Senate Candidate Drops Electric Vehicle Agenda From Senate Campaign

This week, Natron Energy confessed that the company is going out of business and cancelling its $1.4 billion project in Edgecombe County. Back in 2024, then-Governor Roy Cooper touted this exact project as an example of “North Carolina’s momentum in the clean energy economy reaching ‘epic proportions.’”  But now it provides a stark example of how Cooper failed North Carolina by prioritizing Biden’s agenda.

In his campaign announcement, Cooper attacked President Trump and misleadingly claimed that he “worked with Republicans.” Surprisingly absent was Cooper’s economic agenda, which he worked on for years, implementing Biden’s impractical electric vehicle mandate.

While Americans were deeply skeptical of Biden’s mandates, as Governor, Cooper focused North Carolina’s economic development on attracting projects that executed Biden’s EV mandate.

This course of action was always set against broad public opinion and consumer demand. In 2023, Pew Research found that only 38% of adults were open to purchasing an electric vehicle, while 50% were completely closed to the idea. In a separate 2024 study, demand for EVs dropped 14%. In 2025, EVs in America still face weak consumer demand and high prices.

While the Toyota project in the Triad is going steady, other mega projects related to EVs are facing headwinds. As mentioned at the top of this piece, Natron Energy announced that it is closing its doors, cancelling a $1.4 billion project. VinFast announced a $4.5 billion project in 2022 with plans to complete the factory by 2024; as of now, VinFast has not even begun construction. Wolfspeed announced plans for a new $5 billion factory in Siler City, but recently faced financial troubles, although the company claims the factory is still on track.

I hope these EV projects succeed and bring thousands of jobs to North Carolina. But right now, they face serious headwinds.

From my vantage point, it looks like Cooper made a bad bet on EVs being the future, in a bid to improve his reputation with the Biden administration.

Mega projects often require megasites, which are shovel-ready areas for major industrial projects. North Carolina’s megasites are home to numerous EV projects that may ultimately fail. This means that the Tar Heel State will likely miss out on transformative projects.

This is an obvious political liability for Cooper, which is why he is remaining silent about his economic development legacy on the campaign trail.