Trump Is Obsessed With Oil, but Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World

Op-Ed by Dan Wang, The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2026

Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

President Trump has an unconcealed hunger for natural resources from abroad and the power they could grant him. He declared that the United States intervened in Venezuela to “take the oil,” betting that investors would put up at least $100 billion to revive a decrepit industry. His gamble is that countries will still want to buy oil from America to power their cars, trucks, ships and planes for decades to come.

Though China is the world’s largest oil importer, its leader, Xi Jinping, is less brash about coveting foreign resources. The country’s leadership is pushing intensively at substituting electricity for oil.

Chinese technology companies are paving the way for a world that will be powered by electric motors rather than gas-guzzling engines. It is a decisively 21st-century approach not just to solve its own energy problems, but also to sell batteries and other electric products to everyone else. Canada is its newest buyer of EVs; in a rebuke of Mr. Trump, its prime minister, Mark Carney, lowered tariffs on the cars as part of a new trade deal.

Though Americans have been slow to embrace electric vehicles, Chinese households have learned to love them. In 2025, 54 percent of new cars sold in China were either battery-powered or plug-in hybrids. That is a big reason that the country’s oil consumption is on track to peak in 2027, according to forecasts from the International Energy Agency. And Chinese E.V. makers are setting records — whether it’s BYD’s sales (besting Tesla by battery-powered vehicles sold for the first time last year) or Xiaomi’s speed (its cars are setting records at major racetracks like Nürburgring in Germany).

These vehicles are powered not by oil but by domestically generated electrical power that comes from coal, nuclear, hydropower, solar and wind.

In 2000, China produced only one-third of the amount of electrical power that the United States did; by 2024, it produced nearly two and a half times U.S. levels. China’s surging energy investments went substantially into building new plants for burning coal, which the country possesses in abundance. But over the past decade, it has also moved fast on building cleaner energy sources, especially wind and solar.

China now generates more electricity each year than the United States and the European Union combined. It has close to 40 new nuclear power reactors under construction, compared with zero in America. Last year, Beijing announced work on a new hydropower dam in Tibet that will have triple the capacity of China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest power station.

China isn’t just building gigantic amounts of power; its businesses are reshaping technological foundations to electrify the world.

China spent decades trying to build world-leading automotive champions; the results were not impressive until E.V.s arrived. Their adoption allowed Chinese automakers to stop trying to beat the Germans at building better combustion engines and leverage their greater expertise in electronics instead. If an E.V. is a smartphone with tires, then it makes sense that the country that makes most of the world’s electronics would also make nearly half of its cars.

Several technologies had to mature before they could be electrified. The lithium-ion battery was invented by American and Japanese scientists before Chinese companies took over most of this industry in the 2010s. The United States also used to dominate the production of rare-earth magnets, the crucial product in electric motors; China makes more than 90 percent of these magnets today. In addition to batteries and magnets, the writer Noah Smith identifies power electronics and embedded chips as the main drivers of the new electric age.

The oil-burning products that can now instead be powered by batteries and electric motors include not only cars, but also bikes, buses and even some boats. Heavy industry and temperature control for buildings are being electrified, too. And a future in which many noisy, gas-powered household tools can be electrically powered is in reach: Even the foul and loud lawn mower and leaf blower are gradually being replaced by a more gentle thrum.

Some products may never be electrified. Battery packs will probably not power a long-haul flight or container ship (though cleaner fuels are possible). But the opportunity to electrify almost everything else will grow over the next decade, and China is leading the charge.

The southern city of Shenzhen, which has been producing Apple products for two decades now, is leveraging its expertise in electronics — as well as more advanced batteries, magnets and chips — to remake whole categories of transportation and household and industrial products into the image of the smartphone. As the world moves on from combustion engines and into batteries, it will be looking away from oil producers and toward factories in Shenzhen.

The United States is far behind this competition. On the one hand, Elon Musk has done more than anyone else to raise the status of electric vehicles and create their associated technological improvements. But the broader U.S. industrial base has mostly shed its capabilities in batteries and rare-earth magnets, in part out of a deliberate effort to move these factories to China. American companies building drones or other products of the new electric age are also far behind their Chinese competitors.

Electrification demands engagement with the messy world of building power plants and manufacturing at scale, which are China’s strengths. But Silicon Valley has instead preferred to work in the realm of highly profitable digital businesses. Technologists like Sam D’Amico (who is making a high-powered electric-induction stove) and Ryan McEntush (a venture capital investor) have lately sounded the alarm at how comprehensively ahead Chinese capabilities have become.

The United States could compete on building better drones and electric vehicles if its businesses had greater access to electrical power and a vital industrial base. But it is governed by a president who is enthusiastic about powering the future with fossil fuels and has a personal pique against wind turbines, calling them the “SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” His administration is slow-walking approval of and canceling new solar and wind projects while favoring coal and gas — which makes it more difficult to electrify. No product is more important than batteries in electrification, yet an infamous ICE raid targeted a Korean company that was constructing a battery factory in Georgia. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s tariffs have hamstrung American manufacturing, which has lost around 70,000 jobs since April.

America had better shape up before losing out to an electric age ushered in by Beijing. Otherwise, it will be stuck with outmoded products at home while China conquers markets through better technology.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/trump-energy-china-future.html

Even Without Hurricanes, U.S. Disaster Costs Surpassed $100 Billion Last Year

A record-setting 21 thunderstorm events each caused at least $1 billion in damages, a sign that more people and property are in harm’s way.

By Scott Dance, The New York Times, Jan. 8, 2026

In 2025, frequent and severe thunderstorms and the Los Angeles wildfires drove U.S. disaster damage costs above $100 billion, reaching that level for the fifth time in the past six years, according to data released Thursday. And that was without a single hurricane striking U.S. shores for the first time in a decade.

A record-setting 21 thunderstorm systems that spawned tornadoes, large hail and damaging wind each caused at least $1 billion in damages, according to researchers at Climate Central, a nonprofit group.

It was a sign of both intensifying weather systems and population sprawl in storm-prone areas, which put more people and property into harm’s way.

Climate Central took over what is known as the “billion-dollar disaster” database last year, after the Trump administration announced that the government would no longer track such information. The database had been maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

With a total of $115 billion in disaster damage, the data show, 2025 was the least costly year for disasters since 2019, but still above the $67 billion annual average dating back to 1980.

“Not having any billion-dollar severe storms or hurricanes in the fall was a nice break, and one that we have not seen as much of in recent years,” said Adam Smith, who had led the NOAA database for 15 years, until he left the agency last spring to run it at Climate Central as a senior climate impacts scientist. “Still, it was an impactful year.”

More than half of 2025 disaster costs, $61 billion, were tied to the wildfires that burned in Los Angeles last January. Angelenos are still recovering from that disaster.

But otherwise, severe thunderstorms drove extreme weather-related losses across the country. Such storms accounted for about $51 billion in damages, the researchers found.

Most of the storms occurred or originated in the central United States, where humidity from the Gulf of Mexico flows inland and clashes with colder and drier air moving down from Canada to fuel towering clouds.

The storms produced tornadoes that wracked the Southeast and the Mississippi River valley, as well as hail that hammered areas from Colorado to Texas to Tennessee. One high-wind storm, of a type known as a derecho, caused hundreds of thousands of power outages from Ohio to Quebec and blew out high-rise windows in downtown Pittsburgh.

While climate change is causing heavier downpours and causing hurricanes to intensify more quickly, the rise in thunderstorm damage is strongly linked to increased property development, Mr. Smith said.

“Denver or Dallas or Minneapolis can get easily hit by a billion-dollar hailstorm in an afternoon,” he said. “Twenty or 30 years ago, that might not have been the case.”

Still, a warming planet is increasing the potential severity of all storms. For every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the air is capable of holding about 7 percent more moisture, which carries energy that storms unleash. As average global temperatures rise, surging to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels in 2024, that capacity for moisture, and potential fuel for storms, is growing.

Researchers have found that, as the planet warms, hail could be forming less frequently, while individual hailstones are growing larger. It is less clear how global warming may be changing tornado activity. Scientists have seen a trend of tornado outbreaks shifting from the traditional “Tornado Alley” of the Great Plains states toward the Southeast.

After NOAA stopped tracking billion-dollar disasters and Climate Central announced it was taking over the disaster database last year, Kim Doster, a NOAA spokeswoman, called it a project “based in uncertainty and speculation.”

But the data is of interest to emergency managers, public officials and insurance executives, who are all seeking to plan around changing disaster risks.

“The strongest value is in public awareness,” said Franklin Nutter, who served as president of the Reinsurance Association of America until last month. The trade group represents companies that insure insurance companies, helping protect them against catastrophic losses, including those from natural disasters.

The disaster data comes from public agencies, including the National Weather Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and federal and state emergency managers, as well as the insurance industry. It goes back to 1980, adjusted for inflation, because of the consistent and reliable data and methodologies employed over that era, Mr. Smith said.

Last year’s list of billion-dollar disasters did not include the July 4 Texas floods that killed at least 137 people, including children at a summer camp, because they struck in the state’s Hill Country, in an area that was sparsely developed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/climate/us-disaster-damage-costs-2025.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20260108&instance_id=168995&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=213374&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

How E.V.s Became Political Football

The political polarization of battery-powered cars may have started when Toyota released its first hybrid model 25 years ago.

By Lawrence Ulrich, The New York Times, Dec. 27, 2025

In a different world, an electric vehicle would be just another car. But in today’s hyperpartisan climate, battery-powered cars carry not just passengers but a punishing load of political and cultural baggage.

Supporters may view electric cars as heroes, helping halt climate change or making American automakers more competitive around the world. But others see in them the heavy hand of government, pressuring consumers to ditch gasoline whether they are ready to or not. Throw in Elon Musk and his highly charged social media commentary, and even loyalists of his car company, Tesla, may no longer know whom or what to believe in.

“E.V.s have become such a partisan thing that they’re not defined as cars,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who leads the EV Politics Project and EVs for All America, which aim to make electric cars less political. “It’s like we’re having political fights over toasters.”

To industry experts, the seeds of this poisonous debate may have been planted inadvertently 25 years ago, with a humble, shoe-box-shaped sedan: the Toyota Prius. The groundbreaking 2001 Prius kicked off an era of gas-electric hybrids and built Toyota’s reputation as the global leader in green cars.

Mr. Murphy said Toyota had used marketing that implied that buying a Prius was a way to save the planet. That excited liberals, but drew a strong backlash from people less attuned to environmental issues. Nissan made a similar choice with the Leaf, its electric vehicle, in 2010, he said. In one Nissan TV ad, a polar bear hugged a Leaf owner.

“Climate shouldn’t be polarized, but in America it is,” said Mr. Murphy, who worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney. “So when you market vehicles for green virtues, others see it as pushy dogma. Then you’re stuck in politics.”

Imported from Japan, the 2001 Prius arrived when many Americans were switching to sport utility vehicles. Average fuel economy for the 2001 model year had fallen to a 21-year low, at 20.4 miles per gallon. The Prius came bearing a green olive branch; federal testing showed that it could travel 48 miles per gallon.

Margo Oge bought one of the first Priuses. Later, as an official at the Environmental Protection Agency, she would become the chief architect of fuel-economy standards enacted under the Obama administration in 2010.

“The Prius was just this cool little car to save you money and protect us from air pollution,” Ms. Oge said. “The government didn’t ask for or require Toyota to develop this tech. It wasn’t seen as a mandate as E.V.s later were.”

Unlike electric vehicles, which use no gasoline, Ms. Oge said, the hybrid Toyota should have been less threatening to industries like oil and ethanol, or to consumers.

Even so, some critics attacked Prius fans for engaging in virtue signaling, being hypocritical or wanting to impose nanny-state policies. In 2001, an article in Car and Driver magazine praised the Prius’s engineering, but noted that its testers managed to get only 35 miles per gallon.

“It can be no surprise that Toyota Motor Corp. enjoys its share of adulation from the Sierra Club, from Washington, D.C., windbags and from everyone else who conveniently forgets about the five models of sport utilities and two models of pickups also peddled in Toyota dealerships,” the article said.

Toyota played up testimonials from stars, such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep, who publicly adopted the Prius. Sales boomed from 5,500 in 2001 to a peak of 236,000 in 2012.

Red-carpet appearances helped make the Prius a hit, Mr. Murphy said, but at a lingering cost. To some, hybrids and electric cars became vehicles for coastal liberals and do-gooders, not “mainstream” Americans. In 2006, “South Park” called hybrids the nation’s “leading cause of smug.”

But if the Prius attracted gibes, the Chevrolet Volt became a certified punching bag.

That model, a plug-in hybrid sedan, won top car awards. It also became inextricably linked to federal aid for General Motors. To some, the Volt was a four-wheeled symbol for “Government Motors” or “Obama Motors.” President Barack Obama sat in a Volt at its Detroit factory in 2010 and said he would buy one after he left office.

Mr. Obama and his E.P.A. also sought to double the fuel economy of the average new car to about 50 miles per gallon. Politicians assailed the Volt as a socialist scheme to force Americans into electric cars.

Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, accused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of conspiring to hide a Volt defect.

“I’m a free-enterprise guy,” Mr. Issa said. “And the Volt insults a lot of us with being a demo project funded by edict.”

Robert Lutz, a former Marine fighter pilot and the outspoken vice chairman of G.M. — who once derided global warming — publicly defended the car.

“The problem with conservatives is getting them to accept that an electric car is not necessarily a left-wing environmental plot,” Mr. Lutz, a Republican, said in 2012 before Mr. Obama was re-elected. “We’ll probably see the Volt as a political football through November, and then it’ll go away.”

If only. Electric vehicles became even more political as Tesla began its rise with the release of the Model S in 2012.

Though Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, is now a conservative star, many on the right previously attacked his company for earning billions by selling climate credits to other automakers, a windfall enabled by government policy. The company also received a federal loan, which it paid back early.

Of course, many businesses receive government support. Oil and gas companies enjoy many tax breaks, some going back decades.

Mr. Lutz, now retired, said he knew many “staunch Republicans” who drove and loved electric cars. The end of federal policies to encourage their sales and discourage the use of gasoline, he said, can ease some objections. Shorter charging times, he said, more than politics, may persuade more drivers to chose electric cars.

“E.V.s will progress more slowly now, but they will just continue to gain market share until they are by far the dominant technology,” he said.

Mr. Lutz, 93, owns a pair of electric Cadillacs, the Lyriq and the Escalade IQ. He recently got a Corvette ZR1, a gasoline sports car with 1,064 horsepower and a 233 mile-per-hour top speed. Yet Mr. Lutz believes internal-combustion engines, after 120 years of development, have nearly reached their technical peak. Electric cars are just getting started.

“When you drive them, there’s just no contest,” he said. “They’re better, they’re faster, they’re quieter, with fewer moving parts.”

In a bitter turn for Toyota, Tesla’s ascent turned the Japanese company, once an environmental hero, into an ostensible villain. Toyota, Ms. Oge noted, lobbied against pro-electric vehicle policies in several countries.

Now, as sales of electric cars have cooled, Toyota and its hybrids are back in vogue. Other automakers are rushing to offer more hybrids, and the cars are rarely attacked by politicians or in popular culture.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Toyota and G.M. declined to comment.

The decades of pitched battles have culminated in President Trump’s fulsome attacks against electric cars. That includes a bid to unwind former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature climate and energy legislation and regulations. The Biden administration’s policies would have effectively required automakers to sharply increase sales of electric and hybrid cars in the coming years.

Mr. Biden’s policies, which included a $7,500 federal tax credit for the purchase or lease of electric vehicles, helped lift sales. But Ms. Oge said his fuel economy and emission regulations were a “political overreach” that turned many car owners, not just Republicans, against them.

“The Biden administration lost control of that message, completely,” she said. “It became ‘The government wants you to buy this car.’”

But if the Biden administration’s rules were too ambitious, Ms. Oge said, the Trump administration is aiming to make them even weaker than those put in place by Mr. Obama 15 years ago.

With political temperatures hot enough to fry a battery, Mr. Murphy said he advised automakers to eschew controversy. They should not tout electric cars’ environmental benefits, he said, because people either know about them or don’t base buying decisions on them. Automakers should instead lead with the models’ zesty performance, hushed interiors, energy savings, easy maintenance or new technology.

“These cars can win a fair fight as vehicles for most people,” he said.

In his groups’ November survey of the public’s views about electric vehicles, 48 percent of self-identified Republicans held an unfavorable view of these cars, versus 22 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats. Conservative opposition has softened somewhat, Mr. Murphy said. He added that 40 percent of respondents identified as Republican.

“So if automakers can’t crack the Republican consumer market,” he said, “E.V.s will never become as big as we need.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/business/electric-vehicles-poilitics-republicans-conservatives.html?searchResultPosition=1

U.S. Is Seeking Exemption From a European Climate Law, Officials Say

Diplomats told E.U. officials that the bloc’s law on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would hurt American oil and gas companies.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2025

The Trump administration wants the European Union to exempt American oil and gas companies from a landmark law aimed at curbing emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas.

In recent days U.S. diplomats have verbally informed officials in European countries that the Trump administration considers the 27-member bloc’s methane regulations costly, confusing and a threat to American gas supplies to Europe, according to four E.U. and U.S. officials.

Short of a repeal of the law, the United States wants American oil and gas companies to be exempted from any penalties, according to the four people, who had direct knowledge of the conversations, as well as a document that European energy ministers circulated among themselves ahead of a meeting on Monday in Brussels, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The four officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The methane law requires European importers to demonstrate, by 2027, that the oil and gas they buy from the United States or any other country adheres to strict monitoring standards. By 2030, all imports will have to be produced with low levels of methane emissions, though the specific limit has not yet been finalized.

The law requires U.S. companies that sell oil and gas in Europe to monitor and report emissions and to repair methane leaks in their facilities.

“It is regulatory overreach,” Chris Wright, the secretary of the Department of Energy, said of the regulation on Monday. He was speaking on the sidelines of an energy conference in Washington. The Trump administration’s opposition to the methane law was first reported by Reuters.

Europe’s methane law is the latest international climate policy attacked by the Trump administration as harmful to the American fossil fuel industry. President Trump has taken particular umbrage at Europe’s drive toward renewable power, claiming that climate policies have “devastated” the European economy.

But scientists say Europe has been devastated by climate change. This summer was the fourth-hottest on record in Europe. France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, among other countries, suffered through extreme heat, health alerts and wildfires.

Reducing methane emissions is a key element of Europe’s climate strategy. Methane is considered a “super pollutant” because, while it breaks down more quickly than carbon dioxide, it traps about 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere in the short term. It is responsible for nearly a third of the rise in global temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Methane, the main component in natural gas, leaks from oil and gas operations and is also intentionally released at refineries in a process known as flaring. Stopping leaks is seen as one of the most easily achievable climate fixes.

European and American oil and gas companies have lobbied for significant changes in the law.

They’ve noted that the European Union still has not finalized the way companies will need to report emissions and argued that the delay has led to confusion. And U.S. industry officials say they face unique challenges to meet a European requirement that companies precisely declare the origin of all the gas in every shipment. Unlike other countries, the United States has thousands of small gas fields and their output is often combined in pipeline systems, making origins hard to determine.

This year the Trump administration signed a trade deal with Europe that included a pledge for the European Union to purchase $750 billion in American oil and liquefied natural gas over three years in exchange for lower tariffs.

Mr. Wright warned that the methane restrictions pose a “huge” problem for trans-Atlantic trade, potentially making it “too legally risky” for the United States to sell gas to Europe.

And he questioned the efficacy of the methane regulation.

“Just because it has the name, ‘the methane rule,’ does that mean it’s going to drive down methane emissions faster? Absolutely not,” Mr. Wright said. He added: “Does that mean it might drive energy prices up and reduce energy supply into Europe? Absolutely.”

Environmentalists said the European Union was already working to iron out oil and gas industry concerns about the methane rule. None of the issues are big enough to require scrapping the law entirely or exempting any one country, they said.

“This really isn’t about the workability of the regulation,” said Dan Grossman, a vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit group. “It’s more about this unhinged trade conversation that’s going on where the Trump administration is just wanting to push Europe to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. oil and gas without any kind of standards or restrictions.”

Brandon Locke, the senior Europe policy manager overseeing methane issues for the Clean Air Task Force, called the U.S. opposition “perplexing.” He noted that U.S. companies stand to benefit from the law, since they’ve already invested billions of dollars in detecting and fixing leaks and reducing emissions.

He said if the United States gets an exemption, “you’re going to have 10 more lining up tomorrow, asking for the same thing,” and setting back efforts to fight climate change.

Dan Jorgensen, the European Union energy minister, said Monday the E.U. commission, the bloc’s executive branch, was in “a dialogue” with the Trump administration over how best to implement its methane policies.

“We are not considering withdrawing the legislation or an exemption to the legislation,” Mr. Jorgensen said on Monday after a commission meeting on energy.

Opposing solutions to climate change, both in the United States and abroad, has become a hallmark of the Trump administration.

This year diplomats from other nations accused the Trump administration of using bullying tactics to block the adoption of a landmark measure that would have imposed a global pollution tax on the shipping industry. The Trump administration recently sided with oil-rich countries including Saudi Arabia and Russia to block part of a United Nations report calling for the phaseout of fossil fuels.

The Trump administration also joined forces with Qatar to oppose Europe’s landmark sustainability rules, which require companies to root out environmental and social abuses in their supply chains.

At home, the administration has led a political assault on renewable energy. It has moved to repeal every federal climate change regulation. It tried to withdraw permits for six offshore wind projects, and eliminated federal incentives supporting wind, solar and electric vehicles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/climate/trump-europe-methane-rules.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20251221&instance_id=168294&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=212593&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Once a Gamble in the Desert, Electric Grid Batteries Are Everywhere

An early grid battery was installed in the Atacama Desert in Chile 15 years ago. Now, as prices have tumbled, they are increasingly being used around the world.

By Ivan Penn, The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2025

ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE—Lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from cellphones to cars, are increasingly saving electric grids around the world.

Batteries as large as shipping containers are being connected to power lines and installed beside solar panels and wind turbines. They soak up power when it’s plentiful and cheap and release it when electricity use soars, helping reduce the need for expensive power plants and lines.

American researchers invented the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and later showed that the devices could help the electric grid. But for a long time batteries made little headway because grid managers and utility executives dismissed them as expensive and risky.

One of the first breakthroughs came about 15 years ago when engineers at a U.S. energy company installed one of the first lithium-ion batteries tied to a grid in a desert nearly 9,000 feet above sea level in Chile. Challenging conventional notions of how the electricity system should be run, that team helped prove that batteries could help make electric grids more stable and reliable.

The concept of storing energy was not new. Thomas Edison developed alkaline nickel-iron batteries largely for industry and early electric vehicles. Various companies tried other technologies like sodium sulfur, which have not gained much traction. And some utilities have long pumped water uphill so that later it could be sent back down to generate electricity.

But those systems were relatively limited. The kinds of lithium batteries installed in the Atacama Desert in 2009, by comparison, are now being used around the world.

The rapid growth of wind and solar power and the rising demand for electricity from data centers are making batteries a necessity. They store surplus renewable energy for when it’s not windy or sunny, and maintain a balance between energy supply and demand.

Consider California. In recent years, state officials have often asked residents to use less electricity on hot summer days to prevent power outages. But there have been no such alerts since 2022, largely because batteries have allowed California to use its abundant solar power well into the evening. Over the last seven years, the state added 30 times as much battery storage capacity as it had in 2018.

The rest of the world has also seen impressive growth, according to the International Energy Agency, a multilateral organization in Paris. The boom was made possible by a stunning 90 percent drop in the cost of batteries over the last 15 years as new factories have come on line. China is by far the world’s largest battery manufacturer, but Europe, India and the United States have recently been increasing production, too.

“Batteries are changing the game before our eyes,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said recently.

A Bumpy Start

The use of batteries on the grid did not come easy.

A Virginia company called AES began testing grid batteries in Indiana, Pennsylvania and California as early as 2008, but U.S. energy suppliers did not use them commercially until two years later. The pace was plodding for a while.

“There wasn’t the experience with battery storage,” said Carla Peterman, a former member of the California Energy Commission and now an executive vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility. “It was a bit of a chicken or the egg, where there wasn’t enough on there to really say that this could be a big part of the energy system.”

But some Americans clearly saw the benefits of batteries. One of them was Christopher Shelton, an executive at AES, which owns utilities and power plants across the world.

He began to look into lithium-ion batteries when his bosses asked employees to pitch proposals for a “billion-dollar idea.” Mr. Shelton said he thought batteries could reduce the need for power plants that utilities used only when electricity demand climbed to peak levels.

“Why would you build an asset that you weren’t going to use more than 5 percent of the time?” Mr. Shelton said. “We were saying batteries should be an alternative to peaker plants.”

He first installed battery cells at a nondescript electricity substation outside Indianapolis, a city known for its 500-mile car race. His company later connected one in Norristown, Pa., at an operations center of the nation’s largest grid manager, PJM Interconnection. The Los Angeles area was connected next, followed by a larger battery for the Indianapolis grid.

While his tests were successful, they did not sufficiently impress many American utility executives. The reaction was typical of an industry that prides itself for sticking with what it knows best — large coal, gas and nuclear power plants. Anything else has generally been treated as a threat that may cause blackouts.

“Utilities have long been skeptical of new technologies,” said Leah Stokes, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy politics and policy. “They know how to make a widget, which is a giant fossil fuel power plant, so they keep doing that.”

Drew Maloney, president and chief executive of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade organization, disagrees with that assessment. “The U.S. energy grid is the world’s most important machine, and America’s electric companies are quick to pilot and deploy new technologies once they become commercially viable and affordable for customers,” he said.

But even now, U.S. utilities in many states are reluctant to add batteries. A lot fewer large batteries are being added in the Southeast, for example, than in California and Texas.

Utility executives are not the only ones who are skeptical. So are policymakers and many ordinary Americans.

Some local governments have banned big batteries because of safety concerns. In May and June, a large battery complex in Monterey County, Calif., was destroyed in a fire that spewed smoke and harmful chemicals.

Despite that disaster, energy experts say many risks have been addressed. The California fire happened in a type of battery that most companies no longer use. And those batteries were installed in a power plant building where the fire easily spread from device to device. Most batteries are installed outdoors to reduce the chances that fires spread.

‘Testing It on the Moon’

Not much beside the odd desert fox lives on the desolate plateau in Chile where AES set up its battery project. The site is several hours from the two closest airports, in Calama and Antofagasta.

After landing, visitors have to drive at least four hours to the salt flats of the Atacama Desert, where workers collect lithium — a key battery ingredient.

The AES camp is another hour away. It sits on a rocky unpaved path, lined with busted tires. Though temperatures during a late spring and early summer day can reach the 80s, the nights can be near freezing.

“It was like taking the battery and testing it on the moon,” said Joaquín Meléndez, an engineer who led the AES project there under Mr. Shelton.

In the early 2000s, Chile had an energy crisis because Argentina, its main supplier of natural gas, couldn’t provide enough of it. That left Chile, which has no domestic fuel sources, with too little energy for its people and its copper, iodine and lithium mines.

Chile was forced to rely on power plants that burned expensive imported coal. But those plants could not be easily turned up or down, and the needs of Chile’s mining companies fluctuated a lot.

That was where the batteries came in. While it can take a coal plant about 12 minutes to get going, batteries can discharge power almost instantly. By pairing the two, engineers realized that batteries could deliver the electricity that mines needed while coal plants fired up.

Mr. Meléndez worked 16-hour days for six months to connect the first commercialized lithium battery to an electric grid. That device still stands, though most of its tasks have been taken over by newer, more efficient and affordable units.

The project was immediately successful, helping keep the electricity system stable when mining operations caused surges that had previously led to grid failures and outages.

AES executives back in the United States kept close track of what was happening in Chile. And in 2010, the company installed commercial battery systems in New York and Texas. Two years later, AES began adding more batteries in Chile, including next to big solar farms.

Over the last decade, batteries have helped Chile use less coal. Last December, the country got more than 40 percent of its electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, up from 19 percent five years earlier, according to Ember Energy Research, a nonprofit. Australia, Britain, China, India and other countries have also been adding lots of renewable energy and batteries.

Mr. Shelton said that even he had been surprised by the recent rapid growth of batteries. “We under-predicted how far the prices would fall.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/business/energy-environment/battery-prices-electric-grids.html?searchResultPosition=1

A Climate ‘Shock’ Is Eroding Some Home Values. New Data Shows How Much.

By Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2025

Even after she escaped rising floodwaters by wading away from her home in chest-deep water during Hurricane Rita in 2005, Sandra Rojas, now 69, stayed put. A fifth-generation resident of Lafitte, La., a small coastal community, she raised her home with stilts.

But this year, her annual home insurance premium increased to $8,312, more than doubling over the past four years.

She considered selling, but found herself in a dilemma. As insurance costs have risen, area home values have fallen, dropping by 38 percent since 2020. The roadsides around her house are dotted with for-sale signs.

“They won’t insure you,” Ms. Rojas said. “No one will buy from you. You’re kind of stuck where you are.”

New research shared with The New York Times estimates the extent to which rising home insurance premiums, driven higher by climate change, are cascading into the broader real estate market and eating into home values in the most disaster-prone areas.

The study, which analyzed tens of millions of housing payments through 2024 to understand where insurance costs have risen most, offers first-of-its-kind insight into the way rising insurance rates are affecting home values.

Since 2018, a financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires would sell for an average of $43,900 less than they would otherwise, the research found. They include coastal towns in Louisiana and low-lying areas in Florida.

Changes in an under-the-radar part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, have helped to drive this trend. Insurance companies purchase reinsurance to help limit their exposure when a catastrophe hits. Over the past several years, global reinsurance companies have had what the researchers call a “climate epiphany” and have roughly doubled the rates they charge home insurance providers.

Benjamin Keys at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Mulder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the authors of the study, which was published this week, have called these swift changes “a reinsurance shock.” For some Americans, these changes have made it unaffordable to remain in homes they have lived in for decades.

“Homeowners don’t appreciate or don’t understand that we are living in a much riskier world than we were 25 years ago,” Dr. Keys said. “And that risk? They have to pay for it.”

After analyzing 74 million home payments — which included mortgage, taxes and insurance and were made between 2014 and 2024 — the researchers found that a rapid repricing of disaster risk had been responsible for about a fifth of overall home insurance increases since 2017. Another third could be explained by rising construction costs.

The researchers estimated the effects of the reinsurance shock on home prices in the ZIP codes most vulnerable to catastrophes. They found that rising insurance premiums weighed down home values by about $20,500 in the top 25 percent of homes most exposed to catastrophic hurricanes and wildfires, and by $43,900 in the top 10 percent.

Buying a home has long been seen as a way to lock in predictable housing costs. But the fast-increasing burden of insurance is catching some homeowners by surprise.

Last year, Ms. Rojas’s brother-in-law, who lived down the road in Lafitte, decided to sell his home to escape the area’s rising premiums. It sold for $150,000, which is what it cost him to build it in 1984. He estimated he lost about $75,000 on the sale, after accounting for the cost of renovations.

In parts of the hail-prone Midwestern states, insurance now eats up more than a fifth of the average homeowner’s total housing payments, which include mortgage costs and property taxes. In Orleans Parish, La., that number is nearly 30 percent.

A hundred miles north of Lafitte, the small city of Bogalusa, La., lies further inland. Nevertheless, Cristal Holmes saw her insurance premium more than quadruple in 2022, to $500 per month, on top of her $700 monthly mortgage.

Ms. Holmes, a single mother who was working 56 hours a week at a warehouse, struggled to keep up with the higher bills. She fell behind on mortgage payments after her work hours were reduced to 35 per week. She worried she couldn’t stay in her home.

Similar stories are playing out all over town. Ms. Holmes’s real estate agent, Charlotte Johnson, said her office was getting phone calls every day from people who said they could no longer afford their rising insurance premiums. For many, dropping insurance is not an option, because banks refuse to offer or maintain mortgages for people without coverage.

That means owners are being forced to choose between accepting home insurance policies they can’t afford or risking foreclosure.

Buyers face their own obstacles. High insurance prices and interest rates are making it harder than ever for first-time buyers to purchase homes, said Nancy Galofaro-Cruse, a senior loan officer with CMG Home Loans who works with many of Ms. Johnson’s clients. She estimated that more than a third of would-be buyers in the area backed out of the market this year after insurance and interest rates pushed their total monthly housing costs out of reach.

It’s not just the hurricane-prone coasts that have been affected by the reinsurance shock. In Colorado, where wildfires and hail pose the biggest threats to homes, the average homeowner’s premium has more than doubled in the last decade and median premiums have increased 74 percent since 2020.

Steve Hakes, an insurance broker with Rocky Mountain Insurance Center in Lafayette, Colo., has seen clients consider homes in wildfire-prone areas, only to back out when they can’t find affordable insurance. High prices and limited availability have pushed him to advise buyers to look for insurance early in the homebuying process.

And in California, 13 percent of real estate agents surveyed by an industry trade association said they’d had deals fall through in 2024 after buyers couldn’t find affordable insurance coverage.

Colorado regulators are aware of the threats these dynamics pose to the real estate market and are exploring a wide range of fixes, said Michael Conway, the Colorado insurance commissioner.

“We don’t want a situation where the insurance market is effectively decimating the real estate market,” he said.

As insurance becomes more expensive, home values will need to adjust for potential buyers to afford their monthly costs, industry analysts say. And if home values fall, lower property tax revenue could mean less money for local governments to pay for essential services or affect the ability of those governments to borrow money.

Clarence Guidry reached a breaking point this year when he got a quote to insure his home in Lafitte, La. He’d pay a $20,000 annual premium but if a hurricane struck, he’d be on the hook for the first $50,000 in damage before the insurance company would pay out.

His lender wouldn’t let Mr. Guidry, who goes by Rosco, keep his mortgage without home insurance. But keeping his home insured against damage from hurricanes would mean stomaching monthly payments that are at least 40 percent higher than the rest of his monthly mortgage and property taxes combined.

Over the last decade, as the number of wildfires and storms has mounted, losses have exceeded the revenue insurance companies receive from home insurance policies across the United States. In Louisiana, 12 companies, including Mr. Guidry’s insurer, became insolvent after a wave of hurricanes between 2021 and 2023. (Most private insurers do not cover flood damage, which is handled separately under a federal program.)

Insurance companies’ own costs have climbed in recent years for a variety of reasons, including higher construction costs, higher interest rates and President Trump’s tariff policies.

But the changes in the insurance market have begun to put a higher price on risk. Reinsurers have been driving these effects, Dr. Mulder said.

“These reinsurers are looking at a lot of the same data as insurers, but at a much bigger scale and with more sophistication,” he said.

Politicians, homeowners, economists, state insurance commissioners and real estate agents have long worried that insurance costs will rise so much that they will begin to pull down home values.

According to the study by Dr. Keys and Dr. Mulder, which was published as a working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research, this is already happening in some areas.

Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University, said the direct evidence of this phenomenon remained limited and there were factors beyond insurance that affected local home prices.

But there are increasingly troubling signs in some markets, he said.

“The New Orleans housing market is exhibiting signs of failure that are imposing stress on the financial system around it,” he said.

Overall, U.S. home prices have risen about 55 percent since 2018, but New Orleans prices have increased by only 14 percent, less than the rate of inflation over the same time period.

Even in states where heavy regulations have kept costs down, there are signs that home insurers will continue to raise premiums to align more closely with disaster risk. New rules in California allow insurance companies to pass rising reinsurance costs on to consumers. One consumer advocacy group, citing the effects of similar changes in other states, has estimated this provision could raise net premiums significantly for homeowners.

Back in Lafitte, Mr. Guidry was running the numbers for his own budget. Against the advice of his financial adviser, he took money out of his retirement account to pay off his home loan. The plan now is to self-insure for wind and hail damage. That means he and his wife will have to pay out of pocket to repair their home if another severe storm hits.

In forgoing coverage, the Guidrys join some 13 percent of U.S. homeowners who are uninsured, according to Census Bureau data. Insurers continue to drop people in many areas.

“Now, we’ve got to take the gamble,” Mr. Guidry said.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/19/climate/home-insurance-costs-real-estate-market.html?searchResultPosition=1