A journey across hi-tech and hi-green America. The future? Scrapping Teslas and beating China

We live in a world racing ahead at increasing speed compared to the past, and that often prevents us from understanding and decoding new phenomena. Yet we need to take a snapshot of what is happening around us. This is what our longforms are all about - a recurring monthly feature in which we bring you in-depth stories on some key current issues. A way to understand what is happening in the world and to take up future challenges that will impact people, businesses, and communities. Enjoy reading this new issue. 
 

***

There is a scrapyard in the middle of the Nevada desert that may have the solution to the problems of electric mobility in the United States and also provide some good ideas to the rest of the world. Admittedly, to call Redwood Materials simply a scrapyard is a bit reductive, since it is a company that raised and is investing some five billion US dollars in its facilities in Nevada and South Carolina. Yet junking vehicles is the essence of what the company does, a company founded by JB Straubel, a former Tesla top manager who decided a few years ago to leave Elon Musk behind and put himself at the bottom of the electric car food chain. Tesla builds them, Straubel tears them apart when they are old to recycle the valuable materials that power the lithium-ion batteries the entire future of electric mobility relies on. 

The map geolocating the sites of innovation in America featured in our longform 

In the year leading up to the race for the White House and the showdown between an 81-year-old president and a 78-year-old opponent who was recently the target of an assassination attempt in which he was miraculously unscathed, profound transformations are unfolding that often fall under the radar of the media world, which is bound to be more focused on the election campaign. The gap between the real America and those who govern it became evident at the end of June during the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. What made the news, of course, was the President's state of health, but it is remarkable that there was no mention in ninety minutes of AI, electric mobility, gigafactories, microchips, renewable energy, or the space race - yet these are the very fronts where something momentous is unfolding in the United States. A whole redefinition of the American economy whose effects will be fully seen before the 2030s. 
 

This can be understood when traveling from one point to another in the States to discover the new sites of innovation, which are not necessarily only found in Silicon Valley. A good place to start is Carson City, in the Nevada desert near Lake Tahoe on the border with California. 
Just on the outskirts of the town that was named after Scout Kit Carson - the inspiration for the eponymous character in the Italian comic strip Tex Willer - stand the headquarters of Redwood, a company that was established to respond to an emerging new global scenario. At the core of Redwood's strategy is the understanding that the entire mobility industry is irreversibly heading toward electrification. This makes batteries the true “oil” of the 2030s and so the biggest challenge for the future will revolve around the materials for the production of the anodes and cathodes that make them work. Currently, the raw materials on which the battery-manufacturing sector relies - zinc, copper, lithium, and cobalt - have to travel 70-80 thousand kilometers around the globe before they reach the US factories, with total costs that will reach $600 billion by 2030. According to Redwood, the demand for lithium-ion batteries is expected to grow by 500 percent in the next ten years, but the current logistics make America vulnerable. Hence the idea of getting into the business of recycling all the materials used to make anodes and cathodes, and that is why the Biden Administration decided to fund Redwood's activities to the tune of $2 billion. 
 

Guests pose for photos in front of a giant cowboy hat displayed outside the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing facility

(Photo by Suzanne Cordeiro / AFP via Getty Images)

The Nevada company is therefore taking center stage in a new gigafactory ecosystem that aims to radically transform the way the United States meets its demand for energy. Gigafactory is a word that up until a few years ago was used only by Elon Musk to describe the investments of his company Tesla in the production of car batteries. Now every state dreams of attracting some kind of gigafactory, that is a factory with the capacity to produce batteries that collectively exceed one gigawatt-hour (GWh) of energy. In theory, with a GWh capacity, it is possible to produce batteries to power between 10 and 20 thousand electric vehicles in one year. As of early 2021, at least 25 such plants had been established or announced in the U.S. with another ten or so already planned for completion by 2025, with a total value of about $60 billion. The two Carolinas, North and South, are becoming the epicenters of electric mobility-related manufacturing. However, the map of the new Battery Belt includes all the southern states, from Georgia to Texas, and then reaches out into the heart of the Midwest (Missouri and West Virginia) before finally moving up to the Great Lakes region and Detroit. This is where even the big automotive manufacturers - Ford, GM, and Stellantis - are involved in investments and aim to integrate the gigafactories within their new digital innovation ecosystems. Accelerating the creation of the plants in recent years has been not only the new industrial strategy of the major groups, but also a massive injection of public money. Back in 2009, at the height of the recession brought on by the subprime mortgage crisis, the Obama Administration had released the first $2.2 billion earmarked for the EV sector under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In the Trump years there was not the same level of enthusiasm for electric cars as it was chosen to focus on stabilizing and keeping the fossil fuel production sector alive, starting from coal. This scenario changed with President Biden's legislative steps against climate change, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that allocated $391 billion of public spending to the clean energy sector. A stream of tens of billions of dollars in federal funds was released for the electricity sector, much of it taking the form of incentives that are no longer directed at end users as they used to be, but rather at manufacturers. 

The automotive and battery industries now have the chance to access loans worth billions and equally large tax rebates by investing in the electric sector. The aim is to boost non fossil-fueled mobility, but also to wage war in this field - as in many others - on China, which holds a dominant position in strategic sectors such as lithium-ion batteries. The government now grants tax credits to those who produce materials in the U.S. that are essential for making electric car batteries. And to those who recycle them like Redwood. 

Another industry that has become strategic in this new innovation scenario is that of microchips. Also in this case the ongoing effort, which is itself fueled by huge public investment, is to bring to the U.S. productions that are currently mainly located in Taiwan and South Korea, before leadership is taken over by China in this field as well. On the trip around the U.S. in this case the stop to make is in Phoenix, Arizona. This is where Korean Samsung and Taiwanese TSMC (the world's leading manufacturer of semiconductors) were attracted to produce next-generation, advanced chips that have become indispensable not only for electric mobility, but also to meet the huge demand for computing power arising from the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence. 

 Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara (Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, the place to go to take a look at the innovation in progress is still Silicon Valley. However, not just the San Francisco offices of OpenAI (the inventors of ChatGPT), Google or the up-and-coming Anthropic, but especially the Santa Clara headquarters of Nvidia. This is the company that in June overtook Microsoft and Apple on the stock market and that with a capitalization of more than $3,300 billion has become the richest one in the world, also making its founder, Taiwanese-Oregonian Jensen Huang immensely rich, as he now has a personal fortune of about $115 billion. It is all thanks to Nvidia's specialization in the production of GPUs, the graphics cards that were originally made for the gaming sector and have become key to creating the computing power needed for Generative Artificial Intelligence. 

But chips and AI require more and more energy, and the United States, like the rest of the world, needs to be able to produce it in a clean and sustainable manner to meet the challenges of climate change. So, in our journey from one side of the States to the other, we must take a look off the Atlantic coast, and in particular at Martha's Vineyard, the island of the rich and famous in Massachusetts because here, where whales and their hunters once ruled – this is Moby Dick's ocean - now stands America's first major offshore wind farm - 62 giant wind turbines that are the heralds of a potential revolution which aims to turn the waters of the Atlantic into a replica of the European North Sea. 

Vineyard Wind, this the name of the $4 billion project, will generate 800 megawatts of electricity and power 400,000 homes, as well as provide jobs to a great number of people in an area that usually only comes alive in the summer. If everything works out as planned, this will be just the first in a series of similar projects, all of which take inspiration from the experience gained in Europe's northern seas (it is no coincidence that Vineyard Wind was built by a Danish company). 

American innovation can thus today be easily found even far away from Silicon Valley, in places like Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas (the fastest growing urban area in the entire U.S.), Nashville in Tennessee, Denver in Colorado, Salt Lake City in Utah, Tampa in Florida or Atlanta in Georgia, and in small locations that are rapidly becoming centers of attraction. One of these may be a good destination to end the trip, partly because it is located in one of the most remote corners of the United States, in the swampy reaches of Texas bordering Mexico and overlooking the Gulf.
 

SpaceX's Starship rocket launches from Starbase during its second test flight in Boca Chica, Texas (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)

Boca Chica is home to the facilities and launch pads of SpaceX, Elon Musk's space company that perhaps encompasses the very essence of American innovation. It has become the official supplier to Nasa and an alternative to the old Kennedy Space Center in Florida because of its combination of the experience gained in electric mobility and the microchip industry (Tesla), the working methods developed in the gigafactories, and the cutting-edge technology applied in all American innovative fields. From Boca Chica, rockets are being launched to the Moon, in the future they will aim for Mars as today the American pioneering spirit can be seen here even more than in California, and it is very much alive and ever more technologically advanced.