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Lectric XPedition e-bike

Today’s Green Deals are jam-packed once more with EV sales to get you geared-up for the cruising months ahead, led by Lectric eBikes’ 5-year anniversary celebration that is taking up to $570 off select e-bikes, like the XPedition Single-Battery Cargo e-bike at $1,399, while also giving away choices of five add-on accessories. It is joined by Rad Powers’ latest flash sale that is dropping the RadRunner 2 Utility e-bike to $1,299 and also offering free accessories on two other models, as well as a rare special from EVOLV that is dropping the PRO V2 Electric Scooter to its $1,799 low. Plus all of the other days’ Green Deals that are still going.

Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

Lectric takes up to $570 off e-bike bundles

Lectric eBikes is currently celebrating its five-year anniversary, and wanting to extend the celebrations to its customers, has launched a new limited-time sale that is offering five free accessories along with your purchase of either an XP 3.0, XPedition, or XP Trike e-bike. A standout amongst the bunch is the XPedition Single-Battery Cargo e-bike for $1,399 shipped. Down from its usual $1,933 price tag, we only saw it fall to this price for a short-lived period in March before rising to stay at $1,475 since, but today’s deal is bringing things back to the all-time low once more. You’ll find the dual-battery model down to the second-lowest $1,699 rate. It should also be noted that you’ll automatically see the discounted rate once the e-bike and the accessories have been added to your cart.

The Lectric XPedition e-bike was designed for those who are always on the go – especially folks like parents dropping off and picking up their kids from school or delivery drivers who need long travel ranges. It comes equipped with an upgraded 750W rear hub-motor (1310W peak) alongside a 48V battery that carries the e-bike up to 75 miles on a single charge (150 miles with dual-battery), hitting speeds of 20 MPH using only the throttle and up to 28 MPH with the five levels of pedal assistance. It comes with a variety of features to enhance your ride: the integrated cargo rack, custom puncture-resistant tires, hydraulic mineral oil brakes paired with 180mm rotors, a headlamp, taillights, fenders on both wheels, and a backlit LCD display that gives you all the real-time performance data.

Rad Power RadRunner 2 Utility e-bike now $1,299

Rad Power Bikes has launched a flash sale through May 8 that is giving you three varying deals on three different e-bike models; either a $100 off discount or free accessories. The first of these deals is on the RadRunner 2 Utility e-bike for $1,299 shipped. Usually fetching $1,399 since the company lowered prices across its lineup of models, we’ve seen this e-bike included in most of the company’s holiday sales as well as several flash sales throughout the months, often falling to $1,299, but we have seen one instance of the price dropping further to the $1,199 low. Today’s deal is a solid $100 markdown off the going rate that lands at the second-lowest price we have tracked.

Carrying the mantle as Rad Power’s jack-of-all-trades model, the RadRunner 2 comes equipped with a 750W brushless-geared hub motor and 672Wh battery that propels it to a max speed of 20 MPH and travels up to 50 miles on a single charge. It features a four-level pedal assist with a low-profile cadence sensor, and a simple control panel that gives you the battery’s charge level and allows you to adjust pedal assistance settings. It also comes stocked with a rear-mounted cargo rack that offers a 120-pound payload, puncture-resistant fat tires, a standard LED headlight, and an integrated taillight with both brake light and flash mode capabilities.

The second deal is on the RadRunner 3 Plus for $2,099, which comes with a free accessory worth up to $100. This model comes with a 750W rear hub motor and 672Wh battery that hits a max speed of 20 MPH for 45+ miles on a single charge. It has been upgraded with one extra pedal assist level and offers much of the same array of features as the above deal, with the added bonus of fenders for both tires and a full digital display.

The RadTrike e-tricycle is also receiving a free accessory as part of this sale, albeit a pre-designated large basket for front-side mounting for $1,599. It comes with an equally powerful motor as the above models, but with a smaller 480Wh battery that only reaches a max speed of 14 MPH for a much longer 55+ miles of travel range on a single charge. You’ll also get the full list of features from the above deal as well to round out the package.

This flash sale will continue through May 8, with the discounts on the RadRunner 3 Plus and RadTrike being automatically applied in cart when you add both items to your cart. You can browse through Rad Power’s included accessories here. And head over to our Green Deals hub to look through all the other e-bike brands that are having spring sales, as well as deals on power stations, electric tools, water heaters, and more.

Three different frames with the EVOLV PRO V2 Electric Scooter against the night sky with city skyline in background, within post for Lectric 5-year anniversary sale that has the XPedition Cargo e-bike at $1,399

EVOLV PRO V2 Electric Scooter hits $1,799 low

EVOLV is offering a $200 off special on two of its electric scooter models, like the popular PRO V2 Electric Scooter for $1,799 shipped, after using the on-page promo code PROV2-ROCKS at checkout. Down from its $1,999 price tag, we’ve seen a few different discounts drop over the last year on this particular model since its release, all of them falling to the same $1,799 low during major holiday shopping events like Black Friday and Christmas sales. Today’s deal is no different, coming in as a solid $200 markdown that lands at the lowest price we have tracked.

The PRO V2 e-scooter comes equipped with dual 1,200W motors (2,600W peak) and a 52V battery that carries the scooter up to a max speed of 44 MPH for up to 37 miles on a single charge. You can also upgrade to the Pro-R V2 model for an additional $300 ($500 normally – the above promo code works for this upgraded model as well), boosting your motors to 1,400W of nominal power each and extending travel distance up to 50 miles on a single charge. They both feature front and rear spring suspension, front and rear hydraulic disc brakes, a front fender light, a taillight, running lights, turn signal lights, an IP54 water-resistance rating, and a smart center display – all with a foldable design for easy storage and transport when not in use.

The second model included in this special sale is the CORSA Electric Scooter for $2,635 shipped, after using the on-page promo code CORSA-ROCKS at checkout. This model also sports dual 1,200W motors (but with a 4,800W peak) and a larger 60V battery that hits 44 MPH for up to 37 miles on a single charge. It comes with 11-inch tubeless street-style grippy tires, front and rear shock suspension, dual hydraulic disc brakes, twin Halo LED headlights, in-deck lighting, twin LED taillights, turn signal lights, and a large center display.

Spring e-bike deals!

Other new Green Deals landing this week

The savings this week are also continuing to a collection of other markdowns. To the same tune as the offers above, these all help you take a more energy-conscious approach to your routine. Winter means you can lock in even better off-season price cuts on electric tools for the lawn while saving on EVs and tons of other gear.

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Environment

Why electricity prices are surging for U.S. households

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4 hours ago

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June 21, 2025

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Why electricity prices are surging for U.S. households

Kilito Chan | Moment | Getty Images

Electricity prices are rising quickly for U.S. households, even as overall inflation has cooled.

Electricity prices rose 4.5% in the past year, according to the consumer price index for May 2025 — nearly double the inflation rate for all goods and services.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in May that retail electricity prices would outpace inflation through 2026. Prices have already risen faster than the broad inflation rate since 2022, it said.

“It’s a pretty simple story: It’s a story of supply and demand,” said David Hill, executive vice president of energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former general counsel at the U.S. Energy Department.

There are many contributing factors, economists and energy experts said.

At a high level, the growth in electricity demand and deactivation of power-generating facilities are outstripping the pace at which new electricity generation is being added to the electric grid, Hill said.

Prices are regional

U.S. consumers spent an average of about $1,760 on electricity in 2023, according to the EIA, which cited federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of course, cost can vary widely based on where consumers live and their electricity consumption. The average U.S. household paid about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity in March 2025 — but ranged from a low of about 11 cents per kWh in North Dakota to about 41 cents per kWh in Hawaii, according to EIA data.

Households in certain geographies will see their electric bills rise faster than those in others, experts said.

Residential electricity prices in the Pacific, Middle Atlantic and New England regions — areas where consumers already pay much more per kilowatt-hour for electricity — could increase more than the national average, according to the EIA.

Electricity demand is absolutely growing, says Siemens Energy CEO

“Electricity prices are regionally determined, not globally determined like oil prices,” said Joe Seydl, a senior markets economist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

The EIA expects average retail electricity prices to increase 13% from 2022 through 2025.

That means the average household’s annual electricity bill could rise about $219 in 2025 relative to 2022, to about $1,902 from $1,683, according to a CNBC analysis of federal data. That assumes their usage is unchanged.

But prices for Pacific area households will rise 26% over that period, to more than 21 cents per kilowatt-hour, EIA estimates. Meanwhile, households in the West North Central region will see prices increase 8% in that period, to almost 11 cents per kWh.

However, certain electricity trends are happening nationwide, not just regionally, experts said.

Data centers are ‘energy hungry’

The QTS data center complex under development in Fayetteville, Georgia, on Oct. 17, 2024.

Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Electricity demand growth was “minimal” in recent decades due to increases in energy efficiency, according to Jennifer Curran, senior vice president of planning and operations at Midcontinent Independent System Operator, who testified at a House energy hearing in March. (MISO, a regional electric-grid operator, serves 45 million people across 15 states.)

Meanwhile, U.S. “electrification” swelled via use of electronic devices, smart-home products and electric vehicles, Curran said.

Now, demand is poised to surge in coming years, and data centers are a major contributor, experts said.

Data centers are vast warehouses of computer servers and other IT equipment that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other tech applications.

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Data center electricity use tripled to 176 Terawatt-hours in the decade through 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Use is projected to double or triple by 2028, the agency said.

Data centers are expected to consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the Energy Department said.

They’re “energy hungry,” Curran said. Demand growth has been “unexpected” and largely due to support for artificial intelligence, she said.

The U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals, according to the International Energy Agency.

Why the U.S. has a hard time building nuclear reactors

Continued electrification among businesses and households is expected to raise electricity demand, too, experts said.  

The U.S. has moved away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas to reduce planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions.

For example, more households may use electric vehicles rather than gasoline-powered cars or electric heat pumps versus a gas furnace — which are more efficient technologies but raise overall demand on the electric grid, experts said.

Population growth and cryptocurrency mining, another power-intensive activity, are also contributors, said BPC’s Hill.

‘All about infrastructure’

Thianchai Sitthikongsak | Moment | Getty Images

As electricity demand is rising, the U.S. is also having problems relative to transmission and distribution of power, said Seydl of J.P. Morgan.

Rising electricity prices are “all about infrastructure at this point,” he said. “The grid is aged.”

For example, transmission line growth is “stuck in a rut” and “way below” Energy Department targets for 2030 and 2035, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, wrote in a March energy report.

Shortages of transformer equipment — which step voltages up and down across the U.S. grid — pose another obstacle, Cembalest wrote. Delivery times are about two to three years, up from about four to six weeks in 2019, he wrote.

“Half of all US transformers are near the end of their useful lives and will need replacing, along with replacements in areas affected by hurricanes, floods and wildfires,” Cembalest wrote.

Transformers and other transmission equipment have experienced the second highest inflation rate among all wholesale goods in the US since 2018, he wrote.

Meanwhile, certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online, said BPC’s Hill. There has also been inflation in prices for equipment and labor, so it costs more to build facilities, he said.

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Environment

The ticket bot cometh: city is recording drivers that AI says are bad

Published

12 hours ago

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June 21, 2025

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The ticket bot cometh: city is recording drivers that AI says are bad

Barcelona launches automated bus lane and bus stop enforcement pilot with Hayden AI

In a high-tech move that we can all get behind and isn’t dystopian at all, the City of Barcelona is feeding camera data from its city buses into an advanced AI, but they swear they’re not using the footage to to issue tickets to bad drivers. Yet.

Barcelona and its Ring Roads Low Emission Zone have earned lots of fans by limiting ICE traffic in the city’s core. The city’s latest idea to promote mass transit is the deployment of an artificial intelligence system developed by Hayden AI for automatic enforcement of reserved lanes and stops to improve bus circulation – but while it seems to be working as intended, it’s raising entirely different questions.

“Bus lanes are designed to help deliver reliable, fast, and convenient public transport service. But private vehicles illegally using bus lanes make this impossible,” explains Laia Bonet, First Deputy Mayor, Area for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing at the Ajuntament de Barcelona. “We are excited to partner with Hayden AI to learn where these problems occur and how they are impacting our public transport service.”

Currently operating as a pilot program on the city’s H12 and D20 bus lines, the system uses cameras installed on the city’s electric buses to detect vehicles that commit static violations in the bus lanes and stops (read: stopping or parking where you shouldn’t). The Hayden AI system then analyses that data and provides statistical information on what it captures while the bus is driving along on its daily route.

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Hayden AI says that, while it photographs and records video sequences and collects contextual information of the violation, its cameras do not record license plates or people and no penalties are being issued to drivers or owners of the vehicles.

So far so good, right? But it’s what happens once the six mont pilot is over that seems like it should be setting off alarm bells.

Big Brother Bus is watching

“You are being recorded” sign in a bus; via Barcelona City Council.

The footage is manually reviewed by a Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) officer, who reportedly reviewed some 2,500 violations identified by AI in May alone. But, while the system isn’t being used to issue violations during the pilot program, it easily could.

And, in fact, it already has … and the AI f@#ked up royally.

AI writes thousands of bad tickets

NYC issued hundreds of thousands of tickets; via NBC.

When AI was given the ability to issue citations in New York City earlier this year, it wrote more than 290,000 tickets (that’s right: two-hundred and ninety thousand) in just three months, generating nearly $21 million in revenue for the city. The was just one problem: thousands of those drivers weren’t doing anything wrong.

What’s more, the photos generated by the AI powered cameras were supposed to be approved only after being verified by a human, but either that didn’t happen, or it did happen and the human operator in question wasn’t paying attention, or (maybe the worst possibility) the violations were mistakes or hallucinations, and the human checker couldn’t tell the difference.

In OpenAI’s tests of its newest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, the company found the o3 model hallucinated 33% of the time during its PersonQA tests, in which the bot is asked questions about public figures. When asked short fact-based questions in the company’s SimpleQA tests, OpenAI said o3 hallucinated 51% of the time. The o4-mini model fared even worse: It hallucinated 41% of the time during the PersonQA test and 79% of the time in the SimpleQA test, though OpenAI said its worse performance was expected as it is a smaller model designed to be faster. OpenAI’s latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4.5, hallucinates less than its o3 and o4-mini models. The company said when GPT-4.5 was released in February the model has a hallucination rate of 37.1% for its SimpleQA test.

FORBES

I don’t know about you guys, but if we had a local traffic cop that got it wrong 33% of the time (at best), I’d be surprised if they kept their job for very long. But AI? AI has a multibillion dollar hype train and armies of undereducated believers talking about singularities and building themselves blonde robots with boobs. And once the AI starts issuing tickets to the AI that’s driving your robotaxi, it can just call its buddy AI the bank to send over your money. No human necessary, at any point, and the economy keeps on humming.

But, like – I’m sure that’s fine. Embrace the future and all that … right?

SOURCES: Hayden AI, via Forbes, Motorpasión.

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Environment

Batteries are so cheap now, solar power doesn’t sleep

Published

15 hours ago

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June 20, 2025

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Batteries are so cheap now, solar power doesn’t sleep

Arevon solar storage California
Photo: Arevon

A new report from global energy think tank Ember says batteries have officially hit the price point that lets solar power deliver affordable electricity almost every hour of the year in the sunniest parts of the world.

The study looked at hourly solar data from 12 cities and found that in sun-soaked places like Las Vegas, you could pair 6 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels with 17 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries and get a steady 1 GW of power nearly 24/7. The cost? Just $104 per megawatt-hour (MWh) based on average global prices for solar and batteries in 2024. That’s a 22% drop in a year and cheaper than new coal ($118/MWh) and nuclear ($182/MWh) in many regions.

Ember calls it “24/365 solar generation,” and it’s not just a theoretical model. Cities like Muscat, Oman, and Las Vegas can hit that steady power mark for up to 99% of the hours in a year. Hyderabad, Madrid, and Buenos Aires can reach 80–95% of the way there using that same solar-plus-storage setup with some cloud cover. And even cloudier cities like Birmingham in the UK can cover about 62% of hours annually.

“This is a turning point in the clean energy transition,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember. “Around-the-clock solar is no longer a distant dream; it’s an economic reality of the world. It unlocks game-changing opportunities for energy-hungry industries like data centres and manufacturing.”

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This is an enormous opportunity for sunny regions in Africa and Latin America. Manufacturers and data centers could also tap into solar-plus-storage and skip long waits (and big bills) for new grid connections.

It’s not a silver bullet for grid-wide reliability, but it lets solar carry much more of the load, especially where sunshine is abundant. Batteries also help avoid costly grid expansions by allowing up to five times more solar to plug into existing connections.

In 2024 alone, global battery prices dropped 40%, which helped drive down solar-plus-storage costs by 22%. Record-low tenders from countries like Saudi Arabia point to even cheaper options coming soon.

Real-world projects are already online: The UAE built the world’s first gigawatt-scale 24-hour solar facility. Arizona is already home to solar-powered data centers. And as battery tech keeps improving, round-the-clock solar could become the backbone of clean energy systems in the world’s sunniest places.

Read more: This solar canopy cools wastewater and powers a city utility

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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –trusted affiliate link*

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