Vermont Sized Solar

Why Your Utility is Terrified of the Future

A recent study commissioned by Northwest electric utilities warned that meeting our regional climate goals could require building wind and solar installations spanning 9,200 square miles. The report compared this to roughly the size of Vermont and suggested that we need 600 new projects spread across six states to keep the lights on. The study frames 100% renewable as a logistical nightmare, a land-use disaster, and a near impossibility. However, once you strip away the fear-mongering, the math actually reveals a simpler truth. The report is grounded in the legacy utility mindset, and it's strategically bankrupt.

The Fossil Gas Trap

To understand the study, we have to look at what the utilities got right and what they got wrong. They are correct that the grid is changing; data centers are a significant and growing load, and consumer demand is rising as we electrify transportation and heating. They are also correct that wind and solar are variable resources. If you build a grid using only the tools from the 1950s, you end up with the clunky, oversized, and inefficient system as described in their report.

The biggest error in the report is the utility group's refusal to let go of fossil gas. The authors of the study reason that since 100% renewable energy is nearly impossible, they suggest continued reliance on burning fossil gas to stabilize the grid. They claim that the intermittent nature of renewables requires their fossil gas plants as a constant companion to prevent blackouts every time a cloud passes over. This is not a requirement of physics; it's their preferred solution for the rigid, centralized, monopoly business model.

Agrovoltaics and The Community Solar Pivot

First, let's address the land use aspects of the report. They claim that solar would occupy far too much land in sprawling utility-owned solar fields. However, this is not the only option. Solar can be distributed; it can be dual-use, covering roofs, awnings, carports, and more. Agrovoltaics, for instance, allows land to grow crops or graze livestock beneath raised solar panels, maintaining or even improving agricultural output while harvesting the sun.

Furthermore, community solar programs provide a localized solution to our power needs. By building smaller, distributed solar arrays closer to where the power is actually consumed, this significantly reduces transmission line losses. We do not need to blanket six states with massive projects if we can aggregate power from hundreds of smaller, community-focused installations. This turns the grid into a distributed network rather than a fragile, high-voltage pipeline.

The Vermont Irony

The choice of "the size of Vermont" as a scary metric is perhaps the greatest irony of the report. The authors clearly used the state as shorthand for "too big." But in the real world, Vermont is currently the global leader in exactly the technology that makes the utility study obsolete.

Green Mountain Power, the primary utility in the state of Vermont, is doing the opposite of the massive, central-planning strategy suggested by the Northwest report. They are actively incentivizing their customers to participate in Virtual Power Plants (VPPs). They are handing out Tesla Powerwalls and other home storage systems to residents. When the grid faces a peak demand event, the utility can remotely orchestrate this fleet of home batteries to provide power, stabilize frequency, and shave off the load that would otherwise require firing up expensive, polluting peaker plants. Vermont is not paving over its landscape with industrial-scale energy plants to meet its energy needs; it is turning every home into a reliable, intelligent participant in a modern grid.

It's Batteries Stupid: Storage as the Ultimate Shock Absorber

The Northwest utility study tries to convince us that we need massive, land-consuming projects and fossil gas plants to maintain reliability. But this ignores the role of utility-scale energy storage. Batteries act as a massive, silent energy cache for the grid. They soak up excess renewable energy when the sun is bright and the wind is howling, and they discharge that power the millisecond we need it.

When we integrate dispatchable home energy storage and substation-scale storage batteries, we do not need to build out an oversized fleet of generation assets. We simply need to make the system smarter. We can balance the grid using software, distributed generation, multi-level storage, and real-time data.

Grid Strategy Metric	Centralized Legacy Model	Modern Distributed Model
Primary Infrastructure	Massive utility-scale plants spread across 6 states	Localized community solar, agrovoltaics, covered parking, and rooftop arrays
Grid Buffering & Stability	Heavy reliance on fossil gas peaker plants	Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) and battery storage assets
Transmission Footprint	Thousands of miles of high-voltage lines and land-use conflicts	Smart local microgrids with minimized transmission power loss
Consumer Financial Role	Passive ratepayers paying for utility-owned land-grabs	Active participants earning bill credits and securing backup power

Final Volts

This utility group report is a symptom of a dinosaur-era mindset. It looks at the future and sees only a larger version of the past. It can't see past a world where the grid is a unidirectional pipe that utilities control through sheer scale. The reality is that our energy use is evolving and the grid must evolve with it. The future grid is a mesh built on home-based storage, community solar, solar carports, and a smart software maestro that conducts thousands of participants into a symphony of reliability. We do not need to pave over a state the size of Vermont to solve our energy challenges. We just need to stop letting legacy utilities dictate the technology roadmap. The future is distributed, local, and, most importantly, free from fossil fuels.

Home Battery Subscription: Affordable Home Energy Storage and Backup Options

Have you ever wanted a home battery that could power your critical loads or even your entire home, but you didn't want to pay the thousands of dollars upfront to make that happen? If that's you, there's a new option to "subscribe" to a home battery.

Palmetto Solar has launched a residential battery lease plan. You can call it Battery-as-a-Service. This program brings a reliable battery to your garage for as low as $98 per month with no large upfront investment required. The program is now available across 25 states, including key markets such as Arizona, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Oregon. It gives homeowners a practical way to modernize their home energy setup without the heavy capital outlay.

Reliable Backup and Everyday Savings

The primary benefit is peace of mind during outages. A home battery provides automatic whole-home resilience, keeping your lights on, appliances running, and family comfortable when the utility grid goes down.

Beyond backup, the battery supports basic energy arbitrage. You charge it from the grid during lower-cost off-peak hours and discharge it to meet your needs during expensive peak times. Even without solar panels, this approach can produce roughly $600 to $1,000 in annual savings based on seasonal rate changes. These savings help offset much of the subscription cost, making robust blackout protection far more affordable.

Amplifying Value with VPP Programs

Enrolling your battery in a utility Virtual Power Plant (VPP) program, where available, can further reduce your net costs. During high-demand periods, utilities pay you for discharging energy back to the grid. This provides additional earnings for you while briefly supporting broader grid stability.

Maximum Benefits: Pairing with Solar

The strongest financial returns come from combining the battery subscription with rooftop solar and smart time-shifting. This is especially advantageous in markets with Net Energy Metering (NEM) policies, such as California's NEM 3.0, where standard daytime exports offer limited compensation.

By storing daytime solar energy and using or exporting it during high-value periods (for example, the premium evening peak hours between 6 PM and 8 PM in August and September), homeowners can generate thousands of dollars in annual credits and savings. This optimized setup often delivers net positive returns that exceed the subscription cost.

Strategy and Savings Breakdown

Operating Strategy	System Requirements	Estimated Annual Savings / Revenue	Net Benefit to Homeowner
Base Arbitrage	Grid connection only	$600 to $1,000	Subsidized blackout protection plus bill savings
VPP Integration	Grid connection, VPP enrollment	Variable based on events	Lower net lease cost
Optimized Solar Export	Solar array, VPP, time-shifting	Thousands of dollars in credits	Net annual profit

We face the real challenges of legacy energy infrastructure while believing firmly in superior decentralized solutions. For homeowners, a Palmetto battery subscription delivers immediate resilience, meaningful bill savings, and strong long-term value. Through smart software, home batteries, and supportive policies, families can take greater control of their energy needs and build a more reliable future.

Tesla Production: 2026 Half Way

Mid-Year Musings on the Manufacturing Mix

We have officially crossed the midpoint of 2026, and the production numbers for Tesla are officially in. Back in January, we looked at the persistent production plateau that characterized the vehicle market and wondered how the plug-in pioneer would navigate the lack of near-term volume catalysts. The actual results for the first half of the year reveal a total of 860,144 vehicles produced, split between 408,386 units in Q1 and 451,758 units in Q2. It is a fascinating data set that demonstrates why raw spreadsheet formulas lack real-world vision.

Statistical Surges and Trend Tumbles

When we mapped out our 2026 production models at the beginning of the year, the automated spreadsheet tools were screaming for an immediate return to exponential growth. Statistical algorithms look at long-term historical data and blindly project curves upward without any concept of factory retooling, engineering hurdles, or macroeconomic headwinds. Here is how those automated trend models and my estimate stacked up against Tesla's actual first-half vehicle production:

Model / Method	Q1 2026 Estimate	Q1 Error %	Q2 2026 Estimate	Q2 Error %	H1 2026 Total Estimate	H1 Error %
LINEAR	467,028	+14.36%	473,121	+4.73%	940,149	+9.30%
Seasonal	479,950	+17.52%	507,127	+12.26%	987,077	+14.76%
TREND	506,914	+24.13%	519,125	+14.91%	1,026,039	+19.29%
LOGEST	545,723	+33.63%	567,094	+25.53%	1,112,817	+29.38%
CWC Estimate	432,000	+5.78%	440,000	-2.60%	872,000	+1.38%
Wall Street Consensus	~410,000	+0.40%	406,024	-10.12%	~816,000	-5.13%
Actual Production	408,386		451,758		860,144

Every single mathematical trend model overshot the mark. The LINEAR was the closest trend model, and it missed by over 80,000 units for the first half; Seasonal missed by nearly 127,000 units; and the hyper-bullish LOGEST model overshot reality by a staggering 252,673 vehicles. These automated frameworks falsely assumed that the first quarter would see massive growth, ignoring the reality that the opening quarter of the year is historically a weak period for automotive hardware.

The Calculated Clarity of CWC

This brings us to our custom CWC calculation, which proved to be a triumph of pragmatic, grounded analysis. While the automated algorithms were predicting anywhere from 940,000 to over 1.1 million vehicles for the first half, the CWC estimate stood firm at a conservative 872,000 units. The US EV market was still recovering from the end of the EV tax credit. The new vehicles from Tesla (Semi and Cybercab) wouldn't have any meaningful production in the first half. This will start changing and will be significant in 2027. Our custom model correctly recognized these brutal facts of the start of 2026:

• No near-term volume catalysts existed in the product pipeline, because the next-generation affordable models were still well over the horizon.
• Agonizingly slow manufacturing ramps are an inescapable truth for radical new vehicle architectures, which applies directly to the early stages of the Tesla Semi and the Cybercab.
• A disciplined quarterly expectation was required, which led to a relatively flat 1H estimate.

By factoring in real-world complexities instead of relying on sterile math, the CWC first-half estimate came within a microscopic 1.38% of the actual 860,144 vehicles produced. Q1 is seasonally a low delivery time of year, and Tesla experienced an even deeper dip than we estimated. Manufacturing and delivery had a rebound in Q2 and vindicated our grounded approach.

Wall Street Wisdom vs. Real World Volts

How did our internal forecasts stack up against Wall Street's finest institutional analysts? For the first half of 2026, market analysts kept their expectations heavily tempered; this pessimism paid off in Q1, where the consensus was pretty close. However, they remained stubbornly pessimistic in Q2 and that's not how it played out. Heading into mid-year, the Tesla-compiled consensus from 22 sell-side analysts set an exceptionally low bar of 406,024 deliveries for the second quarter.

Tesla crushed this, reporting a spectacular 480,126 deliveries and blowing past Wall Street expectations by nearly 74,000 cars. This massive delivery spike allowed the company to aggressively clear out the 50,000-unit inventory overhang that had accumulated during a sluggish first quarter. While Wall Street was caught flat-footed by surging regional demand in Europe and China, the actual production footprint of 451,758 vehicles tracked beautifully alongside our steady CWC expectations. One caveat here: analysts estimate deliveries; we've been looking at production, so it's a bit of apples-and-oranges, but Tesla can only deliver a vehicle that's been produced.

Looking Forward

What does this mean for the remainder of 2026? Tesla (as with most automakers) sells more vehicles in the second half of the year. For Tesla, historically they sell about 22% more cars in the second half. If 2026 follows this, Tesla will finish the year with 1,895,000 vehicles produced in 2026. This is not far from our January estimate of 1,812,000 for this year.

Final Volts

The automotive transition is never a perfectly smooth, linear climb. Legacy manufacturers continue to stumble through various electrification half-measures, while Tesla is navigating a temporary volume plateau while working on new vehicles, adjusting regional supply lines, and focusing heavily on long-term physical AI development. Spreadsheets can help us chart the boundaries of what is possible, but disciplined execution on the factory floor is what ultimately matters. Every electric vehicle rolling off the line represents a permanent reduction in tailpipe emissions into the air we breathe, a lower total cost of ownership, and a step toward true energy independence. By matching statistical discipline with engineering reality, we can see past the noise of Wall Street and continue marching toward a future free from fossil fuels.

EVs Are Winning

Electrified transportation is the present and the future.

If you open any mainstream automotive, tech, or business news site today, you are almost guaranteed to encounter a steady wall of worry: "EV demand is cratering," the headlines blare, "Legacy automakers pivot back to gas," the pundits chime. It's a beautifully orchestrated symphony of doubt, frequently manufactured by the classic Petroganda of the Oiligarchy or driven by the psychological traps we explored in our piece on How Cognitive Illusions Fuel EV Misinformation.

But here at Cars With Cords, we prefer to look past anecdotal showroom noise and check the hard telemetry. When you zoom out and look at global automotive data, a completely different reality emerges. 

The simple, unassailable truth becomes obvious: EVs are winning, and internal combustion is trapped in a permanent, structural tailspin.

The 2017 High-Water Mark

To understand exactly where we are going, we have to look at where we peaked. The absolute apex for pure internal combustion engine (ICE) passenger cars happened all the way back in 2017. That year, the world bought roughly 83 million purely gas and diesel-powered light vehicles.

Since then, despite global population growth and an expanding international appetite for mobility, traditional engines have never come close to recovering that high-water mark. We did not just hit a temporary plateau; instead, we cleared a structural cliff. As we noted in our deep dive into why Fossil Fuel Peak Demand Has Already Happened, technology transitions do not wait for permission. They accelerate because the new architecture is fundamentally more efficient, reliable, and economical.

To visualize exactly what this looks like, let's examine the data compiled from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and BloombergNEF, charting the actual trajectory from 2010 through our current 2026 baseline, and projecting out to 2032.

Deconstructing the "Comeback" Illusion

The pandemic accelerated a trend that had already started. Look closely at the minor bump on the graph in 2024. Legacy auto executives popped the champagne when they saw that brief tick upward to 58.1 million units, pointing to it as proof that "gas is back."

Don't fall for the trick. That was not a sudden renaissance for spark plugs, oil filters, and complex transmissions. It was merely the post-pandemic clearing of long-standing semiconductor and component backlogs, paired with an interim push into traditional hybrids by buyers waiting for local public charging infrastructure to mature.

Once those backlogs cleared, the momentum of the EV adoption S-curve could not be held back. By 2025, pure ICE sales slipped right back down to 54.5 million. This year, in 2026, we're on track for roughly 51.8 million units. Traditional gas-powered cars now account for barely half of the global passenger car market.

Why the Slide is Structural

This is not a cyclical downturn that a temporary drop in interest rates will fix. This is a classic market substitution pattern driven by unyielding economic forces:

• The S-Curve Has Left the Station: In the world's largest automotive market, China, plug-in electric vehicles just captured a record-smashing 62.9% market share. In fact, every single one of the top 16 best-selling vehicles is now a plug-in. What happens in the largest manufacturing market eventually cascades to Europe, North America, and the rest of the world.
• Relentless Battery Economics: As we tracked in Powering the Future: How Batteries Transformed from Phones to Cars, scaling battery cell production creates an aggressive Wright's Law learning curve. Upfront price parity between the average EV and legacy ICE platforms is arriving at scale, making the choice a pure financial no-brainer for mass-market buyers.
• The Death of R&D Spending: Global automakers have fundamentally turned off the financial spigots for internal combustion development. The remaining ICE vehicles on dealer lots are increasingly riding on aging, legacy platforms as corporate capital budgets are permanently diverted into software-defined EV architectures.

The View to 2032

Modeling a steady, conservative 6% compounding annual decline through the next few years puts the long-term trend into sharp focus. By 2032, global pure ICE sales are projected to dwindle to just 35.8 million units, representing a staggering 57% collapse from their 2017 peak.

Yes, there will be a long tail for gasoline. Captured politicians will push policies to keep gas stations operating for years to come. But the economic engine of the global auto industry has permanently shifted.

The next time someone tries to convince you that the electric transition has stalled out, show them the above graph. The legacy narrative might be full of static, but the data is crystal clear. Electrified transportation isn't just the future anymore; it is actively winning the present.

Enjoy Energy Independence