Tuesday, 16 June 2026

Natural gas's share of the global electricity mix fell for a fifth straight year, with cheaper renewables displacing it from generation stacks, Renew Economy reported.

The outlet attributes the slide to cost, not policy: solar and wind are simply undercutting gas-fired plants in dispatch.

That mechanic matters. Renewables run at near-zero marginal cost once built, so grid operators call on them first and push gas units further down the merit order. Capacity factors at combined-cycle plants shrink as a result.

The shift breaks the transition-fuel thesis that carried gas through the prior decade, when it gained share as coal retired across Europe and North America. Five consecutive annual declines indicate renewables are now eating into gas, not only coal.

The consequence reaches deepest in LNG. Long-dated offtake contracts and regasification terminals were sanctioned on power-sector demand curves that assumed gas would keep gaining share. A cost-driven loss is harder to unwind than a regulatory one, because cutting subsidies or relaxing emissions rules does not raise the marginal cost of a finished wind farm.

Gas peakers still have a role in covering evening ramps and balancing intermittent supply. Baseload economics are the segment under pressure.

Renew Economy's framing places the decline squarely on relative cost rather than mandates. For utilities running gas fleets commissioned during the transition-fuel years, that raises stranded-asset exposure on plants with two decades of book life left.

Swedish bulk transport firm Wibax has ordered over 100 battery-electric semi trucks from Scania for use on European roads, according to Electrek. Scania says the deal is the European Union's largest single sale of electric trucks for bulk transport to date.

Wibax CEO Jonas Wiklund said the company wants to electrify its fleet quickly and is partnering with Scania to introduce the new technology on the timeline Wibax has set. Tobias Ejderhamn, Head of Global Sales, e-truck solutions at Scania, said the deal demonstrates Wibax's confidence in Scania as a partner for scaling up its eMobility operations.

The two companies began working together in 2022, when Wibax started operating a three-axle Scania tractor-trailer combination on an 80 km route between Piteå and Skellefteå in northern Sweden. The new order extends that pilot relationship into a fleet-scale rollout.

Bulk transport, which moves liquid and dry industrial chemicals in tanker and silo configurations, is among the harder road-freight segments to electrify because of high payloads and long daily duty cycles. A single-customer order at this scale gives Scania a reference deployment in a duty profile where diesel has remained dominant, and gives Wibax a defined path to cut tailpipe emissions across a meaningful share of its operations.

Neither company disclosed a delivery schedule or contract value in the material cited by Electrek.