1.Electric Vehicles partnerships gather pace:MG’s Chinese owner and Indian steelmaker JSW team up to build electric vehicles

India’s biggest steel producer JSW and Chinese carmaker SAIC Motor on Wednesday launched a $1.5bn joint venture to build and sell MG-brand electric vehicles in the world’s most populous country.  The partners plan to invest $5bn by 2030 and cut costs by increasing local sourcing, including of batteries from a plant to be built in India’s eastern Odisha state by JSW, the Indian group’s chair Sajjan Jindal told the Financial Times. 

JSW, a family-owned conglomerate, and other Indian partners will own 51 per cent of the joint venture, which will be called JSW MG Motor India. SAIC will own 49 per cent, as it dilutes control of its Indian unit. JSW and MG told a launch event in Mumbai on Wednesday that they planned to bring out a new model every three to six months over the next three years, starting in October.

M&M, Adani Total Energies join to set up EV charging infra across India

The MoU sets a roadmap for the creation of an expansive EV charging infrastructure across the country. With this association, electric vehicle XUV400 customers will now have access to more than 1,100 chargers.

Moreover, the partnership will also entail rolling out e-mobility solutions to provide seamless access to the charging network for the customers covering discovery, availability, navigation, and transactions, the Mumbai-based automaker said.

2.India applied for two deep-sea mining licenses for metals vital to the green energy transition. 

Huge reserves of cobalt, copper, manganese, and nickel lie on the sea floor, and countries are racing to access them: The U.N.’s International Seabed Authority has issued 31 exploration licenses so far, and is meeting in Jamaica this week to discuss future rules on the practice.

Many countries, including the U.S., China, and Russia, are keen to expand mining, arguing that renewable technologies will need large amounts of the metals, but activists say it could disrupt fragile ecosystems.

3.The U.S. set strict new emission limits for automakers Wednesday, a step toward making most new American cars either electric or hybrid by 2032. 

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday finalised rules that aim to limit tailpipe emssions from passenger cars and light trucks as part of a broader effort to transition the US to electric vehicles. The rules direct auto manufacturers to target a percentage of their new vehicle sales toward different types of electric vehicles, starting in 2027 and gradually increasing the targets through 2032. 

The standards are performance-based, meaning auto manufacturers can decide which types of car technologies to invest in to reach the annually reduced emissions levels of their fleets. As a whole, electric vehicles accounted for 7.6% of new vehicle sales in the US in 2023.

The New York Times called it “one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history,” and a major component of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. The rules will likely face election-year pushback from automakers and Republicans, but the Biden administration is betting that the shift to EVs will also benefit workers.

Toyota, which despite being the world’s largest automaker hasn’t fully embraced EVs, said Wednesday that “serious challenges around affordability, charging infrastructure, and supply chain” remain before the mandate can become reality.

4.Bill Gates’ nuclear power startup is set to build its first next-generation reactor in June.

 TerraPower’s chief executive told the Financial Times that it would apply for a U.S. construction permit in Wyoming, and that its planned reactors, which use liquid sodium as a coolant, could be built at half the cost of existing water cooled reactors.

It’s one of several companies racing to bring smaller, cheaper reactors to market — U.S.-based firms are behind state-backed rivals in Russia and China, each of which have one small modular reactor operating already. NuScale, another U.S. company, canceled its plan to build the first American SMR when costs went up.

5.Accenture revenue forecast cut signals slowing consulting market

Accenture has cut its annual revenue forecast in the latest sign that the once booming consulting market is slowing. Pointing to an “uncertain macro environment”, Accenture said on Thursday that its full-year revenues would grow between 1 per cent and 3 per cent, below an earlier prediction of 2 per cent to 5 per cent. It also cut is forecast earning per share.

Deloitte this week announced the biggest overhaul of its operations in a decade as the Big Four firm, which competes with Accenture, braces for a market slowdown.

6.Shankar Vedantam on the power and paradox of self deception.

 McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Shankar Vedantam, the host of NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, about his new book, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain . In the book, Vedantam and coauthor Bill Mesler argue that, paradoxically, self-deception—normally believed to do harm to us, to our communities, and to the planet—can also play a vital role in our success and well-being.

7.A genetically engineered pig liver was transplanted into a human for the first time.

Chinese scientists introduced the liver, from a pig genetically edited to remove proteins that can cause organ rejection, into the body of a brain dead patient. After 96 hours, no sign of rejection was seen.

Pigs have long been seen as a candidate for “xenotransplantation,” of organs from one species into another, because they are physiologically similar to humans. There is a global shortage of livers for transplants, despite it being possible to take them from living humans — 500,000 people face liver failure, which can only be treated with a transplant, each year in China alone.

U.S. researchers have previously demonstrated xenotransplantation of kidneys and hearts.