Author: Arnes Biogradlija

In the four weeks following Europe’s record June heatwave, grain production forecasts for the EU and UK were revised down by almost nine million tonnes, with the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit valuing the lost production at approximately €2.1 billion at current farm-gate prices for wheat, barley, maize, and other grains. That figure represents roughly 5% of the 2025 production value estimate across the affected crops, concentrated in the single growing period when extreme heat inflicted the most damage. France and Hungary absorbed the largest losses. France’s forecast was cut by 4.1 million tonnes, valued at around €891 million, with…

In April 2026, CATL signed a 60 GWh sodium-ion supply agreement with integrator HyperStrong, the largest sodium order ever placed, and declared the chemistry mainstream-ready. The 2 GWh agreement with Solarpro for deployment across Central and Eastern Europe, announced this week using CATL’s Tener Sodium platform, is smaller in absolute volume but more significant in geographic reach: it represents the first large-scale sodium-ion battery energy storage project in a region where the technology’s core performance advantage, cold-weather retention, is directly relevant to grid operating conditions. CATL’s CTO of its domestic energy storage solutions division stated that the company’s goal is…

The proposed €133.4 million subsidy to Repsol for the Atlas electrolyser project at its A Coruña refinery complex is structured around a production premium of €2.20 per kilogram of renewable hydrogen, more than four times the premium that winning projects secured in both the first and second European Hydrogen Bank auctions, where clearing prices ranged between €0.20 and €0.60 per kilogram for the general project category. That gap raises a specific question: whether the Spanish national funding framework, channelled through IDAE and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, is pricing industrial green hydrogen support at levels that reflect a fundamentally different…

In 2022, 14.4 million tonnes of electrical and electronic equipment were placed on the EU market, while Member States collected only 5 million tonnes of e-waste, equivalent to 11.2 kilograms per person. The gap between what enters the market and what is recovered for recycling represents one of the most tangible expressions of Europe’s critical materials supply problem: an enormous volume of copper, rare earths, precious metals, and other strategic inputs is leaving the productive economy through inadequate collection and processing, even as the clean energy transition drives demand for exactly those materials sharply higher. Copper illustrates the scale of…

The UK government’s decision to extend the operational life of Sizewell B by 20 years from 2035, contracting its 1.2 GW output under a contract for difference at £70.50 per MWh in 2025 prices, provides the clearest public benchmark yet for what nuclear lifetime extension actually costs in the British market. The figure is simultaneously useful as a policy instrument, instructive as a market reference point, and uncomfortable for an industry that has long suggested existing plants can continue running at marginal cost. Indexed to inflation and applicable to production beginning several years hence, the price lands very close to…

Contracted offers in the UK electricity demand connection queue rose from 41 GW in November 2024 to 125 GW by June 2025, against Great Britain’s peak electricity demand of 45 GW on 11 February 2026. Approximately 50 GW of that queue is attributable to data centre projects, making them the single largest driver of the connection backlog. Some developers are being offered connection dates in 2037 and beyond. In that context, a study published in Energy and Climate Change by researchers from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business proposes reframing how data centres are assessed and connected, arguing that…

Curtailment in Portugal rose to 182 GWh in 2024 and could triple by 2027 if storage deployment lags the pace of solar commissioning. Against that trajectory, the Portuguese government published its National Energy Storage Strategy on 29 June 2026, setting targets of 3.9 GW of pumped storage by 2030 and 5.26 GW by 2040, starting from a current base of approximately 3.5 GW. The strategy covers battery storage alongside pumped hydro and reflects an explicit government acknowledgment that record levels of renewable curtailment and negative electricity pricing, driven by the rapid build-out of wind and solar without matching investment in…

Since 2013, EU Member States have generated approximately €176 billion in ETS auction revenues, rising from €5 billion in 2017 to nearly €30 billion at the 2022 peak. Over the same period, the explicit allocation to industry decarbonisation from those revenues amounted to around €1.7 billion, less than 1% of the total collected. The contrast with what the power sector, buildings, and transport received is stark, and it sits at the centre of a detailed policy brief published by Agora Energiewende in July 2026 that frames the upcoming EU ETS review as the most consequential carbon market reform since the…

A single year of fossil fuel price disruption comparable to the recent Strait of Hormuz closure would cost Europe’s steel, cement, and organic chemical sectors more than €17 billion in additional expenses relative to a decarbonised production pathway. That figure, drawn from joint modelling by Agora Industry with the Wuppertal Institute and University of Kassel, provides the most concrete quantification yet of what sustained fossil dependence costs European heavy industry in shock scenarios that are no longer hypothetical. The same modelling finds that the transition to domestic renewable electricity, hydrogen, and sustainable biomass would cost less than one percent of…

As battery systems become more complex, validation is increasingly shifting from hardware-intensive testing toward simulation-based workflows that improve repeatability, reduce costs, and accelerate software verification. Battery management systems (BMS), which are central to cell monitoring, safety, and performance optimization, require extensive validation across thousands of operating and fault conditions before reaching production. Testing these scenarios using physical battery packs is often expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to reproduce consistently. This has elevated demand for dedicated BMS validation platforms capable of accurately emulating battery behavior at the cell level while integrating seamlessly into automated development environments. SMART TESTSOLUTIONS has introduced a modular…