Author: Arnes Biogradlija

Arnes Biogradlija is the founder and Editor in Chief of EnergyNews.biz, which he launched in 2021 to separate energy transition realities from fairy tales. He writes data driven analysis on hydrogen, energy storage, small modular reactors, grids and industrial policy, and leads the Energy Talks interview series. EnergyNews.biz reporting has been cited more than 100 times by the International Energy Agency.

Every major battery maker racing toward 400 to 500 watt-hour-per-kilogram lithium-metal and solid-state cells, BYD, CATL, Geely, and others among them, has validated those designs primarily by completing thousands of charge-discharge cycles within a few months of continuous lab testing. A new Cell Press Perspective argues that this metric is close to meaningless for lithium metal specifically, because compressing years of ownership into months of uninterrupted cycling systematically hides a separate and distinct failure mode: degradation driven by elapsed calendar time and rest, independent of how many cycles a cell completes. The mechanism the paper describes is specific to lithium…

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For years, Germany’s greenhouse gas reduction quota system generated certificate trading value that stayed largely invisible to end users. This October’s price cut at 15 H2 Mobility stations, following a similar reduction in June, marks that compliance market’s value reaching retail hydrogen pricing for what independent analysts describe as perhaps the first time. The timing is not incidental: the credit market only began generating meaningful value after a 2025-2026 regulatory reform addressed a prolonged oversupply of the same credits that had depressed their price for years. Germany’s Treibhausgasminderungsquote, the THG quota, requires companies placing fossil fuels on the transport market…

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The World Trade Organization panel established this week is framed as Russia’s challenge to the EU’s carbon border levy, but eighteen other WTO members, including the United States, China, India, Japan, Brazil, Canada, South Korea and the United Kingdom, formally reserved third-party rights to participate in the same proceedings. That scale of multilateral interest is considerably broader than a bilateral dispute, even as the case’s practical ability to change anything about CBAM in the near term remains limited by a structural weakness in the WTO’s own dispute system. The case, formally WTO dispute DS639, began when Russia requested consultations with…

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Sodium-ion batteries have been marketed across the storage industry as a safer, lower-cost alternative to lithium chemistries for stationary and grid-support applications. A new experimental study pairing a sodium-ion cell with a supercapacitor for exactly this kind of use, voltage regulation on remote rural grid feeders, found the combination delivered no net energy benefit to the battery at three of four tested switching frequencies, the opposite of what the same pairing achieved with a lithium iron phosphate cell under identical conditions. The study tested two passive battery-supercapacitor hybrids, lithium iron phosphate paired with a commercial 400 farad supercapacitor and a…

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Romanian battery storage revenues fell by roughly 35% in August for both two- and four-hour systems, and Clean Horizon’s own exclamation points to one cause: increased competition following the commissioning of new capacity, including the Gura Ialomiței project. That is a live instance of the exact cannibalization dynamic Wood Mackenzie has separately flagged as “looming” for Germany, Europe’s largest battery market, where connection requests for new storage capacity have reportedly reached hundreds of gigawatts, while only a fraction of that volume has actually been built. Germany’s own performance in this same monthly report is consistent with that structural warning rather…

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China’s renewable hydrogen production capacity, now exceeding 1.4 million tonnes annually between what is operating and what is under construction, reads as validation that the production question is largely solved and attention can shift to storage, transport and demand. Set against China’s total hydrogen production and consumption of roughly 35 million tonnes a year, more than 97% of it is still grey hydrogen from coal and natural gas; that entire renewable pipeline, even fully built out, would cover under 4% of the country’s hydrogen use. The operating share today is smaller still, at roughly 250,000 to 270,000 tonnes, under 1%…

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Fervo Energy has synchronized the first of three 33-megawatt generating blocks at Cape Station to the grid, a genuine technical milestone for enhanced geothermal systems. What has actually reached commercial operation so far is one block, not the roughly 100-megawatt first phase the announcement is being measured against, with the remaining two blocks not expected online until January 1, 2027. That distinction matters because Cape Station’s broader numbers, a 500-megawatt combined first and second phase by 2028, up to 3 gigawatts contemplated under Fervo’s framework agreement with Google through 2033, and roughly 900 megawatts described as covered by power purchase…

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The fourth edition of Sarajevo Energy & Climate Week (SECW 2026) concluded today in Sarajevo after five days of intensive discussions. Featuring over 200 speakers, panelists, and decision-makers across 21 sessions, the event reinforced its role as Southeast Europe’s primary platform for energy and climate policy. This year’s program focused heavily on accelerating decarbonization, expanding smart grids, deploying green hydrogen, and enhancing infrastructure climate resilience. Panelists issued a strong call to action regarding European trade regulations—such as CBAM and the ETS system—warning that failure to align quickly could severely impact regional exports and broader economic competitiveness. Program committee members and…

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Exactly one natural hydrogen well has ever reached commercial operation anywhere in the world, a small site in Bourakebougou, Mali, that supplies electricity to a single village. That is the entire global track record behind the category MAX Power Mining Corp. is marketing when it describes its Lawson Complex in Saskatchewan as the “world’s first large-scale commercial discovery” of natural hydrogen, a claim that, by the company’s own September disclosures, still describes wells in commercial validation drilling with a completions program planned but not yet finished. MAX Power was originally a mining company before pivoting into natural hydrogen exploration, building…

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Arcadia eFuels’ own 2023 roadmap projected its first Danish plant would begin producing eSAF this year. The offtake agreement Uniper signed this week instead expects first deliveries only “from the early 2030s,” a slip of at least four years from the project’s original target, for a facility that had completed front-end engineering design but had not yet reached a final investment decision as of the most recent independent tracking. Uniper’s commitment to buy 40,000 metric tons of eSAF annually for more than a decade from Arcadia eFuels’ Project Endor in Vordingborg, Denmark, is not a modest slice of that facility’s…

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