Author: Arnes Biogradlija

CORNEX’s Xiangyang facility went from groundbreaking to first product in ten months, a genuine construction achievement the company says beat its own schedule by two months. The plant itself is rated at 70 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity, and it is only one of four Hubei province bases that together give CORNEX, a manufacturer with little name recognition outside China, 110 gigawatt-hours of capacity already operating and 500 gigawatt-hours planned in total. CORNEX broke ground on its Xiangyang lithium battery industrial park on October 28, 2025, and reached first production roughly ten months later, with the project’s first cell manufacturing workshop…

Federal safe harbor tables already assign 52% of a grid-scale battery system’s total direct cost to the cells alone, meaning a project sourcing cells from a Chinese manufacturer fails the 55% non-Chinese content threshold required for 2026 tax credit eligibility before a single other component is even counted. Until August 26, a developer could still forgo the credit and install that equipment anyway. President Trump’s bulk power system executive order removes that option entirely. The Treasury Department’s February 12 guidance on Foreign Entity of Concern rules, Notice 2026-15, gave battery storage developers a specific and narrow test. Projects beginning construction…

Brazil’s December auction for battery storage capacity is really two auctions, one requiring proof of national content and one that does not. CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, is pursuing the harder path through a partnership with Moura, a Brazilian company whose role in their existing relationship has so far been assembly and after-sales service rather than cell manufacturing, a distinction that matters for what Brazil’s localization requirement will actually deliver. The Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy’s Ordinance No. 136/2026 splits December’s Capacity Reserve Auction for battery storage into two separate processes. Auction No. 5, scheduled for December 2,…

The Worley report commissioned by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency projects capital costs for green hydrogen could fall 68% by 2035 through standardised, digitised plant design. BloombergNEF’s own electrolyser price survey found system costs have instead risen by a median of 57% since 2022, the opposite direction the roadmap assumes, and the report itself excludes electricity costs, which account for roughly 70% of the levelised cost of hydrogen. ARENA’s newly commissioned roadmap identifies 24 separate levers developers could pull to reduce green hydrogen project costs, from modular, standardised equipment packages to AI-assisted staffing, and estimates that digitised construction and standardisation…

Quaise Energy has raised 280 million dollars total to prove a drilling technology that, as of its most recent disclosed test results, has not yet reached the depth Fervo Energy achieved years ago with conventional rotary drilling at an enhanced geothermal plant already selling power in Nevada. The gap between Quaise’s demonstrated progress and the more than 5 kilometers Project Obsidian ultimately requires is the more relevant number for judging what the new financing actually buys. Quaise Energy closed the final tranche of a Series B round in late August, bringing in 180 million dollars and lifting the company’s cumulative…

Solar PV and battery manufacturing capacity already exceeded 2024 global demand by more than double and more than triple respectively, according to the International Energy Agency’s Energy Technology Perspectives 2026. That overcapacity, not a straightforward growth story, is the more useful lens for reading the record 1.1 trillion dollar market value the same report attributes to key energy technologies in 2025. The IEA’s ETP-2026 commentary puts the combined 2025 market value of solar PV, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and electrolysers at more than 1.1 trillion dollars, following average annual growth of around 20% over the past decade. That…

Ballard Power Systems generated 20.6 million dollars in revenue in the second quarter of 2026. The company just acquired GeoPura, at an enterprise value of roughly 301.1 million pounds, close to 400 million dollars, and expects about 38 million pounds of revenue this year on its own, a figure that would make the newly acquired fuel cell business larger than Ballard’s historical core. Ballard’s completed purchase of GeoPura, structured as 275 million pounds of upfront consideration funded through 82.5 million pounds of cash and 49.4 million newly issued Ballard shares, plus up to 27.5 million pounds in earnout payments, values…

Climate TRACE puts first-half 2026 global greenhouse gas emissions at 29.7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, just 0.2% above the same period in 2025. The United Nations Environment Programme’s own accounting says emissions need to fall by 55% from 2019 levels by 2035 to stay on a 1.5 degree pathway. A war that shut down roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade for months barely moved the number. Climate TRACE’s satellite and sensor-based tracking, an independent measurement effort separate from the self-reported national inventories most governments rely on, found global emissions rose 56.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent…

Seventy one percent of Americans oppose data center construction in their local area, according to Gallup’s March 2026 survey, a higher opposition rate than Americans express toward nuclear plants. Only 16% of that opposition traces to pollution, the category battery energy storage systems most directly address. Roughly half cites water and energy consumption, a set of concerns battery storage does not change. Cummins’ newly announced battery energy storage deployment, described as the company’s largest to date, is being positioned in industry coverage as more than a technical upgrade to grid interconnection performance. It is being framed as a partial answer…

China accounts for 80% of global lithium-ion battery supply chain production capacity and 85% of solar production capacity, according to the International Energy Agency. The executive order President Trump signed on August 26 restricting foreign-made bulk-power grid equipment does not name China, but the equipment categories it covers, batteries, transformers, inverters and generators, are precisely the ones where that concentration is highest, and the order arrives at a moment when the United States is already short of the equipment it is proposing to restrict. President Trump’s order, issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act,…