Author: Arnes Biogradlija

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…

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…

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…

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%…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Ontario Power Generation’s final investment decision for the first BWRX-300 at its Darlington site put the cost of that single 300-megawatt unit at roughly 7.7 billion Canadian dollars, about 5.6 billion US dollars, close to 18,700 dollars per installed kilowatt before any of the standardization and repeat-build savings a European fleet is meant to eventually deliver. That is the only real-world cost figure available for the reactor design SGE, GE Vernova, Hitachi and Samsung C&T agreed this week to jointly advance across Central and Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom. The memorandum signed on the sidelines of the United Nations…

S&P Global Platts assessed the cost of PPA-backed green hydrogen production in Germany at 11.78 euros per kilogram on September 11, a figure the industry treats as a general benchmark but one that describes almost exactly the setup Shell has chosen for Refhyne II. Shell has said the plant will run on “multiple groups of renewable energy power purchase agreements”, the same procurement model underlying that price assessment, against grey hydrogen produced from natural gas, which typically costs one to two euros per kilogram in the same market. The equipment milestone announced this month, the delivery of the first 14…