Author: Arnes Biogradlija

The AI Energy Management Alliance that Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI launched this week presents itself as a first-of-its-kind coalition. It revives, under a new name, the Advanced Energy Management Alliance, an organization founded in 2014 to promote demand response and distributed energy resources that went largely dormant as that industry matured and consolidated. The underlying idea, that flexible loads deserve different grid treatment than fixed ones, is not new. What is new is the scale of the load asking for it. Nvidia’s own commercial stake in that request is direct and easy to trace. Texas grid operators face 230…

Factorial’s “first commercial order for passenger vehicles,” cited in this week’s Mitsui Kinzoku partnership announcement as evidence of Solstice moving toward broad deployment, came in January from Karma Automotive, a niche manufacturer building its ultra-luxury Kaveya super-coupe in low volumes. That is a genuine commercial milestone for solid-state, but a materially different one than the mass-market automotive adoption the announcement’s framing implies. Mitsui Kinzoku’s collaboration with Factorial pairs a company with real, longstanding materials credentials, an estimated 90% share of the global semiconductor ultra-thin copper foil market and a sulfide solid electrolyte platform, A-SOLiD, first unveiled in 2016, with a…

BYD’s plan to install a solid-state battery in a test vehicle next year lands it on the same 2027 pilot-production timeline that CATL, Geely, SAIC-Qingtao and Samsung SDI have each separately confirmed over the past two months. Rather than a leadership claim, Stella Li’s Valencia announcement is confirmation that essentially the entire top tier of global battery manufacturing has converged on an identical near-term milestone, with genuinely different specifications behind that shared date. FinDreams, BYD’s battery subsidiary, has built 20 amp-hour and 60 amp-hour solid-state prototype cells using lithium phosphorus sulfur chlorine electrolyte chemistry, targeting energy density approaching 400 watt-hours…

Globally, natural hydrogen exploration has produced exactly one commercially operating well, a small site at Bourakébougou in Mali that generates electricity for a single village. That is the entire proven commercial track record behind a category more than 100 companies now describe themselves as pursuing, and it is the backdrop against which Element One Hydrogen & Critical Minerals Corp, a Canadian Securities Exchange company with a market capitalization in the single-digit millions of dollars, has signed a non-binding letter of intent with France’s Mantle8 to explore for natural hydrogen across British Columbia and Alberta. Element One trades under the ticker…

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…