Author: Arnes Biogradlija

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…

Norway sells electric vehicles to 96% of new car buyers. Its EV fleet now represents roughly 35% of all cars on the road. And yet, because internal combustion vehicles waste so much of the fuel they consume, the electricity used by those EVs accounts for only 14% of the Final Energy used by Norwegian road transport. If the country that has done more than any other to electrify its passenger car fleet cannot get halfway to the COP31 target using the proposed metric, the metric itself deserves serious scrutiny. That is the core problem with the “35 by 35” announcement…

With electricity reaching just 32.5% of its population as of 2023 and rural access barely above 9%, Liberia sits at one of the sharpest ends of sub-Saharan Africa’s energy poverty problem. The structural cause is well established: installed generation capacity stood at 126 MW in 2024, composed of 88 MW at Mount Coffee and 38 MW at heavy fuel oil plants, with hydropower output declining sharply during the dry season and contributing to recurring load shedding. A $125 million World Bank financing package signed on June 7, 2026, attempts to address several of these deficits at once, combining renewable energy…

At 40 gigawatts of offshore wind, the Netherlands’ electricity grid infrastructure will require a cumulative investment of €246 billion between 2026 and 2040, a figure that carries a margin of uncertainty wide enough to swallow entire national budgets. The lower bound of that estimate is €172 billion; the upper bound is €320 billion. These are not projections from advocacy groups. They are drawn from the FIEN2026 report produced by PwC on behalf of Netbeheer Nederland and published as an annex to the Dutch government’s Voorjaarsnota 2026, the spring budget update submitted to the Tweede Kamer on 27 March 2026. The…