Tech giant Apple backed President Donald Trump in a push for rare earth minerals this week, announcing a $500 million investment in the only rare earth mine currently operating in the United States.
The investment is part of an urgent crusade to make America less dependent on China, which controls about 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth magnet production. CEO of Highland Electric Fleets Duncan McIntyre told Breitbart News Daily that “domesticating that supply chain is absolutely essential,” as rare-earths have become a foundational pillar to modern society. Rare earth minerals are used for anything from smartphones, computers, and electric vehicles to advanced defense systems.
“[The United States is] less and less dependent on Asia every year. [But] we want to have an entirely independent domestic supply chain,” he said, adding that he is “super encouraged” by recent investments in the U.S. industry.
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The demand for independence is even more imperative, given the exponential rise of artificial intelligence and sheer amount of energy it takes to power that kind of technology, he noted.
“We need to double our supply of energy, and so that means we need more of everything, right? We need more natural gas, we need a nuclear industry, we need more solar — we need more of everything,” he said. “The reality is, data centers are a massive drive of demand for power. Batteries play a role because what they do is they help those data centers run at full steam during the system peaks… So to meet that demand, you have to build more power plants, but you also need storage and you need demand response.”
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Highland Electric Fleets is largely focused on making America more efficient one city at a time, describing itself as “a leader in electrifying fleet transportation.” The company partners with cities to “help them electrify really anything that a city runs: garbage trucks, school buses, anything that’s a municipal workhorse,” McIntyre said.
“The biggest driver is the health benefits are sort of indisputable when you look at the effect of diesel exhaust, specifically on young children. There’s pretty direct ties to things like pediatric asthma, and so it’s really a local health benefit driver,” he explained. “A couple of other things [are]… grid resiliency… When you’ve got a flood or a tornado, your power grid might be out for a couple days. You’ve actually got this fleet of batteries on wheels that can go back up a school or a community center, provide cold storage, provide some degree of power relief for many days, in some cases weeks. So there’s a really a ton of local benefits that are perceived as upgrades to many communities.”
McIntyre noted that the quality of the batteries are improving as demand in the U.S. increases.
“This is not new technology, but in the last five years there have been particularly strong gains. I think the biggest difference is just demand for the technologies has grown exponentially. That’s helped the manufacturers get to scale. It’s helped them provide improvements on the efficiency and the productivity of the batteries,” he explained.
Some companies are planning to expand production of gas-powered vehicles, a move which McIntyre does not see as thwarting the overall long-term adoption of battery power, saying, “It feels inevitable that adoption is happening.”
“Consumers should choose. [But] when it comes to a municipal workhorse, something that has a job, it should be about cost, reliability, practicality, and local health. And those are the things that communities buy on,” he said. “They don’t buy because the federal government or the state government tells them to buy something, they look at the local dynamics of their community, [and] they weigh the pros and cons of each alternative.”
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