OCTA’s hydrogen buses still had years of service life when their depot fuel system became unusable. Hydrogen transit depends on much more than the bus.
The Orange County Transportation Authority is spending another $27.6 million on hydrogen infrastructure as it expands its fuel-cell bus fleet from 10 buses toward 50. Read the announcement quickly and it sounds like ordinary fleet growth: more buses require more fueling capacity. OCTA’s history makes the story much less straightforward. … [continued]
About $100B in shareholder value vanished across hydrogen, eVTOL and SMR bets after my underlying technology warnings were already public.
The Financial Times supplied an interesting prompt this week. Short sellers have made an estimated $2.1 billion betting against Oklo, NuScale and Nano Nuclear, while $30.3 billion of their combined market value has disappeared since the three small modular reactor developers peaked in October 2025. I have been writing for … [continued]
Replacing a working gasoline vehicle can create a short manufacturing carbon debt while avoiding years of much larger combustion emissions.
“The greenest car is the one already built” has been one of the more durable arguments against replacing internal combustion cars with EVs. It sounds sensible enough. Manufacturing a new vehicle has a carbon cost, while continuing to drive an existing car avoids another manufacturing event. But that framing quietly … [continued]
Ontario should build clean energy and flexibility first, then size new nuclear to the durable gap that remains.
Ontario needs a lot more electricity. Demand hit 145.6 TWh in 2025, up 4.4% in a year, and IESO’s reference case gets to 250 TWh by 2050. But its own range runs from 207 to 297 TWh. That’s not a rounding error. It’s a completely different buildout depending on which … [continued]
Germany’s 6 GW hydrogen headline shrinks sharply once the reservations and planned network are unpacked.
Germany’s hydrogen industry finally has a demand number it can put in a headline: nearly 6 GW of paid reservations on the country’s emerging hydrogen core network. FNB Gas presented the reservations and customers’ willingness to pay as a strong indication that the hydrogen economy is gathering momentum. Six gigawatts … [continued]
New nuclear becomes financeable by shifting construction, financing or revenue risk toward governments, state institutions and regulated electricity customers.
Nuclear power works. It produces low-carbon electricity, avoids the health burden of fossil-fuel combustion, provides firm generation and can operate for many decades. My skepticism about building large new nuclear fleets has never depended on pretending otherwise. The more interesting question is why countries that have built nuclear successfully have … [continued]
Across 25 assessed power systems, planning, markets and project pipelines are consistently more mature than the delivered portfolios needed to provide dependable flexibility.
Grid flexibility is easy to mistake for a technology market. One jurisdiction announces several gigawatt-hours of batteries, another creates a new ancillary-service product, and a third launches a capacity auction, pumped-hydro program or demand-response target. Those are meaningful signs of activity, but they do not answer the harder question: can … [continued]
Europe is closing passenger-car hydrogen stations while AFIR rules and grants support new dual-pressure sites that retain 700-bar capability.
Europe’s public hydrogen refuelling network is not growing, but shrinking slightly. It is, however, changing shape. The part built for passenger cars is shrinking, while a new generation of dual-pressure stations is carrying 700-bar capability forward into the bus and truck layer. Germany closed 36 first-generation hydrogen refuelling stations during … [continued]
Lower Saxony’s decision point is not the next fuel-cell repair. It is whether to recapitalize a dedicated hydrogen system after the evidence has moved.
Lower Saxony’s hydrogen trains will probably not be retired because a politician announces that battery-electric multiple units were the better technology. They will be retired when the bill arrives for extending the life of an underused, specialized hydrogen system and the state has to compare that cost with buying the … [continued]
Germany’s hydrogen strategy changes the molecule while preserving much of the gas-system infrastructure, institutional logic and public-risk model.
Germany’s hydrogen strategy keeps producing numbers that sound like market evidence until the subsidy structure is examined. Its latest hydrogen freight program attracted 526 applications seeking €455 million from a €220 million fund, including 71 applications for refueling stations and 455 for vehicles or fleets. That sounds like pent-up commercial … [continued]
