Author: Arnes Biogradlija

The energy transition has a learning problem, not just a technology problem. Shomron Jacob, AI/ML expert and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience deploying production AI systems across enterprise environments, argues that the gap between what artificial intelligence can already do for grids, renewables, and industrial decarbonization and what utilities are actually deploying represents one of the most consequential missed opportunities in climate action today. With three filed patents in AI/ML technology and firsthand experience bridging hardware and intelligent systems at scale, Jacob cuts through the hype to assess where AI is delivering measurable results, where the promises remain…

Within hours of US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, Brent crude surged toward $110 a barrel, European natural gas futures nearly doubled to around €55–58 per megawatt hour, and UK two-year gilt yields spiked 37 basis points in a single session, a move that rivalled the September 2022 turmoil triggered by the Liz Truss fiscal crisis. The speed and severity of these market reactions are not, by themselves, surprising. What is significant is that they represent Europe’s third major energy price shock in four years, and each iteration is proving more fiscally and monetarily corrosive than…

Japan imported approximately 87% of its energy in 2023, a dependency that has deepened since the Fukushima nuclear disaster and one that its domestic renewables landscape cannot structurally resolve. Against that backdrop, the establishment of the Japan–New Zealand Hydrogen Corridor on March 5, 2026, by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Obayashi Corporation, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Chiyoda Corporation represents less a commercial opportunity and more a strategic hedge against a future where green hydrogen demand outpaces any realistic domestic supply scenario. The Supply Gap That Necessitates a Pacific Corridor Japan’s energy self-sufficiency rate stood at approximately 15.3% as of fiscal year 2023,…

Record copper prices would ordinarily signal a healthy industry. Instead, the metal’s midstream sector is under structural strain, exposing fault lines that neither high prices nor by-product windfalls can paper over indefinitely. With the IEA projecting a potential supply deficit of 30% by 2035, and smelter treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs) settling at an unprecedented USD 0 per tonne in January 2026, the copper market is navigating a paradox that has direct implications for global energy security, defence supply chains, and the electrification agenda. When Smelter Fees Hit Zero, the Business Model Breaks The TC/RC benchmark is the price smelters…

Tanker transits through the Strait of Hormuz have fallen by 90 percent since the conflict began, removing approximately 20 million barrels of daily oil flow from a waterway that also carries a fifth of global LNG production. The disruption is not primarily a shipping bottleneck. It is a simultaneous assault on the physical infrastructure that turns hydrocarbons into tradeable commodities, and the damage already inflicted on refineries, liquefaction plants, and storage systems reveals how quickly the architecture of global energy supply degrades when its most concentrated node comes under sustained attack. The strike on Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura refinery, one…

Total global debt reached a record $348 trillion at the end of 2025, with nearly $29 trillion added in a single year, according to the Institute of International Finance. Into that leveraged system, the convergence of declining U.S. oil production and escalating military conflict across the Middle East is creating compounding pressure points that no single policy response is designed to absorb simultaneously. The U.S. Energy Information Administration now projects domestic crude oil production will hold near its 2025 record of approximately 13.6 million barrels per day through 2026 before declining roughly 2% to around 13.3 million barrels per day…

In January 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made a public admission that would have been politically unthinkable a decade earlier: Germany’s nuclear phase-out was a mistake, the Energiewende in its current form has become too expensive and unsustainable, and the country does not have sufficient electricity generating capacity despite more than two decades of investment and a installed renewable base that now reaches a multiple of peak power demand. The statement represents the most direct official acknowledgment to date that the strategic assumptions underpinning Germany’s energy transition require fundamental reassessment. The scale of the investment that produced this outcome demands…

Every 15 minutes, across dozens of European power markets, a financial settlement mechanism reconciles the gap between what energy participants planned to produce or consume and what actually happened. The imbalance price, applied to each Balance Responsible Party’s deviation from its scheduled position, is one of the least visible and most consequential pricing signals in the European electricity system.

A single metric is increasingly shaping investment calculus for battery energy storage systems across European power markets: the Top-Bottom spread, defined as the difference between the highest and lowest hourly electricity price within a given 24-hour period. For a one-hour duration battery operating under ideal conditions, this figure represents the theoretical ceiling on daily arbitrage revenue. What that ceiling has done since 2022, and where it appears headed, carries direct implications for storage project economics across the continent. Germany offers the clearest longitudinal case. During the 2022 energy crisis, TB1 spreads reached approximately 300 €/MWh on a rolling average basis,…

When the European Commission settled its emissions cartel case against BMW, Volkswagen, and DaimlerChrysler in 2021, the €875 million fine was calibrated against a defined window of illegal coordination: 2009 to 2014. That timeline, it now appears, may have been a negotiated convenience rather than an accurate historical record. Internal emails filed as evidence in ongoing litigation at London’s High Court of Justice, and reviewed by Follow the Money, show the same carmakers exchanging strikingly coordinated communications about diesel emissions technology as early as October 2006, the precise starting point the Commission originally suspected but ultimately said it could not…