Thursday, 2 July 2026

Venture Global has enlarged its long-term LNG supply contract with Greece. The company says the deal is Greece's first long-term LNG supply agreement with a U.S. exporter.

The supply arrangement builds on a capacity slot the company took at Greece's Alexandroupolis LNG receiving terminal. Venture Global on September 17, 2024 disclosed a deal covering 1 MMtpa of regasification capacity at the terminal, a node on the Vertical Corridor.

Alongside the Greek offtake, Venture Global closed a USD 2.25 billion sale of debt instruments. The company said the sale split into USD 1.125 billion of senior secured notes due 2034 carrying 6.375% and USD 1.125 billion of senior secured notes due 2036 carrying 6.625%.

The issuance sits against a stack of near-term obligations. At the close of the first quarter, current liabilities stood at USD 3.71 billion, which included USD 126 million in the current portion of long-term debt.

Debt activity has run across the group's project entities. Earlier this year, the subsidiary running the Calcasieu Pass LNG project in Cameron Parish, Louisiana signed a USD 1.75 billion credit facility.

Western Power's community battery rollout for its isolated grid is being led by named state and federal energy officials, according to Renew Economy.

Gair Landsborough is Acting Chief Executive Officer of Western Power, the utility operating the network at the centre of the program.

Amber-Jade Sanderson MLA is the Minister for Energy and Decarbonisation. Josh Wilson MP is the Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy.

Western Power carries delivery responsibility on the operator side, with Sanderson on the state portfolio and Wilson on the federal side. Battery sizing, siting, and funding splits were not disclosed.

The acting title held by Landsborough indicates the top role sits on an interim basis. Next steps include formal program documentation from Western Power and procurement notices for the batteries.

Belarus will design, build, and commission a radioactive waste disposal facility by the end of 2030, World Nuclear News reported. Regulators plan to run an environmental impact assessment and public consultations during 2026, including cross-border consultations with other countries.

Authorities have shortlisted three candidate sites. They are Ostrovets District, near the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant, Mstislavl District in Mogilev Oblast, and Khoiniki District of Gomel Oblast.

The project follows the completion of the country's first nuclear station at Ostrovets. Its second unit entered commercial operation on November 1, 2023. The two units together supply about one-quarter of Belarusian electricity, which has created a domestic need to manage the waste those reactors produce.

The 2026 assessment and consultations come first. Site selection among the three districts has to close before construction can begin against the end-2030 commissioning deadline.

Deep Fission has brought in engineering firm Day & Zimmermann to run pre-construction planning and handle above-ground construction for its Gravity reactor.

The Gravity design places its reactor in a borehole one mile (1.6 km) below the surface, using pressurised water reactor technology and low-enriched uranium fuel. Each unit is rated at 15 MWe.

Work on the ground is already under way. Deep Fission broke ground in December at the Great Plains Industrial Park in Parsons, Kansas, for its pilot project.

The developer is part of the US Department of Energy's Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, having been named in August last year as one of 10 companies picked for support. That program targets at least three designs reaching criticality by 4 July this year.

Deep Fission dates to 2023, when Elizabeth and Richard Muller founded it; the pair had earlier co-founded Deep Isolation in 2016.

NX Atomics moved on a different part of the supply chain, signing Sciaky, a division of Morphix Metals, to apply Sciaky's Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing process to components for the NX Atomics SMR platform.

Salzgitter AG and EWE AG signed a binding offtake agreement for around 10,000 tonnes of green hydrogen each year, according to hydrogenfuelnews.com. Deliveries under the contract are set to begin in 2030 for an initial seven-year term.

Salzgitter will complement the external supply with its own 100 MW electrolyser on-site, hydrogenfuelnews.com reported. The hydrogen supports the steelmaker's low-carbon production shift.

Separately, South Korea has launched hydrogen power auctions offering 1.43 TWh of generation under long-term contracts, according to hydrogenfuelnews.com. The auctions set aside 500 GWh exclusively for low-carbon hydrogen sources, while 930 GWh can draw on a wider range of hydrogen options.

South Korea's first clean hydrogen power bidding market launched in 2024 under the Hydrogen Economy Promotion and Hydrogen Safety Management Act, hydrogenfuelnews.com reported.

Civil society groups want investigators to examine the first carbon credits cleared under a new United Nations mechanism, saying the underlying project is tied to Myanmar's military junta and has overstated its climate benefit by a wide margin, Climate Home News reported.

The project at the centre of the dispute is a Myanmar cookstove scheme cleared to issue roughly 650,000 carbon credits by the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February. That regulator has signed off on just two projects to date.

Article 6.4 is the carbon-crediting mechanism built under the Paris Agreement to let countries and companies count emission cuts made abroad. Because so few schemes have cleared the process, the objections carry weight on one of the mechanism's earliest approvals.

The groups behind the complaint argue the cookstove scheme is connected to Myanmar's junta, which the UN has found responsible for human rights abuses, and that the project has inflated the emission reductions it claims to deliver.

Myanmar's military seized power from the elected government in a February 2021 coup, and fighting has torn through the country since. The Sagaing Region alone holds more than a third of the country's 3.8 million internally displaced people, according to Climate Home News.

With only two approvals on the books, how the Supervisory Body handles the challenge over these 650,000 credits will shape how it weighs human rights and additionality claims. The regulator has not responded publicly to the call for an investigation.

Bruce Power's refurbished Unit 3 has returned to Ontario's electricity grid after the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) lifted the last of four regulatory hold points on the Candu reactor.

The reactor reached the grid at 1:34 a.m., Bruce Power said, adding that it will keep raising power and finish further testing and approvals before the unit can enter commercial operation.

The clearance came on June 2, when Ramzi Jammal, the CNSC's chief regulatory operations officer, told the company the regulator would remove the final hold point after staff confirmed it had met its commitments and stayed within its licence conditions.

Unit 3 went through a Major Component Replacement (MCR), which swaps out steam generators, pressure tubes, calandria tubes and feeder tubes and adds 30 to 35 years to a reactor's operating life.

Eight operable Candu reactors sit at the Bruce site, split evenly into two plants. Units 1 to 4 form Bruce A, and units 5 to 8 form Bruce B.

Bruce A units 1 and 2 came back into service in 2012 after refurbishment. Unit 4 began its own MCR in February 2025.

With Unit 3 synchronised, Bruce Power's next steps are power ascension and the testing needed to declare commercial operation.

Carbon Brief analysis puts fuel savings for the average UK electric vehicle driver above GBP 1,100 a year against a comparable petrol car. The fleet-wide total reaches around GBP 3 billion annually.

The biggest single figure is the fleet fuel bill it displaces: nearly 2.5 billion litres avoided each year, which trims carbon dioxide output by close to 7 million tonnes. Those totals cover more than 2 million battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on the road.

How a driver charges shapes the payoff. The headline figure assumes roughly four-fifths of charging happens at home on cheap overnight rates and the remaining fifth at public points; drivers who plug in only at home can save GBP 1,400 a year. The gap traces back to the drivetrain itself, with BEVs running roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars.

Plug-in hybrids trail on both counts. Electricity powers less than a third of the miles they cover, and petrol fuels the rest.

The analysis comes as the UK government prepares to consult on softening its electric vehicle sales targets. BBC News reports the current zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate goal of 80% of new car sales as BEVs by 2030 could be pulled back to between 50% and 70%.

A lower 2030 threshold would slow the pace at which new BEVs join the fleet through the rest of the decade. Fewer of them means a smaller share of the 2.5 billion litres of fuel and 7 million tonnes of CO2 the current fleet already avoids.

A research team reported an all-perovskite tandem solar cell that reaches 29.1% efficiency without using PEDOT:PSS, the highest figure logged for that configuration to date.

In place of PEDOT:PSS, the group used a phenothiazine-functionalized self-assembled monolayer called 4PAPT as the hole transport layer. The paper reports that 4PAPT drives a direct phase transition, sharpens crystal orientation, and cuts non-radiative recombination losses.

Encapsulated devices held 90% of their starting efficiency past 800 hours of maximum power point tracking under simulated one-sun illumination at around 40 C.

The same interface approach produced a narrow-bandgap single-junction perovskite cell rated at 23.2% efficiency, showing the chemistry carries through to the bottom subcell on its own.

PEDOT:PSS has served as a standard hole transport layer in perovskite research, but its acidic, moisture-drawing character has been tied to degradation during long-duration testing. Swapping it for self-assembled monolayer chemistry is one way researchers have chased both higher output and longer operating life in tandem stacks.

The work appears in Joule under the title "Interface-mediated crystallization enables PEDOT:PSS-free all-perovskite tandems with 29.1% efficiency and enhanced durability".

Gas set Spanish wholesale electricity prices 9% of the time across the first five months of 2026, down from 52% in 2021, according to Ember data cited by pv magazine.

The decline follows a wind and solar expansion that lifted output 37% between 2021 and 2025. From May 2025 through February 2026, Spain installed 1.3 GW of new wind and solar capacity each month on average, pv magazine reported.

With gas exerting less pull on price formation, Spanish households save an estimated EUR 10 per month on electricity, according to Ember. The price gap with neighbouring markets showed in March, when average Italian wholesale prices hit EUR 143/MWh against EUR 42/MWh in Spain.

Large-scale storage capacity in Spain quadrupled in 2025, and Ember expects it to quadruple again in 2026. By May 2026, roughly 6 GW of renewable capacity was supplying ancillary services, which could ease reliance on combined-cycle gas plants for grid stability, pv magazine reported.

The capacity additions came alongside regulatory reforms to strengthen power system resilience after the Iberian blackout on 28 April 2025. Those reforms accompanied the continued build-out through the following months.

The Ember figures show a widening split between Spain and central and southern markets where gas-fired plants still set the marginal price. Spanish households now sit largely outside gas-linked wholesale swings, with renewables clearing most hours.

A research team led by corresponding author Kun Yang has built a scene-aware model that reads panel surface temperature at utility-scale photovoltaic plants from MODIS thermal infrared satellite data. Standard land-surface emissivity methods misread panel temperature because they treat solar modules as generic ground cover.

Each MODIS pixel spans 1 km, so a single reading blends PV modules with inter-row gaps, vegetation, access roads, and bare soil. Pulling a clean panel temperature out of that mixed signal has been the core obstacle for satellite thermal products over solar farms.

Yang said that assigning panels the emissivity of a typical natural surface pushes retrieved temperature into a systematic cold bias of around 10 C. The new model corrects for the optical properties of the modules instead.

During the warm season, the algorithm cut root mean square error from a conventional baseline range of 10.8-18.9 C to 3.7-8.6 C. It narrowed the cold bias from roughly -10 to -17 C down to -2 to -3 C, an improvement that lowers PV power simulation bias by 3-5%.

The team checked the model against ground measurements at two utility-scale plants: an arid installation in Wujiaqu, Xinjiang, and a humid site in Ganzi on the eastern Tibetan Plateau, Sichuan Province. The two locations bracket sharply different climates for Chinese solar operators.

That 3-5% cut in power simulation bias feeds directly into yield modeling, where module efficiency drops as cell temperature climbs. Satellite-derived temperature maps can extend that monitoring to plants without dense on-site sensor networks.

JERA received its first cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Barossa Gas Project in Australia's Northern Territory. The carrier Sohshu Maru delivered the shipment to JERA's Futtsu LNG terminal on June 12.

JERA takes its supply through subsidiary JERA Australia Pty Ltd and will lift roughly 425,000 tonnes of LNG a year, matching its equity share in the Barossa field. The company holds a 12.5% stake in the project, which developed Barossa to feed Darwin LNG. It also owns a 6.13% stake in the Darwin liquefaction plant.

Darwin LNG carries a declared capacity of 3.7 million metric tons per annum and started producing in 2006, according to Rigzone. The plant lost its feedgas after Timor-Leste's Bayu-Undan field, its earlier supply source, stopped exporting in late 2023 as the field depleted, according to operator Santos Ltd. Barossa now supplies the feedgas that keeps Darwin LNG running.

Investment in Barossa, described as the Darwin LNG life extension project, reached USD 3.95 billion, according to a Santos stock filing dated June 18, 2025.

Western Australia hosts a second large development, the Scarborough project, which covers the Scarborough field off Karratha, a second Pluto LNG processing train rated at 5 MMtpa, and modifications to Pluto Train 1, according to operator Woodside Energy Group Ltd.

The European Commission will withhold EU funding from projects that install inverters and other energy hardware supplied by vendors it labels high-risk, a decision aimed squarely at solar developers that depend on those suppliers.

pv magazine reports that the financing curbs will touch an estimated 10-20% of the money flowing into Europe's solar market, and that officials have flagged the same approach for wind and battery energy storage systems.

The rule does not force existing hardware offline. More than 300 GW of Chinese-made inverter capacity already runs across the continent and would keep operating for years even under an import ban, pv magazine reports. That installed fleet sets the near-term security exposure whatever pace the funding rules take on new construction.

The December 2025 compromise of 30 solar plants in Poland, which exploited VPN vulnerabilities, is being used as evidence that the risk extends beyond the inverter itself into the wider control systems, pv magazine reports.

The funding curb follows a wider regulatory push. Earlier this year the Commission published the draft Cyber Security Act 2, naming solar as a sector under examination. Developers now face two open questions at once: how the high-risk vendor label will apply to grant and concessional finance decisions, and how the draft act will set compliance duties for new and existing fleets.

Developers that rely on EU-backed finance must now vet their equipment supply chains against the restriction, while owners of the 300 GW Chinese-made inverter base confront a separate, slower discussion over retrofits, monitoring, and network segmentation, pv magazine reports.

Chevron will take a 70 percent operating stake in Block 10 off Greece's Mediterranean coast under an agreement with Helleniq Energy Holdings SA. Helleniq Energy said in a statement it keeps a 30 percent interest in the block.

The transaction brings the two companies' offshore holdings in Greece to five concessions.

Block 10 has cleared both 2D and 3D seismic studies and now sits in its second exploration phase, which Chevron said supports evaluation of possible drilling targets.

The two firms signed lease agreements on February 16 to explore four blocks in the Greek Mediterranean. Those four areas span roughly 47,000 square kilometers, according to Helleniq Energy.

Andrew Deighan, Chevron's director for exploration in the Middle East and North Africa, said the company aims to expand its exploration portfolio in the Mediterranean.

Indian households could save 69 billion rupees (USD 724 million) a year by switching to more energy-efficient air-conditioning units, Carbon Brief calculates.

On May 21, 2026, India's power demand hit a record 270 GW as a heatwave spread across the country and air-conditioning use surged, according to Carbon Brief.

Sales are running well ahead of prior years. India bought nearly 14 million air conditioners in 2024, up from 10 million in 2023. Ownership is still thin: India's 2020-21 national sample survey put the share of households with air conditioning at 4.9%, a figure that reached around 8% by 2024.

Dr Nikit Abhyankar of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley said India will add between 100 million and 150 million new air conditioners over the next ten years, and up to 200 million if extreme heatwaves intensify.

Government forecasts point the same way. The 2019 India Cooling Action Plan projected space-cooling demand growing nearly 11-fold by 2037 against 2017 levels in a business-as-usual scenario.

Upgrading from a two-star to a five-star unit cuts the emissions tied to generating the electricity that runs it by around 300 kg of CO2 per year per unit, the Carbon Brief analysis finds.

Kyrgyzstan has switched on a 175 MW solar plant, the opening phase of a project designed to reach 1.9 GW, according to pv magazine.

That first stage brought online the 175 MW array together with a 110 kV substation and transmission links, according to pv magazine. Spending on the opening phase came to USD 130 million, national news agency Kabar reported.

The installation, named ROX Issyk-Kul, is built, funded and run by Vietnam's Rox Energy Global and RECA LLC. Construction started in July 2025 after the developers signed a deal with Kyrgyzstan's Ministry of Energy.

The new phase adds more solar than the country had installed to date. IRENA figures put Kyrgyzstan's cumulative solar capacity at 100 MW by the end of 2025, up from 0 MW a year earlier, according to pv magazine. The 175 MW now energized runs past that entire tally.

ROX Issyk-Kul is not the only utility-scale solar contract in the pipeline. Kyrgyzstan's National Investment Agency signed an agreement with Hungary's Electron Holding last November covering 300 MW of solar. A timeline for the remaining phases of the 1.9 GW project has not been disclosed.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has put USD 18.5 million toward the TerraSpark Energy Campus, drawn from a USD 350 million coal-revival program.

The project pairs Babcock & Wilcox supercritical boilers with Mantel Capture's molten borate carbon capture, according to Power Magazine. Developer TerraSpark has laid out a 2030 startup target.

The TerraSpark disbursement draws on a pot built to fund new and refurbished coal generation. At USD 18.5 million, the award commits a small share of the USD 350 million program, leaving the bulk available for further recipients.

Babcock & Wilcox supercritical boilers run above the critical pressure of water, a design used to raise thermal efficiency over subcritical units, according to Power Magazine. Mantel Capture's molten borate process sits earlier in development than the amine systems used at most operating post-combustion plants.

That capture package underpins the permitting case. A new U.S. coal plant without carbon capture would face heavy regulatory and financing barriers, and TerraSpark's design leans on the capture system to hold up at federal and state review, according to Power Magazine.

The 2030 target leaves a tight runway to finish front-end engineering, win permits, lock in offtake, and reach financial close on a first-of-a-kind integrated coal-and-capture facility. Power Magazine called the prospect of a new U.S. coal plant a "strong maybe."

VAALCO Energy has brought its Ebouri-5H development well into production offshore Gabon at an initial flow rate above 8,000 bbl/d of oil with a very low water cut, according to Offshore magazine.

The well delivered a lateral section of 300 m of net pay in Gamba sands, Offshore reported. VAALCO holds a 58.8% working interest in and operates the Etame Marin Block offshore Gabon.

The latest startup follows another development well on the block. VAALCO reported in late April that the Etame 14H well is now in production at an initial flow rate of about 4,850 bbl/d of oil, according to Offshore.

Produced gas from the new wells will support field operations as the partners seek to offset the cost of higher priced diesel currently delivered to the field by vessel, Offshore reported.