
The Faraday Future FF91 actually exists, and I was the first media to drive it
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2 years agoon
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Faraday Future, the oft-delayed electric vehicle startup, has finally brought the FF91 to market, and we were the first media to drive a real production-spec version of the car, around Willow Springs raceway no less.
Faraday invited us to Willow Springs to attend its latest “delivery co-creation day,” where race car driver and Le Mans class winner Justin Bell took delivery of his FF91 2.0 Futurist Alliance limited-edition vehicle. This is the seventh car the company has delivered since the official start of production in March and the start of shipping in May. Faraday is showing a video on its website to recap the events of the day, which should be live as this article is published.
Willow Springs was a fitting location since the event was also the launch of Faraday’s “Racetrack Conqueror Plan,” where the point is to visit racetracks around the world to set track records with its electric car.
Bell and his father, Derek (a multiple Le Mans winner and ex-F1 driver who also has an FF91 on order), say they’re going to work on developing a racing package for the FF91, which will help it on its way to these records. Faraday also plans to engage with other racing drivers in the future – Romain Dumas was one example given.

Faraday also invited other VIPs, including various supercar owners, to come out and challenge the FF91 on the track. A Bugatti Chiron, a Ferrari SF 90 PHEV, a Mercedes GTS AMG Black, and others were in attendance. Faraday did manage to set a record on the day and beat the various other cars at the track.
The FF91 set a lap time of 1:28.13, which beat out the Lamborghini Urus for the fastest lap by an SUV (gas or electric) by more than two seconds. According to fastestlaps.com, that puts the FF91 just behind the Porsche 911 GT3, McLaren 570S and Tesla Model S Plaid by less than a second each and just ahead of the BMW M4 CSL and the 760hp supercharged V-8 Shelby Mustang GT500.
And then, five years after Faraday’s initial production intent and with several attempts at restructuring the company and finding contingent funding inbetween, we finally got a chance to hop behind the wheel.
While Faraday has offered some media drives before, those were in prototype vehicles, whereas this is the first time in a real production vehicle and the first time on a track. We drove production VIN #1, the car belonging to Faraday Future’s founder, Yueting “YT” Jia.
First drive: 1,050 mind-blowing, silent horsepower
This was definitely just a first drive – we didn’t get any street time with the car, just a few laps on the track and a little time sitting in it and messing around with the interface.
But the track time meant we could really get a sense of what the FF91’s 1,050 horsepower (yes, you read that right, one thousand and fifty horsepower) can really do.
On the front straight, it started pulling, and then it kept pulling, and then it kept pulling. It just never stopped pulling. I got up to about 145mph (of its electronically limited 155mph), and it didn’t feel like it was petering out.
And I felt like I was taking it easy. Even at that high speed, the car showed no sign of drama. It was quiet and smooth inside, and there weren’t any theatrics on the way to achieving a faster land speed than most people will ever see.
And even better, in my opinion, was the complete lack of drama on the exterior of the car. The car was not screaming loudly as it blasted by the grandstands. (In fact, it was perhaps easier to hear the motorcycles at the neighboring Streets of Willow track than the FF91 on the big track.)
Some prefer the belching theatrics of a loud exhaust, but beyond the obvious health and climate effects and the inefficiency of noise replacing actual kinetic energy, honestly, they’re just so gauche. It was more pleasant and exciting to see the FF91 whip through the air silently than it was to smell the noisy Spoon Racing Honda idling and giving everyone a headache while it waited to take the track.
All that said, the car was maybe even too quiet. Not on the engine side of things, but with Faraday’s focus on offering a luxurious ride, extensive sound dampening meant it was hard to hear the tires working outside the vehicle.
When tracking an electric car, being able to hear the tires working is a real performance benefit compared to louder motors, as it gives you another sense to help you understand your vehicle’s dynamics. Maybe the Bell performance package will remove some sound-dampening material, which will also help to save weight.
It’s heavy, but Faraday, please stop calling it an elephant
This brings up the FF91’s big disadvantage when it comes to the track: All that size and luxury means it weighs a whopping 6,442 pounds (2,922kg).
That’s an enormous vehicle, even compared to other supercars and hypercars, which lately have seen a trend forsaking weight savings for more raw power (while the late Colin Chapman rolls in his grave). For comparison, the 1,020hp Model S Plaid is 4,700 pounds, and the 1,500hp Bugatti Chiron (one of which was in attendance) is 4,400 pounds. But then again, those vehicles don’t have reclining rear seats. More on that in a moment.
Weight is one of the worst things for vehicle performance. The heavier your car, the harder it is to accelerate, brake, and turn. That is, it’s harder to do all of the things a car is meant to do. When legendary race car designer Colin Chapman was asked what to add to make a car faster, he responded, “Add lightness.”
This heavy weight was apparent in the car’s performance, but not as much as you’d think. The car’s heaviest portion, its 142kWh(!!!) battery, is placed at the floor between the wheels, which helps to keep a low center of gravity and low-ish moment of inertia (compared to its 206-inch length) and increases chassis rigidity. As a result, even in the flatter corners (most of Willow’s corners are banked), we felt very little body roll from the car, which is especially abnormal for an SUV.
In corners, the car was a little floaty when jumping on the throttle on corner exit, again owing to its high weight. It just takes a lot of effort to get such a big car turned. Its tri-motor system is arranged with three equally-sized motors, one in front and two in rear, with a slight rear/oversteer bias to the handling, which I actually enjoyed. I do prefer rear-wheel drive – it’s just more fun to be able to steer the car on the throttle – but everyone’s going AWD because it’s faster and easier to drive, so at least the car will still let me have a little fun.
And as for the brakes, they felt fine, but it certainly did take some real effort to get the car stopped. There’s just so much car behind them. On a track-performance basis, this is probably the car’s weakest point. Not that they felt too small or that the car didn’t behave well under them – just that the car is heavy, and when you have that much kinetic energy, it takes time to shed all of it.
Despite the weight, the car still held its own on the track on the day, setting the aforementioned SUV record and beating other supercars that were brought out to set laps. YT has repeatedly used a metaphor along the lines of “an elephant dancing with cheetahs,” and while I understand the meaning he’s getting at here, I encourage Faraday to stop calling its car an elephant. Nobody wants to hear that.

Another track weakness that I didn’t personally encounter is in the battery temperature management. While my three laps were unbothered, the next driver apparently was unable to coax full performance out of the car, as it had gone into a protection mode from the high temperatures I left it with on this warm-but-not-hot track day.
We saw a lot of this with early Teslas, which could only do a limited number of laps or sometimes couldn’t even complete a full lap of a longer track like the Nurburgring Nordschleife before derating due to temperature. By now, Tesla’s cooling systems and software have improved enough that this isn’t a problem, and there are plenty of racing-focused EVs that don’t have a problem with derating after multiple laps (Formula E, for example, where Faraday was involved in a team in season 3).
Faraday got another car out for the other driver and says that it has some ideas about how to tweak the software to avoid temperature derating, but we suspect it will take a good amount of focused effort (or perhaps a compromise of reducing peak power) to get there.
But if your car does need a break, or if you do, at least you’ve got a nice place to sit.
It’s also a luxury car
That’s the thing about the FF91: It’s not really a sports car. We’ve talked a lot about track performance because that’s where we drove it, but Faraday calls it an “all-ability” car, which merges the capabilities of a luxury car, family car, and sports car.
So its deficiencies as a sports car – namely, its weight and size – are a result of its strengths as a luxury car.
The main focus of the vehicle since its introduction has been the rear Zero-G seats, which have gobs of legroom and are capable of reclining at a 60° angle. These seats are enormous and comfortable, a class above even the Audi e-tron SUV, which is the previous most comfortable car I’ve enjoyed sitting in and even better than the original Lucid prototype rear seats, which had a similar style but were abandoned come production. (Faraday has already floated that there may eventually be a bench seat version of the FF91.)
These Zero-G seats are largely targeted at people with personal drivers and, therefore, target people who spend more time in the rear seat of their own vehicle – not so common in the US, where Faraday is based, but quite common in China, where the founder is from and which the company is clearly targeting much of its strategy at (though it would not tell me when Chinese deliveries would commence).
Upon sliding into position in the back, I immediately and subconsciously went into “comfort mode.” Think of the blue-collar dad, getting home from a hard day of work, popping a beer, kicking off his shoes, plopping into his favorite La-Z-Boy and pulling the recline handle to enter maximum relaxation mode.
Truly, this gives a new definition to the common phrase “living room on wheels.” An employee told us that his kid and wife now fight over who gets the back seat, not the front seat. I can see it.
It’s a startup, after all
And yet, despite being in the first production vehicle, a number of production features were not available to test out. The car was festooned with gear that blocked the rear 27-inch screen from folding down, and the seat massagers were not activated (I’d probably still be sitting there if they were, having melted across the divide into the plane of pure relaxation). And while the software worked well, it was still waiting for some future features (but I’m no stranger to cars like that).
One of its characteristic whiz-bang startup-like features is something we’ve seen on many concepts recently (and production cars, too): funky doors. The FF91’s doors have no handles whatsoever, and are instead opened by a touch gesture either on exterior car window sill or a touchscreen on the B-pillar.
I’m okay with some door handle experimentation, but this seems like a bridge too far. The sill gesture was not reliable in my initial experience, though the touchscreen gesture worked well. This could be solved with, perhaps, auto-opening doors on walk-up or something of the sort. Handles, a button, anything along those lines would be nice. But, at least you can close them manually.
Faraday says that it will engage with early owners, whom it is calling “co-creators,” in an active feedback loop to improve its software and fit it to the needs of its owners. The company wants to offer frequent software updates and says it has much more computing power onboard than it is currently using, so it has plenty of headroom to add more capabilities.
While we didn’t get deep into using the software, the basic interface already does work pretty well. Most importantly, the interface is snappy and responsive, unlike virtually every other OEM interface that isn’t made by Apple/Android or another EV startup.
In terms of interface layout, some of the controls take one too many submenus to reach, and there was some lag between pressing certain digital controls and translating them into hardware movement (e.g., adjusting seats and steering wheel), but you should only have to do that once anyway. Faraday says its software will remember your settings and wants to eventually detect not just who’s in the car but what seat they’re in and set each seat to whatever the occupant’s preferred settings are.
The main screen is vertically oriented between the front seats, and myriad car settings can be controlled from there. There are additional touchscreens on the rear doors, which allow independent controls (such as climate control) for each back seat.
The screens themselves were a little darker than I’d like, though admittedly, it was a bright day, and I was wearing sunglasses, which brings up another point – the FF91’s HUD struggles with polarized sunglasses, something that I have noticed in other HUDs, since the whole point of polarized glasses is to reduce reflections (though the Mercedes EQS, through some black magic, still makes it work).
But even worse, the main screen didn’t look great with polarized glasses either. This is common for screens, though usually it only works when you tilt your head 90° away from the normal viewing angle (and some screens, like phone screens, avoid the problem completely). But in this case, it seemed to darken when my head was just at a diagonal angle, which strikes me as a far bigger oversight than a difficult-to-see HUD.

The driver instrument display and the passenger infotainment display, though, both did not have this problem. But each had a gloss finish on them, which made it difficult to see if there was a bright reflection – which there often was, especially as the strong California desert sun got lower in the sky. They could stand to be both brighter and closer to the driver/passenger, as they are set quite far back into the dash.
But the software also got a big win when I tried pairing my device with the in-car Wi-Fi system. All I had to do was scan a QR code, and my device immediately joined without needing to enter my phone’s settings, and all of a sudden, a bunch of notifications came through on my phone, which I hadn’t been getting due to poor reception at the track. So, score one for FF91’s triple-antenna cell system and a great and easy-to-use software experience.
But we didn’t have a chance to test any driver aids or semi-autonomous software at all. Like most cars on the road today, Faraday’s driver aids are SAE level 2, which means you are still responsible for driving the car. The car has 30 sensors, with cameras and LiDAR, and is powered by NVIDIA’s Orin architecture.
Faraday talked a lot about being autonomous-ready, both in their 2017 reveal and in May of this year, though at this event, it was much quieter about all that – in fact, explicitly telling me that it doesn’t want to make promises it can’t keep, unlike some other companies. This statement would be a refreshing sign of maturity if Faraday hadn’t been making those exact promises about its “FF aiHypercar+” system just a few months ago, which will be able to generate custom maps of private grounds which will allow level 4 driverless operation, and which it said it plans to charge $15k per year for.
And that’s one thing about my conversations with Faraday employees on the day. In Faraday’s marketing presentations, it has made a lot of claims about what its car is and will be capable of. These claims have also been buried under mountains of buzzwords, and the short presentation given by YT was no different.

But in direct conversations, employees mostly spoke in normal human terms, forgoing the buzzwords and just talking about what the car can do, what it will hopefully be able to do in the near future, and what it seems like will come further down the timeline. And at times, the employees recognized the need to distance themselves from promises and designs generated long ago before many of them were with the company.
These conversations were refreshing to experience, but I would like to see them reflected in Faraday’s higher-level messaging. Maybe I’m completely missing the market here, but I just don’t think anyone is served by phrases like “FF aiHyper 6×4 Architecture 2.0.” It doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Focus.
Now it’s time to focus
Putting three cars in one was always going to be a challenge. I’ve written a lot of words about Faraday’s “kitchen sink” approach, reaching all the way back to its original reveal in 2017. In short, I think it’s dangerous to try to make a car that’s everything to everybody. You have to eventually sit down, focus, and trim the fat somehow.

Since that reveal, Faraday has moved from benchmarking itself against the Tesla Model S in its original announcement in 2017 (this wasn’t explicit, but it was still obvious) to now benchmarking itself against Maybach and Ferrari. This latter benchmark surely helps it to justify its $309,000 price tag on these first vehicles, but in the interim, we’ve seen Mercedes announce a starting price of $180,000 on its Maybach EQS SUV, which is quite the undercut compared to FF91’s announced pricing.
Faraday’s less-limited-edition FF91 2.0 Futurist model will start at a lower $249,000 base price, and the base-model FF91 2.0 will be lower still, though that last price point has not yet been announced. We’ll see how close it gets to the Maybach.
Faraday also says that it has one big advantage over the Germans, which is that, as a tech company, it can move faster and has a much better understanding of how people are engaging with technology and devices today.
On this point, I don’t disagree. One thing I love about my early Model 3 is that it is a better car today than it was when it was released due to software updates (and the rollout of the Supercharger network); the same can’t generally be said about cars from traditional OEMs. But I am not the target market for a $309,000 (or $249,000) car, so what I think about this doesn’t particularly matter.
The question is: Will people buying Maybachs want to spend a similar amount of money – or more – on a car that doesn’t have a name with as long of an established history? Will the status gained from having early access to a rare and expensive new brand outstrip the status from having a car with a logo everyone (with money) knows about already and has for a hundred years? Surely, for some people, but are there enough buyers out there of that description to fund Faraday’s operations?
Those operations are the primary focus of Faraday Future’s new CEO, Matthias Aydt, appointed last month after less than a year under the previous temporary CEO, Xuefeng Chen, who is now back to his prior position as FF China CEO.
Aydt said he is focusing on cost-down and ramp-up, with the company targeting .5 cars an hour worth of output in the short term and hoping to reach two cars per hour output around the beginning of 2025.

Those numbers annualize to 2,500 cars a year and 10,000 cars a year, respectively – which is quite a shout from the seven that have been delivered so far this year (though more have been produced and many were brought out to the track). It’s the difference between a real car company producing cars in volume and literally being able to name every owner off the top of your head, the latter of which is possible now.
Aydt gave a public update on Faraday’s progress on October 15, primarily focused toward concerned investors who have seen the stock price fall significantly lately. The company will give more updates on its progress on this front at its quarterly update on November 13 and investor day at its HQ in Gardena, California, on November 15.
So the story of Faraday is one that, despite a lot of ink already being spilled, is still being written – and the company and its investors hope that we are still writing the early pages of that story. Getting here, bringing a competent vehicle to the road, is an achievement that many, myself included, thought would never happen. Faraday deserves credit for that, not only for getting the car to road but for getting it to the road with specs similar to what was promised (minus some of the more hopeful software features… which may still come in updates).
This is why I titled this article “the Faraday Future FF91 actually exists.” This may sound like I am damning the company with faint praise, but it truly is an achievement to have brought this car to market and to have managed some superlatives along the way. Its power is incredible, its rear seat comfort is beyond compare, and its software shows promise. But its strategy at times seems rudderless, and despite the superlatives, its price is still tough to justify. (But hey, I’m not spending over $200,000 on a car; what do I know about what that group wants?)
So now comes the time to focus, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to turn this dream into reality.
And, for goodness sake, stop calling your car an elephant.
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Environment
‘Repowering’ era for America’s aging wind energy industry begins, despite Trump’s effort to kill it
Published
14 hours agoon
April 27, 2025By
admin
Jeffrey Sanders / 500px | 500px | Getty Images
On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely halting permits for new onshore wind energy projects on federal land, as well as new leases for offshore wind farms in U.S. coastal waters. The action not only fulfilled Trump’s “no new windmills” campaign pledge, but struck yet another blow to the wind industry, which has been hit hard over the past few years by supply chain snags, price increases upending project economics, public opposition and political backlash against federal tax credits, especially those spurring the fledgling offshore wind sector.
Nonetheless, the nation’s well-established onshore wind industry, built out over several decades, is generating nearly 11% of America’s electricity, making it the largest source of renewable energy and at times last year exceeding coal-fired generation. On April 8, the fossil-fuels-friendly Trump administration took measures to bolster coal mining and power plants, but as the infrastructure driving wind energy ages, efforts to “repower” it are creating new business opportunities for the industry’s key players.
This repowering activity has emerged as a bright spot for the wind industry, giving a much-needed boost to market leaders GE Vernova, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, a subsidiary of Munich-based Siemens Energy. Following several challenging years of lackluster performance — due in particular to setbacks in both onshore and offshore projects — all three companies reported revenue increases in 2024, and both GE Vernova and Siemens stock have moved higher.
GE Vernova, spun off from General Electric a year ago, led overall onshore wind installations in 2024, with 56% of the U.S. market, followed by Denmark’s Vestas (40%) and Siemens Gamesa (4%).
GE Vernova stock performance over the past one-year period.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, installed wind power generating capacity grew from 2.4 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 150.1 GW as of April 2024. Although the growth rate for launching new greenfield onshore wind farms has slowed over the last 10 years, the U.S. is still poised to surpass 160 GW of wind capacity in 2025, according to a new report from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie.
There currently are about 1,500 onshore wind farms — on which more than 75,600 turbines are spinning — across 45 states, led by Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Illinois and Kansas. Virtually all of the wind farms are located on private land, and many of the largest ones are owned and operated by major energy companies, including NextEra Energy, RWE Clean Energy, Pattern Energy, Clearway Energy, Xcel Energy and Berkshire Hathaway‘s MidAmerican Energy, which generates 59% of it renewable energy from wind, including 3,500 turbines operating across 38 wind projects in Iowa.
A growing number of the turbines are 20-plus years old and nearing the end of their lifecycle. So increasingly, operators have to decide whether to upgrade or replace aging turbines’ key components, such as blades, rotors and electronics, or dismantle them altogether and erect new, technologically advanced and far more efficient models that can increase electricity output by up to 50%.
“What’s becoming clear is that more and more of the U.S. installed base [of onshore turbines] has exceeded its operational design life,” said Charles Coppins, research analyst for global wind at Wood Mackenzie, “and now operators are looking to replace those aging turbines with the latest [ones].”
To date, approximately 70 GW of onshore wind capacity has been fully repowered in the U.S., according to Wood Mackenzie, while an additional 12 GW has been partially repowered. The firm estimates that around 10,000 turbines have been decommissioned and that another 6,000 will be retired in the next 10 years, Coppins said.
Damaged wind turbine that was first hit by a tornado then lightning.
Ryan Baker | Istock | Getty Images
Beyond the fact that aged-out turbines need to be upgraded or replaced, repowering an existing wind farm versus building a new site presents economic benefits to operators and OEMs. To begin with, there’s no need to acquire property. In fact, in certain situations, because today’s turbines are larger and more efficient, fewer turbines are needed. And they’ll generate additional electricity and have longer lifecycles, ultimately delivering higher output at a lower cost.
Even so, “there are some limitations on how much capacity you could increase a project by without having to go through new permitting processes or interconnection queues” to the power grid, said Stephen Maldonado, Wood Mackenzie’s U.S. onshore analyst. As long as the operator is not surpassing the allowed interconnection volume agreed to with the local utility, they can add electricity to the project and still send it to the grid.
Public opposition, Maldonado said, may be another hurdle to get over. Whether it’s a new or repower wind project, residents have expressed concerns about environmental hazards, decreased property values, aesthetics and general anti-renewables sentiment.
RWE, a subsidiary of Germany’s RWE Group, is the third largest renewable energy company in the U.S., owning and operating 41 utility-scale wind farms, according to its CEO Andrew Flanagan, making up 48% of its total installed operating portfolio and generating capacity, which also includes solar and battery storage.
One of RWE’s two repower projects underway (both are in Texas), is its Forest Creek wind farm, originally commissioned in 2006 and featuring 54 Siemens Gamesa turbines. The project will replace them with 45 new GE Vernova turbines that will extend the wind farm’s life by another 30 years once it goes back online later this year. Simultaneously, RWE and GE Vernova are partnering on a new wind farm, immediately adjacent to Forest Creek, adding another 64 turbines to the complex. When complete, RWE will deliver a total of 308 MW of wind energy to the region’s homes and businesses.
Flanagan noted that the combined projects are related to increased electricity demands from the area’s oil and gas production. “It’s great to see our wind generation drive the all-of-the-above energy approach,” he said. What’s more, at its peak, the repower project alone will employ 250 construction workers and over its operating period bring in $30 million in local tax revenue, he added.
In turn, the twin projects will support advanced manufacturing jobs at GE Vernova’s Pensacola, Florida, facility, as well as advancing the OEM’s repower business. In January, the company announced that in 2024 it received orders to repower more than 1 GW of wind turbines in the U.S.
Koiguo | Moment | Getty Images
Siemens Gamesa has executed several large U.S. repowering projects, notably MidAmerican’s expansive Rolling Hills wind farm in Iowa, which went online in 2011. In 2019, the company replaced 193 older turbines with 163 higher-capacity models produced at its manufacturing plants in Iowa and Kansas.
Last year, Siemens Gamesa began repowering RWE’s 17-year-old Champion Wind, a 127-MW wind farm in West Texas. The company is upgrading 41 of its turbines with new blades and nacelles (the housing at the top of the tower containing critical electrical components) and adding six new turbines.
In early April, Clearway announced an agreement with Vestas to repower its Mount Storm Wind farm in Grant County, West Virginia. The project will include removing the site’s 132 existing turbines and replacing them with 78 new models. The repower will result in an 85% increase in Mount Storm’s overall electricity generation while using 40% fewer turbines.
Preparing for ‘megatons’ of turbine recycling and tariffs
Another benefit of repowering is invigorating the nascent industry that’s recycling megatons of components from decommissioned turbines, including blades, steel, copper and aluminum. Most of today’s operational turbines are 85% to 95% recyclable, and OEMs are designing 100% recyclable models.
While the majority of mothballed blades, made from fiberglass and carbon fiber, have historically ended up in landfills, several startups have developed technologies recycle them. Carbon Rivers, for example, contracts with the turbine OEMs and wind farm operators to recover glass fiber, carbon fiber and resin systems from decommissioned blades to produce new composites and resins used for next-generation turbine blades, marine vessels, composite concrete and auto parts.
Veolia North America, a subsidiary of the French company Veolia Group, reconstitutes shredded blades and other composite materials into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a replacement for coal, sand and clay. Veolia has processed approximately 6,500 wind blades at a facility in Missouri, and expanded its processing capabilities to meet demand, according to David Araujo, Veolia’s general manager of engineered fuels.
Trump’s new-project moratorium isn’t his only impediment to the wind industry. The president’s seesaw of import tariffs, especially the 25% levy on steel and aluminum, is impacting U.S. manufacturers across most sectors.
The onshore wind industry, however, “has done a really good job of reducing geopolitical risks,” said John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing the clean energy industry. He cited a manufacturing base in the U.S. that includes hundreds of plants producing parts and components for turbines. Although some materials are imported, the investment in domestic manufacturing “provides some risk mitigation to these tariffs,” he said.
Amidst the headwinds, the onshore wind industry is trying to stay focused on the role that repowering can play in meeting the nation’s exponentially growing demand for electricity. “We’re expecting a 35% to 50% increase between now and 2040, which is just incredible,” Hensley said. “It’s like adding a new Louisiana to the grid every year for 15 years.”
GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik recently told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the growth of the U.S.’s electric load is the largest since the industrial boom that followed the end of the second world war. “You’ve got to go back to 1945 and the end of World War II, that’s the infrastructure buildout that we’re going to have,” he said.
As OEMs and wind farm developers continue to face rising capital costs for new projects, as well as a Trump administration averse to clean energy industries, “repowering offers a pathway for delivering more electrons to the grid in a way that sidesteps or at least minimizes some of the challenges associated with all these issues,” Hensley said.

Environment
ABB is bringing its new, 1.2 MW modular truck chargers to ACT Expo
Published
1 day agoon
April 26, 2025By
admin

Capable of delivering up to 1,200 kW of power to get electric commercial trucks back on the road in minutes, the new ABB MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System is part of an ecosystem of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) that ABB’s bringing to this year’s ACT Expo.
ABB E-mobility is using the annual clean trucking conference to showcase the expansion of its EVSE portfolio with three all-new charger families: the field-upgradable A200/300 All-in-One chargers, the MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System for heavy-duty vehicles shown (above), and the ChargeDock Dispenser for flexible depot charging.
The company said its new product platform was built by applying a computer system-style domain separation to charger design, fundamentally improving subsystem development and creating a clear path forward for site and system expansion. In other words, ABB is selling a system with both future-proofing and enhanced dependability baked in.
“We have built a system by logically separating a charger into four distinct subsystems … each functioning as an independent subsystem,” explains Michael Halbherr, CEO of ABB E-mobility. “Unlike conventional chargers, where a user interface failure can disable the entire system, our architecture ensures charging continues even if the screen or payment system encounters issues. Moreover, we can improve each subsystem at its own pace without having to change the entire system.”
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The parts of ABB’s new EVSE portfolio that have been made public so far have already been recognized for design excellence, with the A400 winning the iF Gold Award and both the A400 and C50 receiving Red Dot Design Awards.
New ABB chargers seem pretty, good

ABB says the systemic separation of its EVSE enhances both reliability and quality, while making deployed chargers easier to diagnose and repair, in less time. Each of the chargers’ subsystems can be tested, diagnosed, and replaced independently, allowing for quick on-site repairs and update cycles tailored to the speed of each systems’ innovation. The result is 99% uptime and a more future-proof product.
“The EV charging landscape is evolving beyond point products for specific use cases,” continued Halbherr. “By implementing this modular approach with the majority of our R&D focused on modular platforms rather than one-off products … it reduces supply chain risks, while accelerating development cycles and enabling deeper collaboration with critical suppliers.”
Key markets ABB is chasing

- PUBLIC CHARGING – with the award winning A400 being the optimal fit for high power charging from highway corridors to urban locations, the latest additions to the A-Series All-in-One chargers offer a field-upgradable architecture allowing operators to start with the A200 (200kW) with the option to upgrade to 300kW or 400kW as demand grows. This approach offers scalability and protects customer investment, leading to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings over 10 years.
- PUBLIC TRANSIT AND FLEET – the new Charge Dock Dispenser – in combination with the already in market available HVC 360 – simplifies depot charging with a versatile solution that supports pantograph-, roof-, and pedestal charging options with up to 360kW of shared power and 150m/490 ft installation flexibility between cabinet and dispensers. The dispenser maintains up to 500A output.
- HEAVY TRUCKS – building the matching charging infrastructure for commercial vehicles and fleets represents a critical innovation frontier on our journey to electrify transportation. Following extensive collaboration with industry-leading truck OEMs, the MCS1200 Megawatt Charging System delivers up to 1,200kW of continuous power — 20% more energy transfer than 1MW systems — providing heavy-duty vehicles with purpose-built single-outlet design for the energy they need during mandatory driver breaks. To support other use cases, such as CCS truck charging, a dual CCS and MCS option will also be available.
- RETAIL – the award winning C50 Compact Charger complements the family as the slimmest charger in its category at just 9.3 inches depth, optimized for convenient charging during typical one-hour retail experiences. With its large touch display, the C50 takes the award-winning A400 experience even further — setting a new standard for consumer experience and very neatly echoing our own take on that “Goldilocks” timing zone for commercial charging.
ABB says that the result of its new approach are chargers that offer 99% plus uptime — a crucial statistic for commercial charging operations and a key factor to ensuring customer satisfaction. The new ABB E-mobility EVSE product family will be on display for the first time at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo (ACT Expo) in Anaheim, California next week, then again at Power2Drive in Munich, Germany, from May 7-9.
Electrek’s Take

The ACT Expo is one of – if not the most important sustainable trucking event in North America, featuring all the big names in heavy trucks, construction equipment, material handling, infrastructure – even Tier 1 suppliers. Mostly, though, it’s many fleet buyers’ only chance to test drive these zero emission trucks before writing a big PO (which just makes it even more important).
Electrek will be there again this year, and we’ll be bringing you all the latest news from press events and product reveals as it happens.
SOURCE | IMAGES: ABB E-mobility.

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Environment
Whisper Aero ultralight aircraft scores $500K for “UltraQuiet” electric jet motor tests
Published
1 day agoon
April 26, 2025By
admin

Along with Tennessee Tech, Tennessee-based ultralight aircraft company Whisper Aero has secured a $500,000 grant to help advance the company’s innovative electric jet motor concept off the drawing board and onto the testing phase.
Earlier this month, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD) announced plans to award $500,000 to Tennessee Tech and Whisper Aero through the Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative.
“We look forward to using these award dollars to place students in internships working directly with Whisper Aero leaders,” said Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham. “By learning from an electric propulsion innovator like Whisper Aero, our students will gain invaluable perspective and can take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it right here in Tennessee.”
The grant will see a Whisper Aero glider fitted with a pair of the company’s eQ250 electric-powered jet “propulsors” for UltraQuiet flight. Tennessee Tech faculty and students will carry out copper-bird ground testing to ensure the safe integration of engines, batteries, and controllers, and kickstart Tennessee Tech’s new Crossville Mobility Incubator.
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Those propulsors, by the way, are super cool.

Whisper Aero’s main claim to fame is its innovative UltraQuiet WhisperDrive (above). It’s effectively an electrically spun ducted fan jet engine that uses a large number of stiff composite fan blades inside a lightweight, acoustically treated duct. With so many blades, the Whisper Aero propulsor can push more air than a conventional prop while spinning much more slowly. As such, the “blade passage frequency” moves up to more than 16,000 Hz – outside the range of most human hearing but not, supposedly, high enough to freak out the beagles.
The Whisper Aero ultralight is effectively an Aériane Swift3 glider fitted with a pair of Whisper’s eQ250 propulsors, each capable of up to 80 lbs. of thrust. The Ultralight has a wingspan of over 40 ft with a maximum L/D of 35:1 and can be stressed to a design loading of +6/-4g, making it capable of some pretty impressive acrobatic feats.
The Swift3 glider is designed for a low speed, low power cruising speed of 45–55 knots with “just” 6.5 hp. Power-off glides from a few hundred feet showed a low sink rate, and a climb rate of 1,250 ft/min with full self-launching power (in other words: the Whisper glider doesn’t have to be towed by a launch vehicle, like a conventional ultralight glider).
Quiet cool

Range under full power is about 109 miles with current battery tech, but it’s expected that range under the latest EPiC 2.0 energy batteries would rise to nearly 170 miles.
Nathan Millecam, CEO of Electric Power System, said, “EPiC 2.0’s leap in energy density and thermal performance has enabled a significant increase in range, a clear validation of our next-gen cell technology. We are impressed by what the Whisper team continues to achieve in advancing electric aviation.”
The press release concludes explaining that flight tests are expected to show that the Whisper Aero glider can be flown, “a few hundred feet away from neighborhoods without any disturbances, while carrying a 220 lbs. payload with full range,” which is all kind of ominous in today’s political climate, but still pretty neat from a purely tech perspective.
The TNGO grant follows a separate grant from NASA awarded last year, though that grant aims to develop the eQ250s – not as a propulsion system, but as a key component in future spacecraft ventilation systems.
Tennessee Tech announces TNGO grant
With support from TNECD’s Transportation Network Growth Opportunity (TNGO) initiative, Tennessee Tech University and Whisper Aero are partnering to advance next-generation propulsion technology in the aerospace industry. This collaboration will enhance aerospace research and workforce development, ensuring Tennessee remains a leader in cutting-edge mobility solutions.
SOURCE | IMAGES: TNECD; via eVTOL Insights, New Atlas.

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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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