Author: Arnes Biogradlija

India’s Central Electricity Authority has set a target of 27 GW of pumped storage capacity by 2031-32, part of a broader 74 GW storage requirement across technologies needed to integrate renewable energy at scale. A national roadmap published in early 2026 extends that ambition further, targeting 100 GW of pumped hydro capacity by 2035-36, with cumulative investment projections of Rs 5 to 6 lakh crore. Against that backdrop, the eighth amendment issued by MP Power Management Company Limited on May 20, 2026, to its tender for 500 MW of pumped storage procurement, is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a…

The Lawson well in central Saskatchewan returned hydrogen concentrations of up to 286,000 parts per million when results were confirmed in January 2026, establishing Canada’s first verified subsurface natural hydrogen system through drilling validated by three independent laboratories. That single data point placed MAX Power Mining Corp. among a small and growing cohort of companies globally that have moved natural hydrogen from theoretical resource to confirmed subsurface occurrence. What happens next is considerably more uncertain, and the company’s latest drilling campaign is the mechanism through which that uncertainty either narrows or expands. MAX Power’s announcement on May 22, 2026, details…

Since the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz in late February 2026, close to 20% of global LNG supply has been removed from the market, triggering sharp price increases across key importing regions and reversing a trend of market rebalancing that had characterized the 2025/26 heating season. European TTF benchmark futures reached $14.80 per million British thermal units for the week ending April 24, 35% above pre-closure levels. EU gas storage levels have fallen below 30%, nearly 20 percentage points down from a year earlier, underscoring Europe’s vulnerability to further supply shocks. Against that backdrop, the decision by Türkiye,…

Germany recorded 573 hours of negative day-ahead electricity prices in 2025, up from 459 hours in 2024 and 301 in 2023. Each year sets a new record, and the trajectory shows no signs of reversing. Solar PV accounted for approximately 17% of Germany’s total electricity generation in 2025, up from 14% the previous year, and the EU as a whole is expected to reach 414 GW of installed solar capacity by year-end 2025. The structural consequence of this buildout is now visible not just in isolated price spikes but in the distributional shape of wholesale electricity prices, which has changed…

The economics of clean hydrogen have long been trapped in an uncomfortable paradox. Green hydrogen, produced through electrolysis powered by renewables, costs between €4 and €12 per kilogram to produce. Grey hydrogen, derived from natural gas without carbon capture, sits at €1 to €2 per kilogram. The gap between what the planet needs and what the market will bear has defined the hydrogen sector’s central challenge for years. Against that backdrop, Mantle8, the Grenoble-based natural hydrogen exploration company, is making a specific and audacious claim: that geological hydrogen can be extracted at production costs as low as €0.80 per kilogram.…

The moment when wind and solar overtook fossil fuels as the dominant source of electricity in the European Union was not supposed to arrive this soon. Yet wind and solar generated a record 30% of EU power in 2025, exceeding fossil fuels at 29%. That crossover is more than symbolic arithmetic. It fundamentally changes the calculus of electrification, transforming it from a long-run bet into the most rational near-term economic and strategic move available to governments, investors, and industries across the continent. The problem is that this inflection point arrives without a coherent operational framework for what to electrify first,…

The standard cost architecture of green hydrogen production is built around two capital-intensive components: a photovoltaic array to convert sunlight into electricity, and an electrolyser to convert that electricity into hydrogen through water splitting. Each component has its own capital cost, efficiency loss, maintenance requirement, and infrastructure dependency. The electricity generated by the PV array must be conditioned, managed, and delivered to the electrolyser at the correct voltage and current profile. The electrolyser requires deionised water, thermal management, membrane maintenance, and in most configurations a grid connection or battery buffer to handle the variability of solar input. The combined system…

The EU’s Connecting Europe Facility for Energy carries a total grant budget of €5.88 billion for the period 2021 to 2027, making it the primary public financing instrument for cross-border energy infrastructure across the bloc. Against that overall envelope, the €600 million indicative budget attached to the newly launched call for proposals represents a significant but not outsized allocation, reflecting both the selectivity of the Projects of Common Interest and Projects of Mutual Interest framework and the expectation that multiple tranches of funding will follow as the second PCI and PMI list matures. Organised by the Climate, Infrastructure and Environment…

Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a massive cargo ship pitches in a deep-water swell. The ambient temperature on the steel deck is a blistering forty degrees Celsius. Stacked at the bottom of a six-high column of shipping containers, bearing the crushing downward force of hundreds of thousands of kilograms of dead weight, sits a single forty-foot ISO container. To the untrained eye, it is just another metal box moving global freight. But inside the two-foot gap between its outer steel shell and its inner pressure vessel, a silent and relentless war is being waged against the laws…

Before the Hormuz closure, approximately 20 million barrels of oil transited the strait every day. By the time Fatih Birol sat down with Michael Liebreich at the IEA’s Paris offices on 19 March, that figure had dropped to roughly four million. The 16-million-barrel daily shortfall represents not merely a supply disruption but, in Birol’s characterisation, the mother of all energy crises, one that he explicitly argues is larger in scale than the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks that reshaped global energy markets for the following five decades. The IEA had one week earlier taken the extraordinary step of releasing 400…