Author: Arnes Biogradlija

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.…

The Trump administration’s October 2025 cancellation of ARCHES, California’s federal hydrogen hub agreement, is routinely described as the loss of 1.2 billion dollars. Court filings show only about 30 million dollars of that commitment had actually been disbursed before the termination. The distinction does not make the cancellation less damaging to a program built on the assumption that the remaining funding would eventually arrive, but it clarifies how much of California’s hydrogen buildout was already running on a fraction of its promised capital before the money was pulled entirely. ARCHES, the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, was structured…

Europe’s public hydrogen refueling station count barely moved between 2023 and May 2026, rising from 178 to 179 sites, even as the underlying network was almost entirely rebuilt. Stations built for passenger cars at 700 bar collapsed from 108 to 32 over the same period, while dual-pressure sites designed for trucks rose from 50 to 129. The coalition of Daimler Truck, Volvo, Toyota, Bosch, Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, Teal Mobility and MB Energy, set to detail its refueling network plans in Hanover on September 15, is proposing to build on top of a market that has already gone through one expensive…

Equinor’s Citrus Flatts Energy Center enters Texas’s grid on a fully merchant basis, with no long-term utility contract backing its revenue. ERCOT battery storage’s monthly revenue index fell from 46,264 dollars per megawatt per year in January 2026 to just 15,306 dollars in February, a two-thirds drop in a single month, part of a broader collapse that has already cut average ancillary service earnings by roughly 80% since the market’s earlier boom years. East Point Energy, Equinor’s wholly owned US battery storage subsidiary, brought the 100 megawatt, 200 megawatt-hour Citrus Flatts Energy Center in Harlingen online as its largest US…