Author: Arnes Biogradlija

The UK’s battery energy storage sector (BESS) completed just 1.5GW of capacity in 2024, a 28% decline from 2023 installations, even as the market surpassed 7GWh of operational grid-scale capacity and announced a series of high-profile project awards. This contraction coincides with a 12% fall in the capacity of newly submitted planning applications, signaling potential market maturation challenges despite continued institutional investment and technological advancement. Project scale improvements partially offset volume declines, with average project size increasing from 52MWh to 62MWh year-over-year, indicating developer preference for larger, more economically viable installations. The recent announcement wave, including Balance Power’s 49.5MW Radwell…

12,000 cycles at 20C-rate with 99.2% capacity retention—the performance metric redefining durability for grid-scale batteries. The global push toward renewable energy integration faces a critical bottleneck: intermittency management. As grids worldwide strain under the variability of solar and wind, vanadium ion batteries (VIBs) emerge with electrochemical properties tailored to solve grid-scale storage paradoxes. Unlike lithium-ion counterparts, VIBs leverage aqueous vanadium electrolytes and carbon electrodes to achieve unprecedented cycling stability and endothermic charging—a revelation for safety-critical infrastructure. The Grid Storage Trilemma: Efficiency, Durability, Safety Grid operators confront a harsh reality: today’s dominant storage technologies force tradeoffs no decarbonizing grid can afford. Lithium-ion…

Over one-third of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) scrutinizing hydrogen-based energy storage focus solely on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, neglecting critical environmental trade-offs like resource depletion, toxicity, and water use. This narrow analytical lens, revealed in a comprehensive review of 30 peer-reviewed studies, obscures the full environmental footprint of technologies central to decarbonizing grids, transport, and industry. The research underscores that environmental outcomes hinge critically on hydrogen production methods and storage scale, demanding more holistic assessments. Compressed gas storage dominates the LCA landscape, featured in the vast majority of analyzed studies, reflecting its current technological maturity. However, alternatives like metal hydrides…

ArcelorMittal declared it “impossible” to proceed with direct reduction iron and electric arc furnace plans at its Bremen and Eisenhüttenstadt facilities in June 2025, abandoning €1.3 billion in approved German government subsidies. The decision, coupled with ThyssenKrupp’s reconsideration of its €2 billion subsidized green steel project at Duisburg and suspension of hydrogen procurement tenders due to prices “significantly higher” than expected, exposes fundamental economic flaws in Germany’s hydrogen industrial strategy. The scale of subsidy abandonment represents an unprecedented failure in European industrial policy coordination. The European Commission had approved the €1.3 billion ArcelorMittal measure through the Recovery and Resilience Facility,…

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ acquisition of the 1 GWh Beehive Battery Energy Storage System represents a strategic positioning in Arizona’s limited but rapidly expanding storage market, where installed utility-scale capacity totaled just 803MW by late 2023 compared to California’s 7,302MW. The 250MW/4-hour duration system, scheduled for first-half 2026 operation, will significantly expand Arizona’s battery storage capacity while testing institutional appetite for standalone storage assets in secondary markets. The acquisition through CIP’s CI V fund, which raised over €12 billion ($13 billion), making it one of the largest renewable energy investment vehicles, signals institutional confidence in utility-scale storage economics despite persistent market…

Corporate funding for energy storage companies plummeted 41% year-over-year in the first half of 2025, dropping from $15.4 billion across 64 deals to $9.1 billion spanning 55 transactions. This dramatic contraction, according to Mercom Capital Group’s latest market analysis, represents the sector’s most significant funding decline since tracking began, driven primarily by regulatory uncertainty surrounding U.S. Investment Tax Credit modifications and Inflation Reduction Act provisions. The magnitude of this downturn becomes more pronounced when examining funding components individually. Venture capital investments decreased 29% to $1.7 billion across 36 deals, while debt and public market financing experienced an even steeper 43%…

The Dutch government is providing over €700 million in subsidies to companies that will produce sustainable hydrogen, yet critical pipeline delays are forcing major project restructuring across the sector. The latest casualty: Vattenfall and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ 1GW Zeevonk project, now halved in capacity and pushed back five years due to infrastructure shortfalls. The project’s dramatic scaling—from 1GW to 500MW hydrogen production capacity—exposes systemic vulnerabilities in the Netherlands’ ambitious hydrogen strategy. The country aims to scale up electrolyser capacity to 4GW by 2030, but critical transport infrastructure isn’t keeping pace with production ambitions. Pipeline Politics Derails Commercial Timelines The Delta…

Oman’s ambitious plan to reduce oil’s GDP contribution from 39% to 8.4% by 2040 faces a critical storage optimization challenge where pumped hydro with battery systems achieves 40% renewable penetration at $570,000 daily costs—16% below the baseline fossil fuel system—while pure battery storage reaches 105% of baseline costs at $715,000 daily. This cost differential emerges as the Sultanate targets 30% renewable electricity by 2030 through 2,300 MW of planned solar and wind capacity, yet faces grid stability constraints that limit renewable penetration to just 28.65% without adequate storage infrastructure. The economic implications become stark when examining storage technology performance across…

China accounts for over 40% of global hydrogen projects that reach a final investment decision (FID), while Europe manages only a 4% conversion rate from announced investments to committed projects, according to the Hydrogen Council. PowerChina’s operational 20MW green hydrogen facility in Tashkent marks the first manifestation of this execution gap in Central Asia, where the company’s alkaline electrolyser technology aims to replace grey hydrogen at the Maxam chemical plant, thereby reducing annual CO2 emissions by 30,000 tonnes. The Tashkent facility’s 3,150 tonnes annual hydrogen production provides a scale reference for China’s expanding international footprint, yet this capacity represents a…

Ore Energy has connected the world’s first fully operational iron-air battery system to the Dutch grid in Delft, securing $23 million in European funding as the global iron-air battery market projects growth from $3.78 billion in 2023 to $10.14 billion by 2031. This achievement positions the Netherlands-based startup as Europe’s primary challenger to Form Energy, which has raised over $1.2 billion and announced a $760 million manufacturing facility while targeting $20 per kWh costs that undercut lithium-ion batteries by 90%. Founded in 2023 as a TU Delft spin-out, Ore Energy’s system provides multi-day energy storage using only iron, water, and…