Author: Arnes Biogradlija

EU electricity prices for energy-intensive industries averaged more than twice US levels and nearly 50% above those in China in 2025, sustained from the prior year, while household electricity prices in many countries have risen faster than incomes and inflation since 2019. The political consequences are accumulating. Governments across Europe spent a decade positioning the shift to clean energy as an affordability solution and are now explaining why consumers who have absorbed that transition face some of the highest retail power bills in the developed world. The explanation, however accurate, is not landing. The more important question is whether the…

Germany’s grid-scale battery storage capacity stood at over 1.5 GW across 207 commissioned projects as of June 2025 and was projected to reach 2.5 GW by year’s end. Grid connection applications submitted to German operators represent a further pipeline exceeding 200 GW of proposed BESS capacity. Against that backdrop, the aFRR capacity market, which has become Germany’s largest balancing market by TSO expenditure, is absorbing a structural shift in its supplier base while simultaneously being reshaped by the solar generation patterns it was not originally designed around. Data covering January 2025 through May 2026 makes the combined effect legible in…

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into InnoEnergy, the EU-backed clean technology investor that has received €760 million in public funds since 2010 through the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. The probe, triggered by a complaint filed in March by Swedish entrepreneur Lars Wallden, examines allegations of financial irregularities and VAT fraud at the Netherlands-based company and its Spanish subsidiary. The investigation arrives at a moment of compounding institutional pressure for InnoEnergy, which has faced a series of damaging findings about the credibility of its reported impact metrics and its executive compensation practices. InnoEnergy operates as…

The TERRE replacement reserve platform provided financial benefits averaging €23 million per month across participating countries in 2023, rising to €38 million per month in 2024, before the platform was phased out entirely on 1 January 2026 as the European balancing architecture consolidated around PICASSO and MARI. That financial trajectory, and the subsequent withdrawal of a platform delivering measurable value, illustrates the tension at the heart of European balancing market integration: the efficiency gains from cross-border exchange are documented and growing, while the structural fragmentation between national markets persists and resists harmonisation at nearly every layer. European grid balancing operates…

Data centre electricity consumption reached 415 terawatt-hours globally in 2024, roughly 1.5% of total global electricity use, and the IEA projects that figure will more than double to 945 TWh by 2030. AI-focused servers drove much of the 17% surge in data centre electricity demand recorded in 2025 alone. The energy cost of the AI build-out is real and measurable. Whether it is the right lens through which to evaluate AI’s relationship with the energy transition is a separate and more consequential question. The dominant concern in policy and media circles frames AI as a net liability for decarbonisation, primarily…

South Korea allocated 721.8 billion won for hydrogen vehicle distribution in 2025, covering 11,000 passenger cars, 2,000 buses, and a small number of commercial vehicles. Against that national backdrop, North Chungcheong Province has announced a 34.5 billion won investment for the second half of 2026 to place 239 hydrogen vehicles into service across the region, with subsidy levels ranging from 33.5 million won per passenger car to 450 million won per hydrogen cargo truck. The investment reflects the structure of South Korea’s hydrogen mobility strategy: cascading public expenditure from the national to the provincial level, underpinned by a mix of…

The global vanadium redox flow battery market was valued at $495 million in 2025 and is projected to surpass $3 billion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 20%. Against that backdrop, Invinity Energy Systems has announced the sale of a 32 MWh vanadium flow battery system to Pacific Steel Group for the Mojave Micro Mill project in Kern County, California, a deployment described as the largest vanadium flow battery installation in North America to date once delivered. The project pairs the storage system with a 40 MWp photovoltaic array to supply solar power to an electric…

The electrical steel market for electric vehicles was valued at approximately $5 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 15% through 2033, reaching an estimated $15 billion. That trajectory reflects a single underlying pressure: as EV drivetrains push toward higher rotational speeds to extract more power from smaller motor packages, the magnetic core losses in conventional electrical steel become an increasingly significant constraint on system efficiency. POSCO’s decision to lead a ten-organisation research consortium targeting 6.5% silicon electrical steel for EV drive motors, announced on June 11, addresses that constraint directly, though the…

KLM’s flight from Amsterdam to Hamburg this week carried passengers on a 5% blend of synthetic kerosene, the first e-SAF passenger flight to Germany. The fuel, produced by INERATEC using renewable electricity, CO2, and water, was blended by MB Energy and loaded at Schiphol before departure. The operation was technically routine. The volume involved was not 200 litres of e-SAF, down from the 500 litres used when KLM operated the world’s first commercial e-SAF passenger flight on the Amsterdam to Madrid route in 2021. That the blend volume has shrunk over four years of effort is the most honest data…

China’s total capacity of renewable-based hydrogen production projects, both completed and under construction, exceeded one million tons per year as of the end of March 2026, with more than 250,000 tons per year already operational, more than double the capacity anticipated by the end of 2024. That acceleration provides the national context for a project that has just reached operational readiness in Jiangsu province, one designed not simply to add to that capacity but to test whether solar generation, green hydrogen production, and electrochemical storage can be engineered into a single self-stabilising system. The Rudong offshore photovoltaic project, built with…