Author: Arnes Biogradlija

Heron Power’s newest funding announcement cites more than 40 gigawatts of customer interest in its Heron Link power conversion system. The company’s own materials from earlier this year put that figure higher, at a backlog exceeding 50 gigawatts, and founder Drew Baglino told Latitude Media in August that demand was running well north of the 40 gigawatts of capacity planned for the company’s first factory. Across every version of that claim, only two customers behind it have been publicly named: Intersect Power, acquired by Google in 2025, and data center developer Crusoe. Heron Link is a solid-state transformer, a category…

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market’s Core Carbon Principles label, the leading quality benchmark in voluntary carbon markets, already excludes large-scale landfill gas projects that combine flaring with electricity generation, the exact category Era4’s UK data center plan depends on. That exclusion predates and exists independently of Era4’s specific project, rooted in a documented pattern across the landfill gas credit category rather than a novel concern raised only by this one initiative. Era4’s plan to build AI data centers at eight UK waste sites, powered by landfill gas already being converted to electricity under mandatory capture rules, runs…

The Partnerships to Accelerate Training and Hiring for Geothermal Heat Pumps prize awarding 1.2 million dollars to eight teams this month was launched in December 2024 under the prior administration’s Geothermal Technologies Office, with a total program budget of 3 million dollars that has not changed since. The September 2026 announcement of this month’s winners credits the same unchanged program to advancing “President Trump’s America First Energy Agenda,” issued by a Department of Energy unit that did not exist under that name when the competition began. The GHP PATHs prize was unveiled on December 5, 2024, structured as a three-phase…

Sinopec’s 260-megawatt Kuqa facility in Xinjiang, once billed as the world’s largest green hydrogen plant, has spent years running at roughly 20% of its intended capacity because its alkaline electrolyzers cannot operate safely when renewable power output drops below a minimum threshold. A new multi-objective optimization study cites Kuqa as the real-world case that motivates its research, and its own modeling results explain with some precision why the plant’s problems were predictable rather than incidental. Alkaline water electrolysis, the technology used at Kuqa and the most commercially mature electrolyzer type available, cannot simply throttle down to match falling solar or…

TransPennine Express has operated under UK government control since May 2023, when ministers stripped its franchise following months in which roughly a quarter of its services were cancelled. The €1.2 billion battery-electric train order signed this month won’t see its first unit enter passenger service until winter 2034 at the earliest, meaning the operator will have spent more than a decade under state control before the trains meant to fix its rolling stock problems actually arrive. Alstom’s contracts with TransPennine Express, worth €930 million for 29 five-car Adessia Stream battery-electric multiple units and a further €230 million for an initial…

Hyphen Hydrogen Energy’s original development plan, published when Namibia selected the company as preferred bidder, projected the country would begin exporting green hydrogen before 2025 and start production in 2026 from an initial 4.4 billion dollar, 2-gigawatt first phase. The project remains in a feasibility study scheduled to run through the end of 2026, meaning it has not advanced past preliminary assessment more than a year after its own original export target date passed. The gap between Hyphen’s original timeline and its current status is the clearest measure of how far Namibia’s green hydrogen ambitions have drifted from the projections…

The Section 301 tariff on Chinese lithium-ion batteries did rise from 7.5% to 25% on January 1. That is not, however, the total duty a Chinese battery pack actually carries today. Stacked with a base tariff and a separate forced-labor tariff added in July, the effective rate on a non-EV Chinese lithium-ion pack stood at 40.9% as of late July, after spending part of the year even higher before a Supreme Court ruling struck down a different tariff layer entirely. The tariff most commonly cited in coverage of the recent tightening around Chinese batteries, the Section 301 increase from 7.5%…

The optimization framework published this year in the Journal of Energy Storage is built to jointly site, size, and route stationary and mobile energy storage systems across a transmission network under full N-1 security constraints. Outside a handful of pilots run by companies such as Nomad Power, Power Edison, and Zenobe, and utility use cases concentrated in storm-outage backup, utility-scale mobile energy storage at the transmission level remains a niche application rather than an established planning asset class, meaning the paper’s computational sophistication is running well ahead of the deployment reality it is built to plan for. The framework proposed…

Rolls-Royce SMR is not expected to reach a final investment decision on its UK reactor program until 2029, three years after this week’s memorandum of understanding with ABB was signed. The agreement is also not ABB’s only recent nuclear partnership: the company has struck similar automation and electrification arrangements with Sweden’s Blykalla and US-based Paragon over the past two years, a pattern that spreads ABB’s exposure across several competing reactor designs rather than committing it to any single one. ABB’s non-binding agreement with Rolls-Royce SMR covers exploration of how the Swiss engineering company’s automation, electrification, instrumentation and communication technology could…

Seven of the world’s top ten energy storage system suppliers by shipment volume are Chinese, led by CATL, BYD and Sungrow, and all three face restrictions on US government-linked procurement. Samsung SDI is, by its own disclosure, the only non-Chinese prismatic LFP battery manufacturer with a US production base, a position that makes it structurally indispensable to companies like Sungrow for reasons that have nothing to do with price and everything to do with scarcity. Sungrow’s move to source battery cells from Samsung SDI, confirmed to ESS News by a person familiar with the arrangement, is being framed around a…