EV battery costs dropping: A new study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicates that declining battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the U.S. and Europe as soon as 2025. In EVs, batteries make up about half the cost. The study predicts that prices will fall by about 77 percent between 2016 and 2030. French carmaker Renault predicts total ownership costs of electric cars like its Zoe will be conventional to gasoline-engine cars by the early 2020s.
RNG in Metro buses: Clean Energy Fuels Corp. announced that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) has awarded Clean Energy a renewable natural gas (RNG) contract to fuel its fleet of transit buses with Redeem brand renewable natural gas. The fueling contract begins with a one-year pilot where Clean Energy will provide Redeem to one of Metro’s eleven compressed natural gas stations, which are currently operated and maintained by Clean Energy. Each station provides fuel for approximately 200 CNG buses. That may lead to the company providing its RNG to the entire Metro fleet of 2,200 natural gas buses for four more years.
Tucker Perkins new CEO: The Propane Education & Research Council has named industry veteran Thomas “Tucker” Perkins as its next president and chief executive officer, said PERC Chairman Thomas Van Buren, who also led the executive search team. Perkins, 60, joined PERC in 2012 as Chief Business Development Officer and most recently served as Chief Operations Officer. Current president and CEO Roy Willis, 67, who has led the PERC staff since operations began nearly 20 years ago, recently announced that he will retire on July 31, 2017. Willis will serve in a supporting role for a limited time to help with the transition.
Big cuts in Trump’s DOE budget: The Trump administration is proposing dramatic cuts to the Department of Energy budget for the 2018 fiscal year, which begins October 1. Funding would be cut entirely for the Clean Cities program and the DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Program would see huge cuts. You can view the proposed DOE budget here with details on the cuts presented on pages 28, 47, and 48 in PDF document pages; these three pages can be seen on pages 22, 41, and 42 in the report’s page numbers at the bottom of each page of the Congressional Justification document.
Weeks ago, news came out that Trump’s 2018 budget proposed eliminating the DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program (ATMVP) and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Trump would like to see a $54-billion increase in defense spending that would be offset in cuts to other departments. DoE would see a $1.7 billion cut for the next fiscal year. Of the $28 billion in the DoE’s budget funding, about $1.4 billion will be increased for the National Nuclear Security Administration.