Author: Arnes Biogradlija

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…

The DIANLL battery-swap system Gotion High-Tech and C&C Trucks unveiled at IAA Transportation this week is framed around delivering “the first customer vehicle for the Europe-Africa transport corridor,” language that suggests a continental logistics network. According to the joint venture’s own disclosure earlier this year, the actual project is a pilot linking Morocco and France with an initial phase of 100 electric trucks. That joint venture pairs Gotion, Moroccan partner Green Power Morocco, identified in this week’s ceremony only by its initials GPM, and Chery Heavy Trucks to oversee fleet operations, charging and battery-swap infrastructure, and digital fleet management along…

The Army published its request for proposals for this exact solicitation on June 15, gave companies two weeks to respond, and announced conditional awards across six installations on September 18, a three-month turnaround for a program that lists nuclear electric generation among its possible technologies. No capacity figures, investment amounts, binding construction timelines or final technology selections have been disclosed for any of the six sites. The conditional awards, issued under the second tranche of the Army’s Strategic Capital Initiative, went to Ameresco for Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, to Indelible-Bloom for Fort Detrick…

Europe’s largest industrial carbon capture facility was inaugurated in Sluiskil, the Netherlands, on September 7, with the prime ministers of Norway and the Netherlands and the EU’s climate commissioner in attendance. Yara’s own CEO, Svein Tore Holsether, offered a more candid assessment than the ceremony’s framing: the project is, for now, primarily a way to avoid costs under the EU Emissions Trading System, and whether it becomes commercially viable at all depends on where carbon prices and demand for low-carbon ammonia land in the years ahead. The facility can capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tons of CO2 annually from…

Smurfit WestRock’s much-cited renewable energy deal with PepsiCo, Givaudan, and Statkraft is not, strictly speaking, Smurfit WestRock’s deal. PepsiCo is the lead buyer that aggregated demand from Givaudan and Smurfit WestRock as supplier-partners, and the wind asset underpinning the 10-year virtual power purchase agreement is an existing Spanish project undergoing repowering, not new generation capacity built from scratch. Both details matter for judging how much additional clean power the arrangement actually brings onto the grid, a question that sits underneath most of this year’s manufacturer energy announcements. The urgency behind these deals traces to a specific, verifiable shift in US…

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…