The conventional wisdom around wind turbines goes as follows: the bigger the better.

That’s because turbines need to be large (read: very large) to gather wind effectively—there’s a stronger breeze high in the sky compared to down near the ground.

Miniaturization time: While much of the focus is on deploying large turbines that can generate grid-level energy, San Diego-based Uprise Energy is looking to serve a smaller niche: Places that need less energy than a city or a town but still wish to find a cost-effective way to reduce their reliance on fossil-fuel energy sources, like diesel power generators.

• According to a 2019 Department of Energy report, there are “hundreds of isolated communities” in the US alone that rely on diesel generators for some or all of their power.

Uprise’s solution, the mobile power station, is a wind turbine that can fit inside of a 20-foot storage container and can be towed by a pickup truck. The 15-person company’s tech is more cost-effective than diesel generators, according to its CEO and founder, Jonathan Knight, and so far it has landed contracts with the DOE and the California Energy Commission.

Corey Markfort, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, told Emerging Tech Brew via email that smaller distributed wind systems like this could fill a “critical gap, especially in remote areas that are not served by a reliable electric grid or are not on a grid at all.”

Keep reading about the opportunities and challenges presented by these tiny turbines.—JM

Automakers, who a few weeks ago were begging the US government to expand the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, are not entirely pleased now that such an extension has moved closer to reality.

Devil’s in the details: The Inflation Reduction Act, proposed last week, would eliminate the current cap on the existing federal EV tax credit and extend it through 2032. So far, so good for automakers. But here’s the rub: Starting in 2024, vehicles won’t qualify for the tax credit unless a certain percent of their battery minerals and components come from domestic sources or the US’s free-trade partners.

• China, which currently dominates battery manufacturing and refining, does not fall into that bucket.
• And, as E&E News reported, much of the non-China mining, refining, and processing capacity is either in Russia or in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Indonesia, with which the US does not have free-trade agreements.

Even so, by 2027, EVs would need to get 80% of their critical minerals and 70% of their battery components from compliant sources in order to qualify for the tax credit. Automakers and energy experts alike have criticized these timelines as unrealistic, arguing that the targets won’t be met and will likely dilute the effectiveness of the credits as a result.

• “These things aren’t in place, and might not be for more than a decade,” Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines, told E&E News.

Big picture: Advocates of this strategy think that the potential short-term pain is worth the long-term gain of the US building out a robust domestic battery supply chain.

“Tell [automakers] to get aggressive and make sure that we’re extracting in North America, we’re processing in North America and we put a line on China,” Manchin told reporters on Tuesday, per Reuters. ”I don’t believe that we should be building a transportation mode on the backs of foreign supply chains. I’m not going to do it.”

Click here to read on-site.—DM

Stat: Y Combinator—the exclusive, famed startup accelerator—reduced its summer 2022 cohort size by nearly 40% compared to winter 2022.

Quote: “Graphite has kind of been the poor cousin of the battery minerals and doesn’t get the attention of the other commodities…But we’re getting very close to an inflection point where demand overtakes supply and this is going to be first-page news.”—Gregory Bowes, executive chairman of the Northern Graphite Corporation, to Supply Chain Dive

Read: The current state of the startup market: a pinch of paradox, a heaping tablespoon of uncertainty, and a cup of contradiction.

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