Browsing: smart grid

Global energy systems are entering a period of historic turbulence, as governments face overlapping crises across oil, gas, minerals, and electricity supply chains.

American electricity prices surged 34% from 2020 to August 2025, reaching $14.87 per kilowatt-hour from $10.96—the fastest five-year increase in…

Germany’s single electricity price zone, long considered a cornerstone of its liberalized power market, is now at the center of a debate about efficiency, grid stability, and fairness. As renewable generation expands rapidly in the north while industrial demand remains concentrated in the south, maintaining a uniform national price has led to mounting redispatch costs.

Global fusion energy companies have deployed $543 million in supply chain investments targeting commercial grid deployment by the mid-2030s, yet specialized component manufacturing constraints threaten timelines as 90% of suppliers report demand surges exceeding current production capacity.

European electricity networks registered over 8,600 instances of voltage limit breaches in 2024, representing a more than twentyfold increase from 2015 levels as solar deployment accelerates beyond grid absorption capacity.

As America’s power grid strains under the dual challenge of integrating intermittent renewables and serving surging demand from data centers, operators are confronting a volatile new reality. The system’s increasing complexity is testing both technical resilience and market design, with implications rippling across the energy storage sector.

As global electricity systems grow increasingly dependent on renewable energy, precision in managing energy storage assets has become a decisive factor in grid stability and project profitability. Wärtsilä’s new GEMS Pulse platform directly addresses this operational challenge by transforming raw battery data into actionable intelligence—aiming to unlock the full financial and technical potential of energy storage systems.

Despite record renewable capacity additions of 582 GW in 2024, the world must nearly double its annual deployment rate to 1,122 GW—a 93% increase—to meet the COP28 target of tripling renewable capacity to 11.2 TW by 2030.

By 2030, data centres are projected to consume 6% of Australia’s grid-supplied electricity — a share larger than that of the entire healthcare and social assistance sector.

Global renewable energy capacity is projected to expand by 4,600 GW by 2030, roughly equivalent to the combined installed capacity of China, the European Union, and Japan, according to the IEA’s Renewables 2025 report.