Saturday, 13 June 2026

Just EUR 300 million of the EUR 1.2 billion offered in the European Hydrogen Bank's second auction has reached signed projects. Hydrogen associations from more than a dozen countries want Brussels to fix the allocation process before the next round runs.

Spain illustrates the drop-off. Seven of the country's winning bidders went to contract on three, while the other four walked away from their awards.

Bidder appetite, however, has not cooled. The third auction round drew offers worth about six times the budget on the table.

Member states are running parallel pots through the Auction-as-a-Service channel, which lets national budgets piggyback on the Bank's tender machinery. Spain has earmarked EUR 377 million for electrolyser projects on that track.

The coordinated push to Brussels came from national associations in Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, Finland, Norway, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, who told the European Commission that allocation and implementation rules need an overhaul. In the same intervention, they asked Brussels to keep the Bank running past the scheduled third tender and to lock in at least three more rounds after it.

On a separate track, the Clean Hydrogen Partnership opened its second Project Development Assistance call, which will pick as many as 13 projects for hands-on help with financial structuring, permitting and consortium building.

The associations frame the problem in operational terms: oversubscribed auctions are not producing operational electrolysers. Without changes to how grants are awarded and policed, they argue, repeat rounds will keep clearing on paper while plants stay unbuilt.

At SNEC 2026 in Shanghai, Canadian Solar took the wraps off SolBank 4.0, an LFP utility-scale battery unit rated at 6.25 MWh and cooled by liquid.

The product packs that 6.25 MWh of DC capacity into a standardized 20-foot enclosure, runs on a 1,500 V DC architecture, and is configurable for 2-hour, 4-hour and 8-hour duty cycles. According to the manufacturer, cell energy density rises 25% versus the prior generation, and station-level density gains exceed 40%. Tighter integration, the company added, should trim balance-of-system costs by roughly 20%.

During the Shanghai show, TÜV Rheinland handed Canadian Solar a UL9540A thermal runaway safety assessment certificate for the new system.

First units are slated to roll off the line in Q4 2026, with North America and Europe identified as the early target markets.

Context

Canadian Solar's storage arm enters this launch from a sizeable base. As of March 2026, the company reported global deliveries of more than 20 GWh of energy storage systems and an order backlog near USD 3.5 billion. The SolBank 4.0 specs point to a clear vendor strategy: squeeze more megawatt-hours into the same container footprint, then pass the installation savings through to developers chasing tighter project economics in Western markets.

General Motors has struck a partnership with Peak Energy, a US battery storage manufacturer, to build and roll out grid-scale storage systems using sodium-ion cells.

GM will also begin manufacturing lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells within a month.

The automaker is already pushing EV-grade packs into stationary use through a separate arrangement with Redwood Materials. Roughly 10,000 GM batteries are being placed into energy infrastructure under that deal, including Crusoe's AI data center in Sparks, Nevada.

GM said a second-life deployment will begin next year at one of its Michigan plants, where about 100 packs are expected to deliver 7.2 MWh of dispatchable energy and trim more than USD 3 million from local electricity bills over the life of the installation.

Context

Ford and EDF announced a gigawatt-scale BESS agreement in May 2026, with deliveries set to start in 2028.

Sodium-ion chemistry, the basis of the Peak Energy tie-up, sidesteps lithium and cobalt and is pitched by manufacturers as a cheaper option for stationary projects where energy density matters less than in a vehicle. LFP, the chemistry GM is about to produce, now dominates both stationary storage installations and lower-cost EVs.

The Michigan project points to a second route into grid revenue: redeploying EV packs after their automotive duty cycle rather than sending them straight to recycling.

The US Department of Defense added CATL, Three Gorges, EVE Energy, Huawei, BYD, JA Solar and Trina Solar to its list of Chinese military companies in a June 9 update signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen A. Steinberg, pv magazine reported.

The same update also names Alibaba, China Electronics Corp. and China General Nuclear Power Corp, according to pv magazine.

The batch pulls in the heart of China's clean-energy supply chain. On the battery side, CATL and EVE Energy cover lithium-ion cells for grid storage and vehicles, and BYD spans both batteries and electric vehicles. JA Solar and Trina Solar sit among the largest photovoltaic module suppliers worldwide. Huawei brings grid inverters and power electronics into the same designation, and Three Gorges anchors the list on the generation side.

The non-energy additions widen the scope further. Alibaba is a retailer, China Electronics Corp. is a state-owned electronics group, and China General Nuclear Power Corp runs much of China's civil nuclear fleet, pv magazine reported.

The Pentagon list identifies companies the department associates with China's military. Designation does not by itself block commercial sales into the US market, but it carries federal contracting consequences and reputational weight for buyers.

Chinese suppliers dominate global production of lithium-ion cells and crystalline-silicon modules, and the named firms include several of the largest exporters into US energy storage and solar project pipelines.

A long-dormant oil well beneath a church parking lot in Grandfalls, Texas gushed more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic wastewater across eight days in April, Texas Railroad Commission records show.

The state regulator spent USD 1.49 million sealing the well and a further USD 1.16 million pumping the brine back into the ground. Crews tracked down the wellbore and poured concrete to choke off the flow by April 29.

A Midland lab measured Total Dissolved Solids in the fluid at 138,771 parts per million, roughly four times the salinity of seawater, alongside chloride and sulfate. While the well remained open, the commission asked operators of injection wells within five miles of Grandfalls to suspend underground disposal. The original wellbore is still being investigated, agency spokesperson Bryce Dubee said.

Grandfalls sits on a stretch of the Permian Basin pocked with aging and orphaned wellbores, the kind of legacy infrastructure that can act as an escape route when pressurized produced water injected nearby finds a path back to the surface.

The community has little margin to absorb the disruption. Census figures put the population at 375, with more than 20 percent living below the poverty line and nearly half identifying as Hispanic.

Pylontech unveiled the PyOcean line of liquid-cooled battery energy storage systems at the SNEC 2026 trade show in Shanghai, with the company aiming the platform at grid-side deployments, large commercial and industrial sites, and AI data center loads.

The top model in the range, the PyOcean-M9-8000, carries 8.0 MWh of DC capacity and uses Pylontech's 601 Ah lithium iron phosphate cells. Per the company's product specifications, energy density reaches up to 426 Wh/L. The 601 Ah cell is rated for more than 12,000 cycles at a round-trip efficiency of 96.5%.

According to Pylontech, switching to larger cells inside a more integrated architecture cuts component count by 50%, land use by 38%, and installation workload by 10%. The company also estimates that on an 800 MWh storage project, the PyOcean-M9-8000 can lower direct investment by more than 10% relative to conventional designs.

First deliveries are scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

Context

The PyOcean launch lands in a Chinese grid-scale storage segment now built around large-format LFP cells and liquid-cooled enclosures, where a 601 Ah cell and 8 MWh enclosure put Pylontech alongside the current high end of the field. The decision to name AI data centers as a target customer, beside grid-side and C&I projects, reflects a load category that needs firm, dispatchable power close to compute sites.

Pennsylvania households would shave more than USD 840 a year off their power bills by 2030 if state lawmakers tackle the drivers of climbing retail rates, a Synapse Energy Economics report concluded.

The Synapse modeling pegs near-term relief at USD 197 per household in 2027, building to USD 2.4 billion in cumulative statewide savings by 2030.

Those savings would land against a steep run-up. Federal data cited in the report show residential rates in the state climbed almost 14% over the past year and sit more than 50% above their 2020 level.

State Representative Elizabeth Fiedler and supporting advocates blame the squeeze on data center growth, citing industry plans for more than 50 of the facilities in Pennsylvania.

Jackson Morris, an analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the projected load from those projects would be equivalent to dropping two-and-a-half times New York City's current electricity use onto PPL's eastern and central Pennsylvania service territory within the next decade.

Supply Stuck in the Queue

Grid operator PJM has 50 GW of generation that has cleared its interconnection process but remains stalled by issues outside PJM's authority, including state and local permitting.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved a PJM proposal for an expedited interconnection track open to large state-sponsored generation projects of any fuel type or technology that can come online quickly.