Author: Arnes Biogradlija

By late August 2025, fossil fuel and mining companies had already filed 22 investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) claims at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). This figure surpasses the 21 claims lodged in 2024, with these sectors now representing nearly half—47 percent—of ICSID’s total caseload. The acceleration highlights how corporations are increasingly leveraging arbitration mechanisms to contest climate-related policies that threaten asset values, particularly fossil fuel phase-out laws. This surge comes as international courts, including the International Court of Justice, affirm states’ legal obligations to mitigate climate change. Yet ISDS tribunals, operating under bilateral and…

In 2022, Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors, marking the end of a decades-long policy shift that cost an estimated €500 billion while increasing emissions and electricity costs. Across the border, France—historically reliant on nuclear for more than 70% of its electricity—struggles with aging infrastructure but still enjoys one of Europe’s lowest-carbon grids. For Bruno Comby, founder of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, these diverging trajectories illustrate a paradox: the green movement’s rejection of its most scalable low-carbon tool. WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE Comby argues that nuclear power’s poor public image is less about technical realities than about political…

The collapse of a flagship green hydrogen project in Gladstone has triggered a A$66 million legal battle between the Queensland government and Fortescue Metals Group, exposing the high-stakes risks of public subsidies for nascent green technologies. This litigation, spearheaded by the state’s newly elected coalition government, seeks to recoup the entire sum granted to Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue just two years prior, underscoring a mounting tension between ambitious decarbonization goals and fiduciary responsibility. In a parliamentary address, Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie confirmed the state had issued a notice to comply and a default notice to Fortescue, demanding full reimbursement of the…

China’s Clean Energy Transition: A Complex Calculus Between Growth, Security, and Decarbonization Chinese carbon emissions have shown a rare contraction in fuel combustion during early 2024, according to official data and academic analyses—a sign of the tangible impact of China’s rapid deployment of clean technologies. Kevin Tu, Director of Agora Energy China, highlights that emissions growth slowed to just 0.7% year-over-year, compared with near double-digit increases in previous decades, signaling that China may be entering a plateau phase in its emissions trajectory. WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW The driving forces behind this shift extend beyond regulatory frameworks. Tu underscores the comparative…

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%…