Teslarati: BMW CFO Downbeat About Electric Cars and Their Ability to Generate Profit

BMW chief financial officer Friedrich Eichiner was downbeat about electric cars when he spoke to reporters in Lisbon last week. “We’ve learned that people aren’t prepared to pay a higher price for an electric vehicle. I don’t see some kind of disruptive element coming from electric cars that would prompt sales to go up quickly in the next five to six years.” This is in spite of recent reports that the German Minister of Economic Affairs has called for a joint effort by European car makers to produce batteries for electric vehicles in Germany and Europe.

Eichiner says it will take seven years to double the energy density of batteries for electric cars. Until then, “We simply have to walk through the valley of tears,” Stefan Juraschek, vice president of electric powertrain development, told reporters at a briefing at a BMW testing facility in Munich recently. That’s what he says it will take before his company will be able to make money selling battery-powered cars.

TechCrunch: Apple Maps Adds EV Charging Station Data From ChargePoint

Just in time for that cross-country holiday trip, Apple’s bringing some key electric-vehicle charging info to its ecosystem, courtesy of ChargePoint. The partnership brings location info for 30,000 charging stations, which will pop up in Maps as badges, along with available pricing and hours of operation.

Apple’s AI assistant will, naturally, be getting in on the action -- “Hey Siri, where’s the closest charging station?” -- and iPhone owners can use Apple Pay to charge the charge.

Fortune: Samsung Is Supplying This Electric Car Startup With Breakthrough Battery Tech

Samsung SDI has agreed to supply electric auto startup Lucid Motors with lithium-ion batteries that the two companies say outperform what’s currently available in the marketplace. The joint deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, follows Lucid Motors’s announcement that it will build a $700 million factory in Casa Grande, Ariz. employing up to 2,000 workers.

The factory will begin producing 1,000-horsepower cars in 2018, and at least one variant will be able to travel 400 miles on a single charge, Lucid Motors chief technology officer Peter Rawlinson has said.

Computerworld: Nearly Half of Residential Distributed Solar Power Is Owned by Private Companies

About 44% of all solar power that's installed on residential rooftops, known as distributed solar capacity, is owned by private businesses, such as SolarCity or Vivint Solar, according to new government data.

Distributed solar capacity in the U.S., which includes all solar power capacity other than utility-scale installations 1 megawatt or larger,  increased to 12.3 gigawatts as of September, according to new figures from the Energy Information Administration. In comparison, a cumulative 11.6 GW had been installed in the U.S. by the end of 2015.

World Positive: Trump’s Road to Jobs and Infrastructure Is Clean (and Bipartisan)

Clean energy has garnered bipartisan support across the country. When we at DBL Partners first sat down to consider policy options this summer (with government, academic and private industry experts at the Stanford Policy Forum), we believed that our recommendations could build on these shared objectives of building a thriving 21st century clean energy industry in the U.S. that simultaneously fueled economic growth and tackled the threat of climate change.

Unfortunately, our reality today looks quite different. On the evening of Election Day, we joined proponents of clean energy across the U.S. in a collective state of shock. During the campaign, now President-elect Trump had dismissed global warming as a Chinese hoax and promised to radically change the direction of federal energy and environmental policy. It would obviously be disappointing if the Trump administration were to follow through on this approach.