Author: Arnes Biogradlija

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Dominance Financing finalized a $3.26 billion loan to AEP Texas on July 8, 2026, targeting the physical bottlenecks constraining massive load additions. This capital injection funds approximately 100 transmission projects encompassing roughly 2,800 miles of rebuilding, reconductoring, and new construction. The federal government explicitly cited artificial intelligence data centers, advanced manufacturing, and Permian Basin operations as the primary beneficiaries of this modernized infrastructure. This transaction represents the third utility financing executed under the EDF program, succeeding a $1.6 billion commitment to AEP Transmission in late 2025 and $26.54 billion deployed to Southern…

Spain registered 34 new battery energy storage projects totaling 1.76 GW in the second quarter of 2026. This marks a 112 percent year-on-year increase in the number of project filings and a 140 percent expansion in total capacity compared to the 733 MW proposed across 16 projects during the same period last year. The accelerated deployment pipeline reflects a market confronting acute solar cannibalization, where an excess of daytime generation is forcing renewable asset owners to integrate storage solutions to maintain project viability. Grid saturation and extreme price volatility act as the primary catalysts for this shift. During the first…

Three sectors, steel, organic chemicals, and cement, account for roughly a quarter of all emissions covered by the EU Emissions Trading System and currently source 75% of their energy and feedstocks from imports, predominantly fossil fuels. A study published on 14 July 2026 by Agora Industry, modelled jointly with the Wuppertal Institute and University of Kassel, sets out a pathway under which that import dependence falls to 25% by 2050 through a combination of electrification, green hydrogen, sustainable biomass, and carbon capture with storage. The cost of pursuing this trajectory, the study finds, amounts to less than one percent of…

Renewable electricity generation grew by 9.8% in 2024, its fastest annual rate in recent years and more than seven times the 1.4% increase posted by non-renewable sources over the same period. Global renewable power capacity reached 5,149 GW by the end of 2025, after the addition of 692 GW, representing a 15.5% annual increase. The headline figures are strong. What they obscure is the scale of what still needs to happen. Renewables accounted for 31.7% of global electricity generation in 2024, totalling 9,836 terawatt hours. The political architecture around that number is rapidly expanding. At the Bonn Climate Change Conference…

Germany recorded 459 negative-price hours in 2024 and 573 in 2025, setting new records each time. Through the first half of 2026, the pattern has shifted in a way that complicates straightforward narratives about the direction of price volatility: the frequency of negative hours has declined relative to 2025, but the depth of those negative prices has increased, and the occurrence of extremely high prices, most dramatically during the late-June heatwave, has grown. The result is a day-ahead market with wider daily spreads than at any point in the previous three years, driven by two opposing forces that are both…

The LDES Council estimates that up to 8 terawatts of long-duration energy storage capacity will be needed globally by 2040, potentially unlocking $540 billion in annual grid savings. Against that projection, the technology pool capable of delivering economically viable storage beyond four hours remains narrow and largely unproven at commercial scale. The announcement by Victoria’s State Electricity Commission that it will deploy a 20 MW, 200 MWh compressed CO2 battery at the site of the decommissioned Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley is therefore more than a single infrastructure commitment. It is the first commercial deployment of this technology…

Tesla reported a federal tax bill of zero dollars for 2025, continuing a pattern in which the company has owed the US government almost nothing for all but one of the past 20 years, despite reporting total US revenues of $264 billion over that period. The conventional exclamation points to loss carryforwards and green energy tax incentives. What a Reuters review of corporate filings across 14 countries made visible in April 2026 is a second mechanism: Tesla units in the Netherlands and Singapore recorded approximately $18 billion in profits between 2023 and early 2025, profits that were not taxed in…

Conventional enhanced geothermal systems access rock at temperatures around 150 to 200 degrees Celsius. Quaise Energy is targeting 300 to 500 degrees Celsius, temperatures that exist at depths beyond what standard drill bits can reach economically. The Houston-based company has raised $134 million in a first close of its Series B, led by Prelude Ventures with strategic investment from JERA and Idemitsu, two of Japan’s largest energy companies, bringing its total capital raised to $230 million. The money funds Project Obsidian, a 250-megawatt superhot geothermal power plant being built on federal leases in Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest near the Newberry…

Global sodium-ion battery shipments reached 9 GWh in 2025, up 150% year over year, almost entirely driven by Chinese manufacturers operating at a scale that Western producers have yet to match. In that context, Peak Energy has announced a 183,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Sacramento, California, targeting 4 GWh of annual sodium-ion battery system production and citing more than 6 GWh of customer commitments from Jupiter Power, Energy Vault, and RWE Americas. The facility, representing up to $71 million in capital investment and supported by a $10.5 million CalCompetes tax credit awarded in May 2026, is scheduled to begin production and…

Heating and cooling buildings account for over a quarter of UK CO2 emissions, and the country has deployed almost none of the shallow geothermal energy that could displace fossil fuels in that sector at scale. The gap is not primarily technical; it is a knowledge gap. Developers, planners, and regulators lack the subsurface data needed to assess geothermal viability, design aquifer thermal energy storage systems with confidence, or satisfy environmental requirements about interference between adjacent schemes. The British Geological Survey’s release of 17 borehole data packs and a drilling report from the Cheshire Observatory, the final major deliverable from the…