Author: Arnes Biogradlija

Washington calls its steel and aluminum tariffs a national security necessity. Brussels calls its carbon border charge a climate safeguard. The numbers behind both mechanisms tell a less symmetrical story than either side’s talking points suggest. Since June 2025, the United States has charged a flat 50 percent duty on most primary steel and aluminum entering the country under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Since January 2026, EU importers of the same two metals have operated under the financially binding phase of the bloc’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, facing certificate charges now benchmarked at just over…

A claim that building 1 gigawatt-hour of utility-scale battery storage consumes roughly 450 gigawatt-hours of energy before it delivers a single kilowatt-hour back to the grid sounds extreme until it is checked against the literature. It isn’t fabricated. A widely cited 2016 review of lithium-ion battery life-cycle studies found cumulative energy demand ranging from 316 to 2,318 megajoules per kilowatt-hour of capacity, with 960 megajoules per kilowatt-hour as the likeliest figure, a range that converts to roughly 88 to 644 kilowatt-hours of embodied energy for every kilowatt-hour of nameplate storage. A 450 to 1 ratio sits comfortably inside that band,…

A 12.8 gigawatt-hour battery storage cluster in Inner Mongolia, anchored by a 4 gigawatt-hour single-site facility, is being framed this week as a fresh milestone in China’s grid-scale storage buildout. It isn’t one. The Envision Jingyi Chagan Hada Energy Storage Power Station connected to the grid in the final days of December 2025, and the completion of the full 12.8 GWh cluster, along with its integration into Envision’s AI dispatch platform, was already covered in depth by multiple outlets in February 2026, six months before this account presents the same facility as newly online. That timeline matters because the underlying…

A market projected to grow nearly ninefold in a decade, from $1.01 billion this year to $8.81 billion by 2036 at a 24.2% compound annual rate, would ordinarily read as an unambiguous investment signal. For hydrogen electrolyzers, the number deserves closer scrutiny than the headline allows, because it arrives at a moment when the gap between installed manufacturing capacity and actual project deployment has become the defining feature of the industry, not a footnote to it. The disconnect is starkest in China, where alkaline electrolyzer manufacturing capacity is on track to reach 43.77 gigawatts annually by mid-2026, alongside 2.7 gigawatts…

China curtailed an estimated 360 terawatt-hours of wind and solar output in the first half of 2026, up 49% on the same period a year earlier, according to the Global Energy Monitor’s review of China’s coal power in the first half of the year. India’s curtailment over the same six-month period, aggregating a CREA quarterly snapshot for January to March and a Lok Sabha reply citing Grid-India data for April to June, amounts to roughly 8.3 TWh. The ratio between the two figures is approximately 43 to one. The comparison is being made not to dismiss India’s curtailment challenge, which…

Inter RAO, one of Russia’s largest energy companies with a net profit of approximately €1.3 billion in 2025, was added to the EU’s sanctions list in the most recent Brussels package after years of deliberate exclusion. The delayed designation reflected a specific EU calculation: sanctioning grid operators carries direct risks for civilian energy supply, and Inter RAO had historically served as a transmission intermediary in Finland and the Baltic states before withdrawing in 2022. Now that it has been sanctioned, the immediate consequences fall not on Russia’s domestic power sector but on Tbilisi, where Inter RAO’s Dutch letterbox subsidiaries effectively…

Global greenhouse gas emissions in May 2026 totalled 5.0 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent, a decrease of 0.1% compared to May 2025, according to Climate TRACE’s monthly release published July 30. Year-to-date through May, total global emissions stand at 25.3 billion tonnes CO2e, unchanged from the same period in 2025. Those numbers sit against a backdrop in which global average temperatures have now exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for two consecutive years. Flat emissions in absolute terms, at a level still producing year-on-year temperature increases, are not the emissions trajectory consistent with limiting warming. They are the trajectory consistent…

Grey hydrogen produced via steam methane reforming without carbon capture generates between 9 and 11 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen produced. Combusting that hydrogen in a gas turbine to generate 1 megawatt of net electrical output produces approximately 857 kilograms of CO2 per hour, compared to 577 kilograms per hour for natural gas combustion at the same output level. A policy or infrastructure decision that switches from natural gas to grey hydrogen combustion does not reduce emissions. It increases them by roughly 50% while adding the cost and complexity of hydrogen production, storage, and delivery. This is the…

Of 4,328 solid-state battery electrolyte patent families filed globally between 1999 and 2023 and analysed in a study published in the Journal of Energy Storage in 2026, 45% cover sulfide electrolytes, making them the dominant platform by a significant margin. But the data also shows that halides and polymer-inorganic hybrids are growing faster than sulfides as a share of annual filings, and that oxides, once a primary R&D focus, are transitioning toward a complementary and hybrid role. The pattern that emerges from this analysis is not convergence on a single winning chemistry, but diversification across platforms with meaningfully different manufacturing…

TerraPower’s Natrium reactor received NRC construction approval in March 2026, the first commercial-scale next-generation nuclear plant to achieve that milestone in the United States, and began major reactor construction at Kemmerer, Wyoming in April. Within months, TerraPower’s founder Bill Gates is arranging a meeting with South Korean Prime Minister Han Seong-sook to discuss SMR cooperation, with SK Group, which invested $250 million in TerraPower in 2022, expected to help coordinate the agenda and participants. The timing is not coincidental. The Kemmerer construction permit unlocked a project that was previously a regulatory ambition, and the companies now being asked to supply…