Author: Arnes Biogradlija

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…

Grand View Research put the global data center energy storage market at 1.6 billion dollars in 2024. Market Research Future put the same year’s market at 7.491 billion dollars, nearly five times larger. MarketsandMarkets, whose newest report projects the market will reach 5.17 billion dollars in 2026, published a separate report on what it called the “Data Center Battery Market” just ten weeks earlier, projecting 4.82 billion dollars for the identical year. The specific dollar figure attached to this market depends far more on which research firm is asked, and which report from that firm, than on any settled measurement.…

Bolzano, Italy’s own operating data puts its hydrogen buses at 1.27 euros per kilometer against 0.55 euros for battery-electric equivalents, more than double the cost per kilometer. That gap is consistent enough across European transit agencies that hydrogen fuel cell buses made up just 1.8% to 2% of new EU bus registrations in the first quarter of 2026, against a battery-electric share of 21.8% and climbing. Vilnius’s newly completed 10 million euro hydrogen production plant, built to fuel an initial fleet of 16 buses, is moving in the opposite direction from where most comparable European cities have already gone. The…

The 58.6-megawatt battery complex Axpo and Energie Uri inaugurated in Gurtnellen this week is described as Switzerland’s largest battery storage facility to date. A single existing Swiss pumped hydro plant, Nant de Drance in Valais, has a power rating of 900 megawatts and an energy capacity of 20 gigawatt-hours, roughly 18 times the power and 200 times the storage capacity of the new project combined. Axpo’s 50-megawatt, 100-megawatt-hour battery and Energie Uri’s smaller system, reported at 8.6 megawatts when construction began last September and at 8.4 megawatts in this week’s commissioning announcement, sit on adjoining plots in Gurtnellen’s Platti industrial…

Vanadium redox flow batteries had reached only about 1.6 gigawatt-hours of cumulative global deployment by early 2026, roughly 1.5% of all stationary battery storage installed worldwide. Installed costs for utility-scale vanadium systems still run one and a half to two times higher per kilowatt-hour than lithium iron phosphate at comparable duration. Sumitomo Electric’s new 2 megawatt addition to its V40 lineup, unveiled ahead of SMART GRID EXPO in Chiba, is entering a market that remains a narrow specialty rather than a broad alternative to lithium-ion. The new V40 model pairs a 2 megawatt power conditioning system with 12 megawatt-hours of…

Stahl-Holding-Saar tendered in March 2024 for up to 50,000 tonnes a year of hydrogen produced locally in Saarland to supply its Dillingen and Saarstahl plants. No electrolyzer of that scale has been built in the region, and the large-scale projects once expected to supply it have been abandoned. The 17-kilometre pipeline section that broke ground in Wallerfangen on August 28 assumes a hydrogen source, whether domestic or imported, that remains substantially unresolved on both ends of the border it crosses. Creos Deutschland’s groundbreaking ceremony for its section of the Franco-German mosaHYc pipeline drew Saarland’s Minister-President, a federal state secretary, Luxembourg’s…

On April 1, 2026, between midnight and 12:15 a.m., Belgium’s cross-border marginal aFRR price for reducing power output averaged 132 euros per megawatt-hour, more than four times the 32 euro average price paid for increasing output in the same quarter-hour. Basic merit order logic says that should not happen, and the reason it does reveals a structural feature of how Europe’s automated balancing platform pools bids across an expanding set of national grids. PICASSO, the Platform for the International Coordination of Automated Frequency Restoration and Stable System Operation, went live in June 2022 under the EU’s Electricity Balancing Guideline, initially…