Sunday, 1 November 2026

The European Investment Bank (EIB) will provide up to USD 90 million to finance the first phase of Egypt's Dandara solar and battery storage project, according to Ecofin Agency.

That first phase will pair 569 MWp of solar capacity with 100 MWh of battery storage, Ecofin Agency reported.

Separately, Ekurhuleni has started construction on a R360 million solar plant at Springs Fresh Produce Market, according to BusinessTech Africa.

The Springs plant will supply Ekurhuleni's municipal network rather than individual traders directly, and no reduction in traders' tariffs has been announced, BusinessTech Africa reported.

Elementum Energy Ltd won backing for its 57.6-MW Danube wind project in Ukraine's 700-MW wind auction, renewablesnow.com reported.

The Ukraine-based operator priced its offer at EUR 0.0595 per kWh, or USD 0.0666 per kWh.

Nine firms contested 12-year contracts awarded through Ukraine's Feed-in Premium scheme. Under that scheme, generators sell their power on the open market, collect a top-up when prices drop below the bid level, and hand back a share of the gain when prices climb above it.

Run by state-owned JSC Guaranteed Buyer, the tender drew 93 bids worth 1,218 MW, 1.7 times the volume on offer.

TotalEnergies disclosed an USD 891 million write-down against the value of its German wind interests in its latest third-quarter results, according to Recharge.

Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanne said some of the group's German concessions currently had no viable path to monetise them profitably for the company and its customers, Recharge reported.

Pouyanne described merchant offshore wind in Germany as a challenge, citing higher costs across the industry and grid connection delays.

Masdar signed a memorandum of understanding with Invest New Zealand to explore investments of up to NZD 1 billion, or USD 585 million, in solar PV, wind power and battery storage projects in New Zealand, according to Energetica India.

The agreement establishes a framework to identify, develop and advance renewable energy opportunities in the country, Energetica India reported.

The MoU does not name individual projects, locations, generation capacities or how the investment would be split across solar, wind and battery storage, according to Energetica India. The parties have not disclosed a development timeline or confirmed whether the agreement is legally binding.

A review published in the journal Catal argues that graph neural networks (GNNs), a branch of artificial intelligence, are reshaping electrocatalyst design by learning material properties directly from atomic structure.

The review describes GNNs as representing molecules or crystals as graphs, with atoms treated as vertices and chemical bonds or spatial proximity relationships treated as edges, an approach that avoids manual feature engineering. Through message passing, the models learn topological and geometric features, capturing atomic-scale connectivity along with distance and angular relationships, without that manual step.

According to the review, preserving topological integrity gives GNNs an advantage over traditional methods, which compress three-dimensional structures into fixed-length descriptor vectors and sacrifice spatial fidelity.

Representatives from Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan met in Istanbul to discuss the Kambarata-1 Hydropower Plant Project, with support from the World Bank, according to Event Registry.

Participants reviewed the next implementation steps for the planned 1,860 MW Kambarata HPP-1, which is to be built on the Naryn River in the Kyrgyz Republic.

The project is being implemented jointly by the governments of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

The parties examined key technical aspects of the project and exchanged views on future collaboration and cooperation in the water and energy sector, according to Event Registry.