Sunday, 9 August 2026

Antora Energy has closed a USD 550 million Series C round backed by new and existing investors, according to ESS News. G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the round, ESS News reported.

The US energy storage company will direct the capital toward expanding production capacity, including a second US manufacturing facility, according to ESS News.

Antora's batteries store electricity as heat inside insulated blocks of solid carbon, ESS News reported. The units are manufactured at a plant in San Jose, California.

The company's largest disclosed deployment is a 50 MW/5 GWh thermal battery project in South Dakota, per ESS News. The installation sits at POET's Big Stone City bioprocessing facility. Antora put more than 200 thermal batteries on site and moved the project from initial construction to commissioning in under 12 months, according to ESS News.

Latvia's installed solar capacity has reached 1,521 MW, according to figures from the Latvian Renewable Energy Alliance (LREA) reported by pv magazine.

About 601 MW of that total was added in the country so far this year, building on the 920 MW installed by the end of last year, pv magazine reported. That makes 2026 Latvia's strongest year for solar deployment on record, ahead of the previous calendar-year high of 319 MW set in 2024.

The build-out has changed the country's generation mix. Solar was the largest single source of Latvian electricity in both May and June, according to pv magazine. In June, solar produced 274 GWh, or 55% of total electricity generation of 495 GWh.

That June share was an EU record for solar within domestic electricity generation, according to separate analysis by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE cited by pv magazine.

Within the distribution network, solar now accounts for 78% of total installed generation capacity, pv magazine reported. Solar output rose 50% against the first six months of last year, with 441.3 GWh of solar electricity fed into the grid this year.

Serentica Renewables has commissioned the first phase of a 1 GWh battery energy storage system in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, according to ESS News.

That opening phase comprises 50 MW/200 MWh of battery capacity, ESS News reported.

The developer said the Bikaner installation supplies one of the world's first time-block round-the-clock renewable power arrangements for industrial consumers.

Serentica Renewables is the renewable energy arm of Vedanta Group, and the project marks the first large-scale battery energy storage system the company has delivered for the commercial and industrial segment, per ESS News.

The independent power producer holds 3.2 GW of renewable energy capacity, ESS News reported, with projects spanning solar, wind, storage and balancing solutions across multiple states.

Serentica Renewables has a planned 7 GWh battery order pipeline for the next two years, according to ESS News.

China has issued its 15th five-year plan for a national response to climate change, setting targets for the 2026-2030 period, according to Carbon Brief.

The Ministry of Ecology and Environment published the document in late July alongside 18 other government departments, Carbon Brief reported.

At the centre of the plan is a target to cut carbon intensity by 17% across the five years, according to Carbon Brief. Carbon intensity measures emissions per unit of economic output, so the target constrains the emissions growth rate rather than capping absolute volumes.

The plan sits inside China's standing pledges to peak emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality before 2060. The five-year period covered by the new document therefore spans the window in which the peak is meant to occur.

The scale of the task is set by the country's current emissions base. Analysis by iGDP cited by Carbon Brief put China's greenhouse gas output at around 14,000MtCO2e in 2021, excluding land use, land-use change and forestry.

Non-CO2 greenhouse gases made up roughly 2,700MtCO2e of that total, or 19%, according to the same iGDP analysis. That share covers gases outside the carbon dioxide accounting that carbon intensity targets typically address, including methane and other high-warming-potential emissions.

The involvement of 18 departments beyond the environment ministry indicates the plan reaches across ministries rather than sitting with a single regulator. Carbon Brief described the document as the latest in a series of plans setting climate and energy targets.

An ensemble forecasting approach improved solar output prediction accuracy by 11% and 13% across two utility data sets, according to Solar Builder.

The method was tested at seven sites using Imperial Irrigation District and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power data covering 2019 to 2022, Solar Builder reported. The 11% improvement came on the Imperial Irrigation District data set and the 13% improvement on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power data set.

Solar Builder noted that as of August 2026 the methods have only been tested across California.

TerraFlow Energy and Shoals Technologies Group have signed a memorandum of understanding covering a deployment plan of up to 5 GW of vanadium flow battery systems a year, according to ESS News.

The agreement pairs the flow battery developer with Shoals Technologies Group, and sets the 5 GW annual figure as the ceiling of the plan rather than a contracted volume, ESS News reported.

TerraFlow claims its redox battery runs with less than 3.5% degradation over 20 years, per ESS News. The company also puts the cycle life of the system at 20,000 to 40,000 cycles.

Those durability figures are the commercial argument for vanadium flow chemistry, which trades lower energy density for long-duration cycling and slow capacity fade. The claims are TerraFlow's own.

Fluence booked USD 1.44 billion of orders in the three months to June 30, 2026, close to triple the USD 508 million taken in the same quarter of 2025, according to ESS News. The same results cut full-year revenue guidance and disclosed a widening net loss.

The order backlog reached USD 6.4 billion, the highest in the company's history, ESS News reported, alongside an energy storage order pipeline of 45.6 GW/163.7 GWh.

Data center demand supplied a large share of the intake. Fluence secured approximately USD 850 million of data center business through July, ESS News reported, including its first large behind-the-meter order signed during the third quarter and approximately USD 550 million from an unnamed hyperscaler in July 2026.

Quarterly revenue rose to USD 649.8 million for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2026, from USD 602.5 million a year earlier, according to ESS News.

The profit line moved the other way. Fluence reported net losses of approximately USD 44.3 million for the three months and USD 136.1 million for the nine months ended June 30, 2026, ESS News reported, against net income of approximately USD 6.9 million and a net loss of approximately USD 92.1 million for the same periods a year earlier.

Manufacturing is the constraint. Fluence now expects USD 400 million in project deliveries to slip into next year because of production issues at a new international contract manufacturing facility and construction-related delays affecting completion and start-up of a new US contract manufacturing facility, according to ESS News.

That pushed guidance down. The company expects revenue of approximately USD 2.9 billion to USD 3.1 billion, with a midpoint of USD 3.0 billion, compared with prior guidance of approximately USD 3.2 billion to USD 3.6 billion and a midpoint of USD 3.4 billion, ESS News reported.

The result is a company converting demand faster than it can convert factory output: order intake up nearly threefold year on year against a backlog that is now the largest it has carried, with roughly USD 400 million of that work rescheduled beyond the current fiscal year.

An August 6 presidential proclamation applies a 15% tariff to goods made using polysilicon materials, Solar Builder reported. The measure is framed as backing for US output of those components.

US producers account for roughly 2% of global polysilicon supply, compared with about 90% from China, according to Solar Builder.

Alongside the duty, the proclamation assigns Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a second task: setting up and running an incentive scheme for firms that want to manufacture polysilicon inside the United States, Solar Builder reported.

SEIA chief executive Tim Pawlenty said tariffs and price floors on solar materials would create fresh problems for US manufacturers and push up energy costs for households and businesses.

The 15% rate attaches to finished products containing polysilicon rather than to shipments of the raw material alone.

Two levers now sit in the same document. One raises the cost of imported polysilicon-based goods; the other, administered by Lutnick's department, is intended to pull investment toward domestic polysilicon manufacturing.

South Korea's Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) and the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment signed a memorandum of understanding on 30 July at Gangnam Police Station in Seoul to shift new police vehicles to electric and hydrogen models, electrive reported.

The pilot attached to the agreement is small. According to electrive, 22 internal combustion vehicles operated by police substations under Gangnam Police Station will be replaced with EVs, and nine 200 kW fast chargers will go in across six substations.

That leaves a wide gap against the national fleet. South Korea's police fleet numbers roughly 17,600 vehicles, electrive reported, and as of the end of June 2026 only 2,185 of them, or 12.4%, were electric or hydrogen models.

The replacement rate sets the pace. Procurement data from 2023 to 2025 shows the KNPA buys or leases about 1,908 new vehicles a year, according to electrive. At that turnover, an all-electric and hydrogen intake for new purchases works through the fleet gradually rather than at once.

Charging capacity is the second constraint the pilot addresses. Nine chargers at 200 kW spread over six substations gives the Gangnam sites dedicated fast-charging rather than reliance on public infrastructure, per electrive's account of the plan.

Eight major Chinese polysilicon manufacturers have put their names to an industry pledge that rules out selling photovoltaic products for less than what they cost to make, pv magazine reported.

Between them, those eight firms are reckoned to control upward of 90% of effective polysilicon capacity in China, according to pv magazine.

The pledge follows the release of a cost-accounting standard for the photovoltaic industry on July 27, per pv magazine.

A mandatory energy-consumption standard covering polysilicon and germanium production, GB 29447-2026, takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, and could push higher-energy plants toward upgrades or closure, pv magazine reported.

Share prices moved on Aug. 7. Tongwei added 6.26%, Xinte Energy jumped 14.04%, and GCL Technology finished 8.96% higher in Hong Kong, according to pv magazine.

On the same session, the most-traded polysilicon futures contract settled 2.95% higher at CNY 37,040 per ton, pv magazine reported.

Measured from CNY 32,560 per ton just before the July 31 regulatory meeting in Yancheng, that leaves the contract up roughly 13.8%, according to pv magazine.

Hydrostor has secured an offtake agreement covering 60 MW with local power provider Clean Energy Alliance for the Willow Rock Energy Storage Center, the compressed air energy storage plant under construction in southern California, according to ESS News.

The contract gives the project a level of revenue certainty while construction proceeds, ESS News reported. Willow Rock, in Kern County, California, is sized at 500 MW/4,000 MWh, giving it eight hours of duration at full output.

ESS News describes Hydrostor as a Canadian compressed air energy storage developer. Willow Rock is the company's first utility-scale project in the United States.

On-site work started in July 2026. That followed a permit from the California Energy Commission issued in December 2025.

The 60 MW contracted to Clean Energy Alliance represents a fraction of the plant's rated power capacity, leaving the balance of the 500 MW uncontracted under this agreement.

Qatari telecom Ooredoo has taken the lead investor role in Zankore, a new AI compute platform in Indonesia, with a commitment of USD 800 million to support the launch, according to Semafor.

Zankore intends to bring 200 MW of capacity online next year, Semafor reported, naming Nvidia and Nokia as suppliers to the project.

The telecom's investment case rests on demand growth across the region. Ooredoo sees data center demand more than tripling in Southeast Asia by 2030, according to Semafor. The company has had a foothold in Indonesia for nearly two decades.

A second transaction under consideration points to compute assets further north. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala is weighing becoming the lead investor in a possible USD 6.3 billion, 500 MW data center in Japan's Akita prefecture, Bloomberg reported, according to Semafor. That project would be more than twice the size of Zankore's first phase in megawatt terms.

The USD 800 million commitment covers the launch of the platform rather than a single site.

Czech transport operator Dopravní podnik Ostrava has committed to as many as 70 Urbino 12 battery-electric buses under a framework contract with Solaris, electrive reported.

The vehicles are due to reach the operator across two years, 2027 and 2028, according to electrive.

Two battery configurations sit inside the 12-metre platform. The higher-capacity version is rated at up to 350 kilometres between charges, and the second targets duty cycles needing no more than 250 kilometres, electrive reported.

Solaris vehicles are already common on Ostrava's network: the manufacturer has supplied the city with over 450 buses and trolleybuses to date, according to electrive.

DPO's earlier battery order dates to 2021, covering 24 Urbino 12 electric buses plus charging equipment. It was the first electric bus contract Solaris won in the Czech Republic, electrive reported.

Alabama utility regulators opened formal hearings this week that could lower the profits of one of the state's major monopoly utilities for the first time in more than 40 years, according to Inside Climate News.

The Alabama Public Service Commission sat Thursday and Friday to review the allowed rate of return for Spire Alabama and Spire Gulf, subsidiaries of Spire Inc., which supplies natural gas to nearly 2 million homes and businesses across Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, Inside Climate News reported.

Under the current framework, the Alabama PSC lets Spire earn between 9.5 and 9.9 percent on its equity investments, with a target midpoint of 9.7 percent.

Spire wants that midpoint lifted to 10.5 percent, with an allowable band running from 10.3 to 11 percent and locked in for five years, per Inside Climate News.

The Alabama Attorney General's Office pushed in the opposite direction, recommending a 9.2 percent target inside a 9 to 9.4 percent range, and a two-year term rather than five.

Energy Alabama, a nonprofit clean energy advocate that filed as an intervenor, went lower still, urging a target of 8.3 percent with an allowed range of 8.3 to 8.7 percent.

The household stakes were quantified in testimony from economist George Ford, who said cutting the midpoint from 9.7 to 9.2 percent would save the average ratepayer about USD 14 a year, while granting Spire's requested 10.5 percent would cost about USD 22 a year, according to Inside Climate News.

The commission will set the final parameters of Spire's allowed returns, with a decision expected at its next regular meeting on Sept. 1.

Gas projects account for 99.8 gigawatts of the 201.5 gigawatts admitted to the first study round under PJM Interconnection's overhauled queue rules, Inside Climate News reported.

That round holds 715 projects, the first cohort processed under the grid operator's "first-ready, first-served" framework, according to Inside Climate News.

PJM figures cited by Inside Climate News spread the gas total across 147 projects. Battery storage qualified 60 gigawatts and nuclear 17.3 gigawatts. Among the remaining technologies, solar reached 11.8 gigawatts, hybrid solar-storage 7.5 gigawatts and wind 3.9 gigawatts.

Application counts rank the technologies differently. Storage filed 314 proposals against 147 for gas. Solar entered 117, wind 61 and hybrid solar-storage 37, while nuclear submitted 24.

Three years ago, solar, wind and battery storage made up more than 90 percent of the projects waiting in the queue, Inside Climate News reported.

PJM expects demand to grow by as much as 70 gigawatts by 2038, driven largely by data centers.

Study admission does not guarantee a connection. PJM has studied more than 300 gigawatts of projects since 2020. Only 51 gigawatts of generation hold interconnection agreements today, according to PJM's own figures cited by Inside Climate News.

Fleet operator Moove has closed a Series C round of USD 250 million, with the capital directed at expanding its autonomous vehicle fleets and building out the charging and depot infrastructure those fleets require, according to electrive.

The round prices the company at USD 2.1 billion, electrive reported. Mubadala Investment Company led the investment, joined by Woven Capital, Toyota's growth fund, and Ion Pacific.

Moove runs autonomous vehicle fleets on behalf of Waymo, with services already launched in Phoenix and Miami. London is set to become the first European city to host the robotaxi service under that partnership, according to electrive.

The depot and charging spend sits at the point where robotaxi operations meet electricity demand: fleets that run continuously need dedicated charging capacity and servicing sites rather than public infrastructure.

Oklo Inc. said its Groves Isotope Test Reactor has reached first criticality, achieving a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at low power, according to Neutron Bytes.

The company, listed on the NYSE under the ticker OKLO, describes itself as an advanced nuclear technology developer.

Neutron Bytes reported that the criticality milestone came less than a year after groundbreaking on the project. The reactor operates under authorization from the U.S. Department of Energy granted through the DOE Reactor Pilot Program.

Groves is the first reactor under that program to achieve criticality on private land, according to Neutron Bytes. It was built from the ground up on a greenfield site.

Centrus Energy has signed a low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel deal with X-energy, according to Neutron Bytes, one of several supply agreements now shaping the fuel chain for advanced reactor developers.

The designs behind those contracts require enrichment levels above the standard commercial grade. Neutron Bytes reports that X-energy's Xe-100 is built around 80 MWe high-temperature gas-cooled reactor modules using TRISO pebble fuel enriched to about 15.5% U235. TerraPower's Natrium design uses a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor with dense uranium metal fuel enriched to roughly 19.75% U235.

Fabrication capacity is moving in parallel with the contracts. X-energy and its wholly owned subsidiary TRISO-X began construction work on the TX-1 advanced nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge in November 2025, per Neutron Bytes.

The metal fuel route reached its own marker in the same month. Framatome and TerraPower produced successful elements of uranium metal, which Neutron Bytes describes as a key milestone in uranium metallization for advanced reactor fuel commercialization.

Other developers are working the regulatory track rather than the contract track. Newcleo filed a regulatory engagement plan with the NRC for a mixed-oxide fuel manufacturing facility, according to Neutron Bytes. A MOX plant would put recycled fissile material into the same supply picture as fresh enriched uranium.

Supply arrangements are also forming outside the HALEU segment. CCTE announced a nuclear fuel supply agreement with BWXT Canada, Neutron Bytes reported.

Taken together, the agreements pair reactor vendors with fuel suppliers at the point where enrichment specifications diverge sharply between designs. TRISO pebbles at about 15.5% U235 and uranium metal at about 19.75% U235 draw on different fabrication lines and different qualification paths. Both sit above the enrichment level of conventional light-water fuel, and both depend on facilities such as TX-1 reaching operation.

Marks & Spencer is putting ten battery-electric DAF XD trucks into its UK logistics network, according to electrive. Five are already running, and the other five are due to enter service later this year.

One unit carries an inverter system that draws power from the truck battery to run a refrigerated trailer, removing the diesel refrigeration unit that normally does that job, electrive reported. M&S says this is the first application of the technology on a DAF truck in the UK, and that it came out of the eFREIGHT 2030 project under the UK government's Zero Emission HGV and Infrastructure Demonstrator (ZEHID) programme.

The DAF XD Electric tractor units use a 525 kWh battery pack, of which 462 kWh is usable, according to electrive.

Each vehicle is expected to cover around 100,000 kilometres a year, electrive reported.

A fire at a photovoltaic plant in the municipality of Puertollano, central Spain, burned around 90 hectares and triggered a large firefighting operation, according to pv magazine.

The blaze started around 13:00 on Wednesday, July 22, pv magazine reported, with three workers on site attempting to contain it at the time.

One of them, a 51-year-old man, suffered burns, according to pv magazine. He was treated first by a mobile intensive care unit and then airlifted by helicopter to Getafe Hospital.

Eight aircraft and up to 24 ground vehicles took part in the response, mobilizing up to 129 people including forest firefighters, environmental agents and support personnel, pv magazine reported.

Mercedes Gómez, minister of sustainable development for the region of Castilla-La Mancha, said the fire was already contained and under control by Thursday morning, according to pv magazine.

The cause of the fire has not yet been reported.

Enphase Energy reported quarterly revenue of $291.9 million for the second quarter of 2026, alongside approximately $1.08 billion in year-to-date agreements signed with third-party owners, according to a company release distributed by GlobeNewswire.

Shipments in the quarter came to roughly 1.59 million IQ Microinverters, equivalent to 725.2 MW DC, plus 113.8 MWh of IQ Batteries, the release states.

Margins split widely between accounting bases. Enphase posted a GAAP gross margin of 60.0% against a non-GAAP gross margin of 46.8%. GAAP net income reached $36.1 million, while the non-GAAP figure came in at $61.5 million.

The third-party owner agreements break into two tax-credit qualification routes: $202.4 million under the 5% ITC Safe Harbor and $878.6 million under the Physical Work Test, per the company. Both are mechanisms for locking in investment tax credit eligibility ahead of statutory deadlines, and the heavier weighting toward the Physical Work Test accounts for more than four-fifths of the executed total.

Customs refunds added to the quarter's cash position. Enphase said it received approximately $41.0 million in refunds from U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the second quarter, with a further $11.0 million arriving after the quarter closed.

Free cash flow totaled $25.9 million for the period, and the company closed the quarter holding $937.7 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. That balance sits above three times the quarter's revenue.

Revenue of $291.9 million against 725.2 MW DC of microinverter shipments and 113.8 MWh of battery capacity gives a picture of a business still split between its inverter franchise and a storage line measured in megawatt-hours rather than megawatts.

Türkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortaklığı (TPAO) is buying a 15% interest in BP Energy Company of Kirkuk Limited, the vehicle carrying BP plc's Kirkuk redevelopment work in northern Iraq, according to World Oil.

The Turkish state producer's entry leaves BP with 43% and ConocoPhillips with 42% once the deal closes, and regulatory approvals are still outstanding, World Oil reported.

Four producing areas sit inside the Development and Production Contract: the Baba and Avanah domes of the Kirkuk oil field, plus the adjacent Bai Hassan, Jambur and Khabbaz fields in federal Iraq. The contract's initial phase targets more than 3 Bboe from those assets, according to World Oil.

Signing took place while Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi was in Türkiye on an official visit. BP and TPAO had signed a cooperation memorandum of understanding earlier in the year.

BP CEO Meg O'Neill described TPAO as "a trusted partner for more than 30 years" through joint work across the Caspian region, World Oil reported.

New solar capacity in Serbia reached about 61 MW over the first six months of 2026, the Association Renewable Energy Sources of Serbia (RES Serbia) said in figures cited by pv magazine. Total installed solar now sits at roughly 379 MW.

The prosumer segment accounted for 125.9 MW and distribution-connected plants for 192.2 MW when Serbia closed 2025 with 318.3 MW in service, pv magazine reported.

Grid access is the constraint on what comes next. A government decision in May pushed new grid connection studies for variable renewable projects out to 2029-2030. Isailovic of RES Serbia said the delay "has proven to be a bottleneck for investors," holding back several projects and slowing capacity additions.

Large industrial users are still queuing for transmission-level access under active consumer status. Linglong filed for 39.9 MW, while HBIS is seeking to connect a 63 MW project, according to pv magazine.

Storage requests dwarf the operating solar fleet. Complete grid connection study applications now cover 4,530.6 MWh of approved capacity across 24 battery projects, pv magazine reported.

A definitive agreement between SoftVest and Blackbeard puts a value of roughly USD 2.24 billion on the merger of the Permian Basin Royalty Trust with Blackbeard's land and mineral holdings, World Oil reported.

The merged entity takes the name PBT Land and Minerals, Inc. Its acreage position covers about 111,000 net royalty acres alongside 68,000 surface acres, sitting mainly on the Central Basin Platform within the Permian basin, according to World Oil.

Current PBT unitholders are set to hold roughly 59%, leaving 41% with Blackbeard and its affiliates, World Oil reported.

A senior secured revolving credit facility of USD 500 million, arranged with JPMorgan as lead, passes to the new company, which can draw a further USD 100 million under an accordion feature, according to World Oil.

World Oil reported that daily volumes at Waddell Ranch under Blackbeard Operating moved from about 3,000 bpd to above 35,000 bpd.

Ferrari's first electric car has taken orders for every unit it planned to build this year, a run of just under 500 cars, with the target met in under two months, Electrek reported citing the Financial Times.

Pricing starts at EUR 550,000, about USD 640,000, which puts the Luce among the most expensive cars Ferrari sells, according to Electrek.

Investors were unimpressed at the unveiling. Electrek reported that Ferrari (RACE) shares fell 6% in the days around the Rome launch on May 25.

No customer has taken a car yet. First deliveries are set for October, and Electrek reported that Ferrari would not discuss the sales numbers, pointing instead to its half-year results on July 30 for a fuller account of how the Luce has been received.

The Luce runs four independent motors for more than 1,000 hp, drawing on a 122 kWh battery built around an 880-volt architecture, per Electrek. Peak charging is 350 kW, range tops 530 km, and the car hits 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds.

Electrek reported that Chinese buyers account for a large share of demand, and quoted chief executive Benedetto Vigna saying the order book was stretching toward the end of 2027.

The order intake arrives after Ferrari scaled back its electric ambitions, having roughly halved its 2030 EV sales target last year, Electrek reported.

A floating wind turbine design developed by Australian researchers could cut construction costs by as much as 40 percent, but the concept does not extend to the largest offshore machines, RenewEconomy reported.

Wenhua Zhao, a professor at the University of Queensland, tested a scale model of the structure, about 2m tall, at the wave basin at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, according to RenewEconomy.

Zhao said the design worked in testing and could support a turbine as large as 3.6 MW with an 87m hub height. The model also showed it could survive a 1-in-100-year storm.

The size ceiling is the limiting factor the researchers themselves flag: the cost saving does not carry over to the biggest oceanic machines.

February 2030, when the current administration leaves office, is the deadline Uruguay has set for bringing 500 MW of new renewable capacity online, weighted toward photovoltaics, pv magazine reported.

Fernanda Cardona, Uruguay's Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining, set out the plan in Montevideo as the XII Latin American Renewable Energy Congress opened. The Uruguayan Renewable Energy Association ran the event on July 28 and 29, hosting it at the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay.

Four solar plants make up the 500 MW, and two of those have been identified so far. Hybridization work forms part of the same package, but no battery storage project has been put forward yet, according to pv magazine.

Melo Photovoltaic Solar Park in Cerro Largo is the larger of the two named projects. Its installed capacity is set at 100 MWp, and at the connection point it will run at a nominal 75 MW. Roughly 140,000 modules on trackers are planned, backed by investment above USD 75 million.

That capacity lands on a system already close to fully decarbonized: pv magazine puts Uruguay's renewable share at around 97% of electricity generation, with hydro and wind supplying most of it.

Solar met 49% of Latvia's electricity demand in June, a record for the EU, according to pv magazine, citing figures compiled by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE from the Energy-Charts platform.

The two other Baltic states posted comparable figures. Lithuania's solar share of electricity demand hit 44.7% in June and Estonia's reached 35.8%, pv magazine reported.

Germany held above 30% for three months running. Fraunhofer researchers recorded shares of 30.3% in May and 30.4% in June, with a preliminary reading of 31.6% in July, per pv magazine.

Spain's monthly high came in June at 36.9% of electricity demand, more than five percentage points above the same period a year earlier, according to pv magazine.

France set its own national record in July at 14.6%, its highest solar share of electricity demand to date, though the country stayed below the EU average, pv magazine reported.

The Energy-Charts dataset behind these national figures is maintained by Fraunhofer ISE, which compiles solar shares of electricity demand across EU member states.

UK solar capacity rose by 2.2 GW in the 12 months to the end of June 2026, a 10.9% increase, according to pv magazine.

June alone brought 27,391 new solar installations across the UK, adding 132 MW, pv magazine reported.

The distributed segment faces a lower entry barrier from August 27, when new plug-in solar regulations take effect. Per pv magazine, the updated rules let households self-install systems up to an 800 W limit per electrical circuit, potentially opening opportunities in the rental sector.

At utility scale, the UK government secured 4.9 GW of solar capacity in its seventh (AR7) allocation round, pv magazine reported. Of that, 1.87 GW is expected online by 2028 and 3 GW in 2029.

The largest operational UK solar farm to date is Cleve Hill, at 373 MW, according to pv magazine.

The first phase of the Ummbila Emoyeni wind farm on South Africa's Mpumalanga Highveld comprises 25 turbines with a combined generation capacity of 155MW, according to SAnews. The developer is Seriti Green, a subsidiary of mining company Seriti Resources.

Output will be wheeled through Eskom's transmission network to supply Seriti's coal mining operations, SAnews reported. The wind farm sits between Bethal, Davel and Morgenzon, and the first phase alone accounts for the 25 machines and 155MW figure cited by the agency.

The project is expected to form part of a 900MW hybrid cluster combining wind, solar and battery storage, which SAnews said would be the largest hybrid energy facility in South Africa once completed.

On the national picture, SAnews put installed renewable capacity at close to 16GW, with a further 32GW of projects in the grid connection process and expected to connect by 2030.

The share of locally generated electricity from renewables stood at 2% in 2016, rose to 6% in 2021 and reached 9% in 2024, according to the agency.

Behind-the-meter uptake has moved faster. The number of households with solar panels climbed 86% over a three-year period to 675,000 in 2025, SAnews said.

More than R50 billion in green energy investment commitments were announced at this year's South Africa Investment Conference, according to the same report.

Vanadium is "a big thing" at the moment, according to Graham Arvidson, quoted by RenewEconomy in a piece on the metal's role in data centre storage.

The metal itself is hard, ductile and lustrous, RenewEconomy reports, and shifts from a silvery grey to blue, yellow, green or purple once exposed to open air.

Power systems are accumulating flexibility plans faster than they are building flexible grids, according to CleanTechnica.

The distinction matters because grid flexibility is easy to mistake for a technology market, CleanTechnica writes. Jurisdictions announce batteries measured in gigawatt-hours, create ancillary-service products, or launch capacity auctions, pumped-hydro programs and demand-response targets. Each announcement lands as a procurement headline rather than as delivered system capability.

CleanTechnica's framing separates the announcement layer from the operating layer: a new ancillary-service product, a capacity auction and a demand-response target are three different instruments, and none of them is the same as a grid that can actually absorb variability. The gap CleanTechnica identifies is between the volume of such plans and the flexibility that power systems have in operation.

The Iberia Parish Council adopted an ordinance requiring utility-scale solar projects to sit at least half a mile back from the nearest residential property line, according to Grist.

Grist reported that the setback rule appears to have effectively killed the Acadiana Solar project in Iberia Parish, Louisiana. The outlet said the project could have brought millions in local tax revenue to the parish.

The measure applies specifically to utility-scale solar, and the distance is fixed to the nearest residential property line rather than to a dwelling. Setback ordinances of that scale narrow the pool of parcels large enough to host a project once buffers are subtracted from developable acreage.

South Africa's Eskom welcomed the convictions of former contractor Michael Lomas and businessman Hudson Kgomoeswana over procurement irregularities and corruption tied to the Kusile Power Station project, according to SAnews.

The utility framed the outcome as part of a wider enforcement effort rather than an isolated case. Eskom said it remains an active participant in coordinated initiatives run through the National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure (NATJOINTS), the Energy Safety and Security Priority Committee, and other government-led structures set up to counter fraud, corruption, theft and related criminal activity, SAnews reported.

Kusile has been a focal point for procurement scrutiny at the state power company, and the convictions of Lomas and Kgomoeswana attach individual criminal liability to conduct Eskom described as historical procurement irregularities.

X-energy and Centrus have signed a definitive agreement under which Centrus will supply enrichment services for low-enriched uranium (LEU) and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), according to a GlobeNewswire release.

Centrus will enrich the HALEU at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, and the material will go to X-energy's fuel subsidiary TRISO-X, LLC for fabrication of TRISO-X coated particle fuel at the company's fuel fabrication campus in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

That fuel is the core of the supply chain the agreement is meant to feed. HALEU enriched to approximately 15.5% uranium-235 is the primary feedstock for TRISO-X coated particle fuel, according to the release.

TRISO-X received a 40-year Special Nuclear Material License from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in February 2026, clearing the fabrication side of the chain before the enrichment contract was set.

X-energy said it is advancing more than 11 GW of new nuclear capacity across the United States and the United Kingdom, with commercial Xe-100 projects underway with Dow, Amazon, and Centrica. Those three offtake relationships span industrial heat, data center power demand, and a UK utility partner, and each depends on a fuel route that starts with enriched uranium and ends in coated particle form.

The two ends of that route are now under one commercial arrangement: enrichment in Ohio, fabrication in Tennessee. Domestic HALEU enrichment has been the binding constraint on advanced reactor developers whose designs cannot run on conventional LEU, and the Piketon plant is the point where X-energy's requirement is being placed.

Inverter models that held an FCC grant on July 28 can still be sold, installed, and used, Electrek reported, and retailers are cleared to keep moving previously approved inventory.

The draft leak moved US solar hardware stocks. Electrek reported gains of as much as 17% at Enphase, roughly 11% at SolarEdge, and about 7% at Sunrun. Tesla traded flat.

Domestic supply covers a minority of demand. Intertek CEA estimates that US factories are on track to meet 40% of combined solar and battery demand next year.

Three offshore wind leases in U.S. waters will be cancelled under a USD 1.22 billion settlement between RWE and the Trump administration, with the proceeds routed into LNG and gas-fired power projects, Offshore Engineer OEDigital reported.

Four comparable arrangements preceded it this year under the administration's campaign against U.S. offshore wind development. None was larger, the outlet said.

Work on RWE's U.S. projects had already halted last year, a stoppage the outlet attributed to the administration's moves against the industry.

Most of the money traces to a single seabed tract. An auction run by the Biden administration drew USD 1.1 billion from RWE for acreage off New York; the two other leases together cost USD 163 million, according to the same report.

A 16% stake in a Louisiana LNG project accounts for USD 900 million of the redirected spending. RWE also placed a USD 300 million turbine order covering 15 gas peaker plants it has queued across the U.S.

"Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense," Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, adding that it should not depend on costly subsidies or on technologies unable to meet current demand.

Set aside the RWE deal and the administration has agreed this year to hand back roughly USD 2.7 billion to TotalEnergies, Ocean Winds, Invenergy and Duke Energy, alongside the cancellation of nine federal leases, Offshore Engineer OEDigital reported.

Pony.ai's fourth-generation heavy-duty truck cut autonomous driving hardware costs by about 70% compared with the previous generation, according to Electrek.

The company plans deployment of 500 to 1,000 Gen-4 autonomous heavy-duty trucks over the next two to three years, Electrek reported. Those units are earmarked for three uses in China: long-haul freight, bulk commodity transportation and port logistics.

Robotruck-driven revenue exceeded USD 10 million in Q1 2026, up more than 30% year over year, per Electrek.

The fleet foundation is already in place. More than 200 trucks have been deployed since November 2025, and they have handled more than a billion tonne-kilometres of freight since then, Electrek reported. The hardware cost reduction applies to the latest generation of that platform.

Pony.ai has worked on autonomous trucks in China and the Middle East since 2018, partnering with SANY for series production, according to Electrek.

The African Energy Chamber (AEC) reaffirmed its support for Venezuela's hydrocarbon development strategy in high-level meetings with government and industry officials, according to World Oil, as the country steps up efforts to attract upstream oil and gas investment following recent energy sector reforms.

The chamber's delegation was led by Executive Chairman NJ Ayuk and Senior Vice President Verner Ayukegba, World Oil reported. The group met Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, Minister of Hydrocarbons Paula Henao, PDVSA President Héctor Obregón and other senior officials.

The talks followed the publication in July of regulations implementing Venezuela's Organic Hydrocarbons Law. According to World Oil, the government says the rules are intended to give a clearer framework for future oil and gas investment and to support efforts to rebuild production.

The capital requirement attached to that rebuild is large. Industry estimates cited by the chamber suggest Venezuela will require approximately USD 183 billion in upstream and related infrastructure investment between 2026 and 2040 to reach its long-term production target of 3 MMbpd, World Oil reported.