A forecast is not a plan. A storage target is not a molecule. And a press release about “diversified supply” does not fill a cavern in Bavaria when the cargo is sitting in the Pacific because Seoul or Dhaka paid more. As of late September 2026, the European Union is heading into the heating season […]
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Mercedes-Benz is no longer talking about “transformation.” It is talking about survival in Germany. WirtschaftsWoche, citing three people familiar with the talks, reports that Mercedes wants about €800 million in German labor-cost savings — roughly $911 million at current rates. Options on the table include longer hours without extra pay, cuts to holiday and Christmas […]
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Europe spent a decade congratulating itself for pushing coal to the edge of the power system. Then it priced itself back onto the fuel it spent political capital destroying. Benchmark Dutch TTF gas prices spiked above €80 per megawatt-hour this month, the highest in three years, after the Iran conflict choked LNG shipments through the […]
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The wind industry is approaching a structural inflection point. Early fleets in Europe and the United Kingdom are aging faster than advertised, composite blade waste is outrunning recycling capacity, and decommissioning liabilities are coming due just as subsidy structures change. Two recent posts by Peter Clack capture the twin problems: rapid performance decay well short […]
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The global diesel squeeze just absorbed another shock. Overnight into Sunday, Ukrainian drones reached the Gazprom Neft Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya — about 16 miles, or 25 kilometers, from the Kremlin — during what Russia called the largest drone barrage of 2026. This was not a one-off raid on a storage tank. It was […]
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Hamburg-based Enerparc AG, one of Europe’s largest independent solar park owners, filed for insolvency at the Hamburg Local Court. On September 7, 2026, the court appointed restructuring attorney Stefan Denkhaus of BRL as provisional insolvency administrator. Operations at the parks are continuing while administrators try to stabilize the group. Enerparc reports about 5.5 GW of […]
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American oil executives have spent months warning that a prolonged disruption of the Strait of Hormuz would eventually produce a fuel crisis rather than a simple crude shortage. They now say that moment has arrived. Commercial inventories of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel have been drawn down for more than six months. Strategic crude reserves […]
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The green-steel project was sold as the industrial proof of Net Zero: replace coking coal with hydrogen, swap blast furnaces for electric arc furnaces, keep the mills, cut emissions, and lead the world. In Germany, the United Kingdom, and across the EU, that story is colliding with energy prices, missing hydrogen, cheap imported steel, and […]
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Berlin is talking to its own energy companies about filling gas storage without the government walking into the market and buying molecules itself. That is the story Bloomberg reported today, and it is the tell that Germany’s summer refill has not gone to plan. Officials have been discussing how Uniper SE and SEFE — both […]
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Volkswagen’s board has approved the largest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history: about 100,000 jobs gone by 2030, a slashed model lineup, and four German plants—Emden, Zwickau, Hanover, and Audi’s Neckarsulm—facing a phased wind-down between 2031 and 2034. That is not a cyclical downturn. It is what happens when energy policy prices a manufacturing nation […]
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