Author: Arnes Biogradlija

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…

Fervo Energy’s 396-megawatt power purchase agreement with Google, expandable to nearly 1 gigawatt by June 2030, is described as the world’s largest enhanced geothermal deal to date. It is being signed against a Cape Station project whose first and far smaller 100-megawatt phase has not yet delivered a single megawatt: the first of three GeoBlocks making up that phase is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026, with the remaining two following in early 2027. Fervo’s agreement with Google, signed August 26 and announced September 1, commits the company to supply 396 megawatts from an enhanced geothermal GeoCluster at Cape…

AVILOO’s newly published battery health rankings place the Mercedes-Benz EQA and Hyundai IONIQ 5 at the top after 150,000 kilometers and the Nissan Leaf ZE1 at the bottom, a pattern that holds up consistently across independent coverage of the report. The specific percentage figures behind that ranking do not hold up quite as consistently: the Leaf’s median state of health at that mileage appears as both 86.3% and 86.7% in different summaries of the identical dataset, a small but telling sign that the underlying report’s numbers are not being reproduced with full precision even in outlets covering the same release.…