ACT Expo, the largest advanced fleet expo, is happening this week, and the question on everyone’s lips is: how can we electrify our fleet quickly?
Range Energy thinks it has the best answer, and it doesn’t require any retrofitting of tractors or engines, just a new trailer.
Range figured that so many people have thought about electrifying the semi-truck tractor, but nobody has really focused on the trailer. This makes sense considering the trailer is just dead weight on most trucks, so why would people think about changing the motive power of something without motive power?
But with EV tech, Range thinks it can change that and add more safety and fuel efficiency. And it can do this much more quickly than it takes to build and validate new electric trucks.
The idea is to add electric motors and a battery directly onto the trailer itself. This gives the trailer the ability to provide some of its own torque to help lighten the load on the diesel tractor, effectively reducing the amount of mass it needs to pull around on its own.
This just makes any load easier to carry. It should enhance the performance of the truck, making it easier to turn onto arterial roads, get up to speed on the highway, or perform passing maneuvers.
Range told us that when it drove down to ACT Expo, from Northern to Southern California, going over the famous Grapevine (Tioga Pass) was a cinch. The pass is famously difficult, featuring a 5-mile stretch of 6% grade, with shoulders dotted with frequent water stops for overheating engines. Range said it easily passed other trucks on the way up – and on the way down, it didn’t have to worry about brake fade since it used regenerative braking in the trailer to charge the battery.
And it doesn’t even take any additional communication between the tractor and the trailer. All of this is done through Range’s “smart kingpin.” This is just the standard interface on any truck trailer, but Range has put sensors in it to detect lateral loads from acceleration and braking. The sensors detect how much force the tractor is asking for, and Range spins up the motor in proportion.
Range showed us a demo of how this works on a shrunk-down prototype of its trailer, with a handle attached to a version of its smart kingpin:
Range’s small-scale demo prototype. It really felt like I was moving nothing at all.
Range says that its system can reduce diesel emissions by 41% and fits directly into a fleet without any changes to tractors or usage patterns. It can even be used in “mild-hybrid” mode if charging isn’t available, effectively turning a diesel truck into a hybrid without having to retrofit the engine itself.
Not every scenario will get that 41% reduction, but Range says even in the worst-case scenario, this impromptu hybrid system should improve efficiency by about 10%. (I question how this is possible at a steady speed on a flat road, but in normal operation that includes any amount of braking, the number seems reasonable.)
Of course, you’ll want to keep these batteries charged when possible because as long as you’ve got 200 kWh of batteries, you might as well use them. So you’d be wise to add charging to your yard, and the trailer accepts either 19 kW AC or DC up to 350 kW. Range hasn’t finalized a single charging solution yet, but spoke of the potential of adding various plugs, overhead charging systems, or even a contact interface at the rear of the trailer, which would automatically start charging whenever the trailer is in a loading bay.
This system enables zero-emission operation in many situations in which that might be desirable, like in yard operation, while idling, or in ports or other emissions-control areas. In these cases, the trailer could be used to push the tractor, and the tractor could be used just for steering. While this sounds unwieldy, Range reminded us that articulated buses often work in a “pusher” configuration, with the rear car of the bus providing motive power, so there shouldn’t be any difficulty there.
Adding batteries and motors to the trailer unlocks a lot of options and applications that a typical “dumb” trailer doesn’t have. It’s easier to add a powered liftgate or powered landing gear for one since you’ve already got power onboard.
Having energy onboard means being able to use the trailer for temporary installations that need power – think disaster response, where electric vehicles have proven capable. Or you could continue powering a refrigerated trailer even while the truck is parked – or when the tractor isn’t even connected.
And the trailer has bidirectional charging, so it could be used to power offboard equipment or to help balance the grid (and make money through energy arbitrage if your trailer spends a lot of time parked and plugged in).
Beyond these efficiency, utility, and performance gains, Range sees safety benefits with the system. By adding control to the rear axle, a truck can gain all sorts of modern safety features like stability control or jackknife protection. And the aforementioned regenerative braking protects against brake fade on long grades and makes obnoxious Jake brakes redundant – and those giant runaway truck ramps should see a lot less use.
It’s not all upsides, though – Range’s unit weighs about 4,000 lbs, which eats into your payload. Semi-trucks are limited to 80,000 lbs gross vehicle weight, and the more the truck and trailer themselves weigh, the less payload you can fit into them and stay under that 80k limit. Because electric trucks are heavier, they are given an additional 2,000 lbs of wiggle room, for a total of 82k lbs.
But Range’s system doesn’t qualify for that exception. It’s working on this issue with regulators, trying to get its unit qualified so that trucks with its trailer can access that additional 2k lbs, but it hasn’t received that allowance yet.
Range is moving quickly to try to get those allowances and also to get to market. Since almost all regulation is on the tractor and not the trailer (in fact, a recent court decision said that the EPA and CARB can’t regulate trailers because they aren’t “self-propelled”), this means that Range can get its trailers to market much quicker than other manufacturers that are still going through regulatory processes to bring truck tractors to market. And then Range can get those trailers onto trucks more quickly since further modification of the tractor isn’t needed.
And as a startup staffed by many people who have worked in fast-moving EV startups before (the CEO, Ali Javidian, worked at Tesla from 2008-2012), Range is moving quickly. It plans to have trailers for sale next year, though we’ll have to see how that works out, especially when it comes to battery supply, which has been difficult lately.
Range argues that its solution is necessary and helpful because we need action now on climate change, and these trailers can be deployed more quickly and with less capital than converting a whole fleet.
That said, California’s huge new truck rule has some pretty aggressive timelines, including an end to new diesel purchases for drayage trucks at the end of this year. So Range may find its market disappearing over time as everyone converts to fully electric operation.
The company still thinks that it will have a niche since its trailers could even give electric trucks the additional safety benefits mentioned above or could be used as range boosters for EV trucks as well. If, say, someone needs a 400-mile truck but can only find a 300-mile truck that fits their other specifications, adding a Range trailer could give them the boost they need.
It’s still early days for Range, and though it is moving quickly, there’s a lot of distance from here to there. We don’t know pricing or availability yet, though Range says it’ll be in the market next year. And while the company is promising a lot, most of these promises seem fairly realistic, and nobody else is doing anything like this (that we know of). We’re certainly excited to see more from Range as it moves forward.
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The BYD Atto 3 goes on sale in Japan (Source: BYD Japan)
China set a new record for clean tech exports in August 2025, hitting $20 billion, according to new data analyzed using Ember’s China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer. The country remains the world’s largest exporter of electrotech, with surging demand for EVs and batteries leading the charge.
EV exports jumped 26% from January through August compared to the same period in 2024, while battery exports rose 23%. Other sectors saw more modest growth – grid technology up 22%, wind up 16%, and heating and cooling systems up 4% – but those gains were offset by a 19% drop in solar PV export value. EVs and batteries are now worth more than double the value of China’s solar PV exports.
This milestone is remarkable because it comes even as technology prices have fallen sharply. Solar panel prices, for example, have plunged more than 80% over the past decade, making them more affordable and driving up global demand. In August alone, China exported 46 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV – more than Australia’s entire installed solar capacity – setting a record in capacity terms. However, their dollar value remains 47% below their March 2023 peak.
Falling prices have fueled growth in new regions. Over half of the increase in China’s EV exports this year came from outside the OECD, with the ASEAN region emerging as a major growth engine. EV exports to ASEAN surged 75% in the first eight months of 2025, mainly driven by Indonesia. The country saw the biggest rise in Chinese EV imports globally this year, becoming the world’s ninth-largest EV market. Battery electric vehicles made up 14% of new car sales in Indonesia in August 2025, up from 9% a year earlier.
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Africa is also rapidly adopting Chinese clean tech. From January to August, EV exports to the continent nearly tripled year-over-year (+287%), albeit from a very low base, with Morocco leading growth and Nigeria’s imports soaring sixfold. Latin America and the Caribbean saw an 11% rise, while the Middle East climbed 72%.
Domestically, China’s own adoption of clean tech is accelerating even faster. EVs accounted for 52% of new car sales in August, and in the first half of 2025, China installed more than twice as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined. Ember’s recent China Energy Transition Review attributes this momentum to consistent policy support that’s reshaping the country’s economy and energy system around electrified technologies.
“Demand for clean technologies continues to skyrocket as more and more countries seek their benefits, from low-cost power to cheaper vehicles,” said Ember analyst Euan Graham. “China’s electrotech is becoming the basis of the new energy system, with continued cost reductions driving faster growth than ever, especially in emerging economies.”
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Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.
“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”
His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.
Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.
Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”
The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.
Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.
With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.
The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.
“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.
A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’
Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.
In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is fierce.
Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.
While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.
However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.
Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.
“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.
“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”
There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.
GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.
As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.
Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.
That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).
It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.
You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.
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