loans are wasteful government overreach — and the party and Trump have since railed against it.
On this year’s campaign trail, Trump said he will “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”
He and fellow Republicans have also talked about eliminating the IRA’s $7,500 federal personal tax credit for buying a new electric vehicle, as well as various incentives for private companies investing in manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, EV batteries, heat pumps and other clean-energy products.
But in an interview with CNBC last fall, Speaker Johnson hinted at the potential problem for the GOP now that investments have been made, and job growth continues to climb, across Republican states. He said it would be impossible to “blow up” the IRA, and it would be unwise, since some aspects of the “terrible” legislation had helped the economy. “You’ve got to use a scalpel and not a sledgehammer, because there’s a few provisions in there that have helped overall,” Johnson said.
The economic boost that hundreds of IRA-funded projects have given the country, beyond just the EV industry, are predominantly in red states — and the hundreds of thousands of clean-energy jobs linked to the IRA as well as the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. A vast portion of that workforce voted for Republicans in November, and jeopardizing their livelihoods could fuel a balloting backlash.
“The IRA is the quintessential policy that can create jobs, drive economic growth and improve our economy,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group comprising about 10,000 business leaders and investors, “while at the same time giving us the tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
While the clean energy jobs market remains small relative to a total U.S. employment market of roughly 160 million Americans, it has become more than just a blip in the jobs picture. Data for the full year 2024 is not yet available, but according to E2’s Clean Jobs America 2024 report released in September, more than 149,000 clean-energy jobs were created in 2023, accounting for 6.4% of new jobs economy-wide and nearly 60% of total employment across the entire energy sector. Over the past three years, E2 reported, clean-energy jobs increased by 14%, reaching nearly 3.5 million workers nationwide. “Our members and businesses across a lot of sectors are very concerned about the potential of repealing” the IRA, Keefe said.
In the two years since the IRA passed, E2 has tracked private-sector clean-energy projects, including solar, wind, grid electrification, clean vehicles and EV and storage batteries. To date, it has identified 358 major projects in 42 states and investments of nearly $132 billion. More than 60% of the announced projects — representing nearly 80% of the investment and 70% of the jobs — are located in Republican congressional districts.
In November, the Net Zero Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University released a study focused on the domestic and global impacts of tinkering with Biden’s climate bills, in particular, the IRA. “Our scenario analysis shows that U.S. repeal of the IRA would, in the most likely scenario, harm U.S. manufacturing and trade and create up to $80 billion in investment opportunities for other countries, including major U.S. competitors like China,” the study said. “U.S. harm would come in the form of lost factories, lost jobs, lost tax revenue and up to $50 billion in lost exports.”
The fallout of gutting the IRA has not been lost on GOP lawmakers whose states and counties are benefiting from the law’s largesse. In August, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, urging him not to axe the tax credits that have “created good jobs in many parts of the country — including many districts represented by members of our conference.”
Coincidentally, one of the signees, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor. Another, Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia, has touted the eight clean-energy projects, totaling $7.8 billion in investments and creating 7,222 jobs, the IRA has brought to his district. And the tiny town of Dalton, Georgia, home of the largest solar panel manufacturing plant in the western hemisphere and source of about 2,000 jobs, is in the district represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vociferous climate-change skeptic who has nonetheless cheered the factory.
The QCells solar panel manufacturing plant in Dalton, Georgia, U.S., on Monday, May 3, 2021.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In a survey of nearly 930 business stakeholders conducted in August by E2 and BW Research, more than half (53%) said they would lose business or revenue as a direct result of an IRA repeal and 21% would have to lay off workers.
If Republicans fully repeal the IRA, which would require congressional approval, they “would be shooting themselves in the foot and hurting their own constituents,” said Andrew Reagan, executive director of Clean Energy for America, a nonprofit that advocates for the clean-energy workforce. “You would see not only projects canceled, but job losses,” he said.
West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who will chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee this year, talked in a recent interview with Politico about a focus on rolling back elements of the IRA, including “frivolous” spending, while pushing to keep parts that have created clean-energy jobs. In her state, “some people have taken advantage of this tax relief and are now employing 800 and 1,000 people,” Capito said, “and that’s what this should be all about.”
Union organizing at EV and battery plants
In addition to spurring new job growth, the IRA, Infrastructure Act and CHIPS Act each have provisions ensuring that a significant portion of jobs created go to union members or provide prevailing wages and benefits, apprenticeships and job training to non-union workers. So it’s no surprise that unions are also on the front line in the battle to protect the bills.
Unionization rates in clean energy have surpassed traditional energy employment for the first time, reaching 12.4%, according to a recent Department of Energy report. “That’s a really big deal for us and we want to keep building on that,” said Samantha Smith, strategic advisor for clean energy jobs for the AFL-CIO, which represents more than 12.5 million U.S. workers in manufacturing, construction, mining and other sectors. “We’re going to work to make sure that every job and clean-energy project with this federal funding can be a good union job,” she said. “That is our focus when looking at this legislation and what Congress might do.”
The Laborers’ International Union of North America represents about 530,000 workers in the energy and construction industries. Executive director Brent Booker noted that LIUNA members voted for both Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, but that “none voted to take their jobs away.” And while “cautiously optimistic that the IRA is going to stay in place,” the union “will hold to account this administration to make sure” it does.
A recent report from the Center for Automotive Research outlines the critical workforce needs to meet the demand for EV batteries, which is expected to grow six-fold in the U.S. by 2030. There are a significant skills gaps in the battery industry, the report stated, which will require increased recruitment and training of workers — especially engineers, technicians and assemblers — for years to come.
This paves the way for unions to organize workers at battery plant factories, many of which are joint ventures located in the so-called “battery belt” that stretches from Michigan down to Georgia. In February of last year, the United Auto Workers committed $40 million through 2026 in funds to support non-union autoworkers and battery workers who are organizing across the country, and particularly in the South.
“In the next few years, the electric vehicle battery industry is slated to add tens of thousands of jobs across the country,” the UAW said in announcing the investment. “These jobs will supplement, and in some cases largely replace, existing powertrain jobs in the auto industry. Through a massive new organizing effort, workers will fight to maintain and raise the standard in the emerging battery industry.”
Indeed, just this week, workers at Ford’s $6-billion BlueOval SK EV battery plant in Glendale, Kentucky, a joint venture with South Korea’s SK On, filed with the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election.
Clean Energy for America’s Reagan said he assumes that Trump will be true to his America First platform: to strengthen U.S. manufacturing and supply chains, cut consumers’ energy bills in half by increasing domestic energy production and reduce reliance on foreign trade, especially with China. “He can’t do any of those things if he repeals the tax credits or tries to stifle American companies that are creating jobs,” Reagan said. “If he’s going to be successful, he can’t take an adversarial approach to a huge part of our economy.”
Yolo County, California depends on its climate for continued agricultural success. As such, the county’s leaders are taking environmental stewardship seriously by aiming for full carbon neutrality by 2030. To help achieve that goal, they’re putting zero-emission machinery like the Volvo DD25 Electric compactor to work.
We got our first chance to sample the DD25 Electric at Volvo Days last summer, where the all-electric tandem roller’s vibrating drums impressed dealers and end users alike. It was no surprise, then, that when Yolo Country fleet superintendent, Ben Lee, when shopping for a compactor the DD25 Electric was high on his list.
“The DD25 Electric will help us achieve our goals in several ways,” explains Lee. “By reducing emissions, lowering noise levels, being more energy-efficient, improving working conditions and promoting environmentally friendly practices … we’ll use it to compact soil, gravel and other base materials for road and foundation projects, as well as rolling out and leveling asphalt during road construction and resurfacing.”
To help Lee handle those various projects, the Volvo’s drum frequency can be adjusted from 3500 vpm (55 Hz) to 4000 vpm (67 Hz) to cater to different applications and materials.
The DD25 Electric offers other benefits, as well – like a 20 kWh 48V battery that offers up between six and eight hours of continuous operation. That’s could be several shifts in the kind of conditions Yolo’s work crews will encounter, meaning it will only have to get put to bed (Volvo recommend overnight AC charging) two or three times a week.
Getting power to the compactor, too, is something Yolo is considering. “There are some remote areas in the county, so we’re looking into a mobile, self-contained charging unit as well,” explains Lee, apparently referencing the Volvo PU130 mobile battery. “So we wouldn’t have to bring the machine back to the yard each night during a long-term project.”
Yolo County views electric equipment as an essential step in reducing emissions and energy consumption, especially as communities work towards stricter regulations and sustainability goals.
Electrek’s Take
This press release came to us ahead of the devastating wild fires in Southern California that are dominating headlines right now – so much so that I effectively sat on the news for a few days, debating whether or not we should even be talking about a California news story that isn’t about the fires right now.
But I realized: this story is about the fires. Climate change driven by combustion and carbon emissions is driving climate change and that’s making fires like these possible … and I should have run it sooner.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Volvo CE.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports9 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway