Friday, 19 June 2026

Elevate Infrastructure and ArcLight Capital Partners have brought online the 150 MW/600 MWh Prospect Power battery storage facility in Rockingham County, Virginia, the partners said on June 11.

The four-hour duration system pairs 150 MW of power output with 600 MWh of energy capacity, a configuration aligned with PJM Interconnection capacity market product rules. Rockingham County sits in the Shenandoah Valley within the PJM footprint, west of the Northern Virginia data center corridor that has driven much of the regional load growth.

The partners did not disclose offtake terms, capacity market participation, or construction cost in the June 11 statement.

ArcLight Capital Partners is a Boston-based private equity firm focused on energy infrastructure, while Elevate Infrastructure develops and operates storage assets in US wholesale power markets. The two announced commercial operations jointly.

Prospect Power adds to a build-out of grid-scale lithium-ion storage inside PJM, where four-hour assets currently anchor most standalone battery development because the duration qualifies for capacity payments alongside energy and ancillary services revenue. The 150 MW nameplate places Prospect Power among the larger standalone storage assets entering service in Virginia.

Neither company named an engineering, procurement, and construction contractor, battery supplier, or interconnection date for the project in the announcement.

Norwegian trade union SAFE began strike action on the Norwegian continental shelf after negotiations with employer group Offshore Norge on the Well Service Agreement collapsed over the weekend, with 154 members walking out the following day.

A further 224 SAFE members will join the strike from Thursday, according to Rigzone. Affected companies include SLB, which accounts for 177 of those members, alongside Cactus, Subsea 7, Weatherford, DeepOcean, Vetco Gray Scandinavia and Baker Hughes.

SAFE says the Well Service Agreement has fallen behind other oil industry collective bargaining areas, lagging by a full wage settlement over the last five years.

The walkout follows a separate deal reached between Offshore Norge and trade union Styrke on the Oil Service Agreement. That contract covers about 7,200 workers from nearly 50 companies, according to a statement by Offshore Norge.

Under the Styrke agreement, salary grid rates will rise by NOK 47,000 effective 1 June 2026, including offshore compensation and holiday pay.

An earlier Offshore Agreements dispute, since averted, had threatened to cut Norwegian oil and gas production by over 45,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, according to Offshore Norge.

The Well Service Agreement covers personnel providing specialist services to operators on the Norwegian continental shelf, including wireline, completion and intervention work supplied by service contractors such as SLB and Baker Hughes.

European officials are hesitant to commit naval ships to demining the Strait of Hormuz despite US President Donald Trump's push to open the waterway quickly.

Trump said at the leaders summit in Evian that ships are starting to transit the strait and it would be completely opened by Friday.

The operational timeline offered by US officials and outside experts is longer. A senior US official said it could take as many as two weeks for shipping through the strait to significantly increase, and even longer to return to pre-attack levels, according to Rigzone.

Retired US Navy officer Ben Cipperley said it could take 30 days or more to confidently declare the Strait of Hormuz mine-free, according to Rigzone.

The caution from European capitals follows recent reports of mines in the wider region. Omani officials warned seafarers last month to exercise caution after a suspected mine was spotted in its territorial waters.

The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint for a significant share of seaborne crude and LNG cargoes leaving the Gulf. The gap between the White House's Friday timeline and the multi-week to multi-month assessments from naval specialists frames the near-term question for shipowners, insurers, and Gulf producers weighing when to restore normal transit patterns.

According to Rigzone, European reluctance centers on the risk to naval vessels assigned to clearance operations under a compressed political timetable set by Washington.

Somalia secured a USD 80 million Green Climate Fund grant for its Ugbaad project, helping farmers earn a steadier living as droughts and floods worsen, according to Climate Change News. Abdiaziz Ibrahim Aden of Somalia's Ministry of Environment and Climate Change said the programme targets more than 2 million beneficiaries.

Aden told Climate Change News the grant has reduced the pull of armed groups on young Somalis. A United Nations Development Programme finding cited in the same report attributes two in three conflicts in the country to competition over natural resources.

Nearly 2 million Somali children could face acute malnutrition this year, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has warned.

Alec Crawford of the International Institute for Sustainable Development called climate change a threat multiplier on social and economic tensions. "It is a contributing factor to violence and instability and conflict, but it's not the sole driver," he told Climate Change News.

Policy context

COP30 in Brazil agreed a set of indicators for the Paris Agreement's Global Goal on Adaptation, 10 years after governments set the goal itself. The indicators are designed to track how countries implement their adaptation commitments.

For Green Climate Fund recipients such as Somalia, those indicators give donors a way to measure whether grants like the Ugbaad package translate into results against the rural climate shocks, resource-driven conflict, and child malnutrition pressures described in Climate Change News.

Uzbekistan began construction of its first small modular reactor (SMR) with a groundbreaking ceremony and symbolic pouring of first concrete at the Jizzakh region site. The country's Committee for Industrial, Radiation, and Nuclear Safety issued a construction licence on June 4 to the general contractor for the first unit, a Russian-made RITM-200N.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's Director General Rafael Grossi said the project features the first export order for any SMR.

A 2025 supplemental agreement to the contract changed the plant's design to two gigawatt-scale VVER-1000 units and two SMRs, raising proposed capacity to more than 2,100 MWe from the previous 330 MWe. Site preparation has involved excavating about 1.5 million cubic metres of soil to create a pit 13 metres deep.

Under the original schedule, the first unit was set to go critical in late 2029, with subsequent units commissioned one by one. Approximately 15,000 people are expected to be employed at the construction site, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The RITM-200N is a land-based variant of the reactor used in Russian nuclear icebreakers, developed by Rosatom. Uzbekistan has pursued nuclear power as part of a strategy to diversify a generation mix dominated by natural gas and to free up gas for export. The Jizzakh project is the first nuclear plant ever built in the country and now combines large-scale and small modular technology under a single contract framework following the 2025 redesign.

European delegations and the Marshall Islands pressed Brazil's COP30 Presidency at the Bonn mid-year climate talks to anchor the voluntary fossil fuel transition roadmap inside the formal UN negotiating track, Climate Home News reported. The 90-minute session in Germany centered on whether the roadmap Brazil committed to last year stays a side process or carries weight into the next stocktake response.

COP30 president André Aranha Corrêa do Lago pledged at the Belem closing plenary to produce a voluntary roadmap built in consultation with interested governments. Brazil is due to finish that work by November.

Switzerland, speaking for a bloc that includes South Korea and Mexico, said the roadmap must be a "sustained process, not a one-off report".

Moscow took the opposite line. Russia stayed silent at the Bonn session but argued in earlier written submissions that the roadmap should not appear in any document approved by governments at UN climate talks, Climate Home News reported.

Submissions stack up before November

Nearly 20 countries have filed formal opinions on the roadmap, alongside negotiating blocs representing small island states, the poorest countries, and the European Union. The first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels drew around 60 countries to Santa Marta, Colombia, in April.

Stakes for the 2028 stocktake

The procedural fight matters because the second global stocktake lands in 2028, and governments are likely to negotiate their response at COP33 the same year, with possible new emissions-cutting commitments on the table. A roadmap inside the UNFCCC track would feed those findings directly into the COP33 response text. A roadmap kept outside it would not.

The US will add 86 GW of new utility-scale generating capacity in 2026, the largest single-year addition in over two decades and nearly double the 53 GW installed in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration's February 2026 Electric Power Monthly report.

Solar and battery storage drove the projection, together accounting for 79% of all planned utility-scale additions for the year, pv magazine reported, citing EIA data.

Utility-scale solar additions were projected at 43.4 GW, a 60% jump from the 27.2 GW added in 2025. Within that pipeline, Texas led with 17.4 GW, or roughly 40% of national planned solar construction, while Arizona and California each contributed about 6%.

Battery storage was set to break its own record. The EIA expected 24.3 GW of new capacity online in 2026, above the 15 GW added in 2025. Roughly 48% of grid storage already in operation sits co-located with solar arrays, a configuration aimed at curbing curtailment and shifting midday output to the evening peak.

Generation data tracked the buildout. The EIA projected US solar output to climb from 290 TWh in 2025 to more than 420 TWh by the end of 2026.

TotalEnergies' settlement with the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management converted the $928 million it had paid for two cancelled offshore wind leases into mandatory spending on conventional energy projects, including the Rio Grande LNG export terminal already under construction on the Gulf Coast.

Heatmap News reported Friday that BOEM had published the settlement documents covering both cancelled TotalEnergies leases on its website. The terms gave the French major a fixed window, running from November 18, 2025 to September 30, 2026, to redeploy a matching sum into conventional energy work.

The company moved fast. According to Heatmap News, TotalEnergies spent the full $928 million in less than 21 weeks. BOEM cancelled the Carolina Long Bay lease east of Wilmington, North Carolina on April 2, followed by the Attentive Energy lease off Northern New Jersey on April 13.

Crucially, the agreement named the Rio Grande LNG export terminal as an eligible destination for the redirected spending, a project TotalEnergies had already taken to final investment decision the previous September.

Patrick Pouyanne, chief executive of TotalEnergies, told Axios the company itself originated the cancellation deal. "It came from us, we took the initiative," Pouyanne said.

Critics challenged the structure. Kit Kennedy, managing director for power, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Heatmap News the inclusion of the Rio Grande project pointed to a sweetheart deal or collusive arrangement.

The practical outcome was narrow. TotalEnergies walked away from two federal offshore wind leases, kept its total US energy spending intact at $928 million over the settlement window, and channeled that sum into an LNG export project it was already building.