Northvolt raised more than $13 billion on the promise of a European battery industry. It filed for Chapter 11 in November 2024 with $5.8 billion of debt and about $30 million in cash, and went into Swedish bankruptcy in March 2025, the largest in modern Swedish industrial history. Eighteen months on, the pieces have nearly all been sold. On September 25 the last valuable one found a buyer. Refinyx, a Stockholm startup, came out of stealth by buying Northvolt’s recycling technology: a portfolio of 134 patents and the 13,000-square-foot pilot and lab facility in Västerås.

Energy Vault is buying the project portfolio of Goshe Energy Storage, a Boulder, Colorado developer of utility-scale batteries. The deal adds 15 US projects totaling more than 2.3 GW to Asset Vault, the unit through which Energy Vault owns and operates storage instead of just building it for others. No price was disclosed. The shares rose on the news. Most of that 2.3 GW is pipeline, and pipeline is cheap to announce.

H2SITE has won €3.4 million (NOK 39.1 million) from Enova, Norway’s state climate fund, to build a commercial-scale ammonia-to-power system for ships. The project, called HydraNord Power, will produce a 700 kW net unit that cracks ammonia into hydrogen on board and feeds it to fuel cells. The system can make up to one tonne of hydrogen a day. It’s aimed at auxiliary and hybrid power on deep-sea vessels and offshore operations: the electricity a ship needs for everything except main propulsion.

Two next-generation geothermal companies moved closer to the grid on the same day. Quaise Energy was picked for up to $25 million in Department of Energy support for its superhot plant in Oregon. Sage Geosystems chose Ormat’s Blue Mountain power plant in Nevada as the site for its next commercial-scale enhanced geothermal system (EGS). Different technologies, different business models. Same destination: firm power, around the clock, from rock that conventional geothermal can’t use.

Willdan Group is buying Mantis Innovation, a Houston energy services firm, for $285 million in cash. It’s a big step for Willdan, an engineering and energy efficiency consultancy that mostly works for utilities and public agencies. Mantis gives it a much stronger foothold with private commercial and industrial customers, data centers among them. Mantis employs more than 220 people and expects about $120 million in net revenue this year, with adjusted EBITDA margins in the low 20s.

An Coimisiún Pleanála has written to the operator of Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg, Co Clare, asking it to redo the ecological paperwork behind a ballroom. Clare planners approved the building back in February. It’s a single-storey hall of about 1,240 sq m, seating 320, replacing the marquee the resort currently throws weddings in. The approval carried a condition about Vertigo angustior, the 2mm narrow-mouthed whorl snail that lives in the dunes behind the course and is listed under Annex II of the EU Habitats Directive.

The future of shipping may be powered by an idea that is thousands of years old: wind. Maersk has agreed to install a 35-meter rotor sail on one of its 8,700-TEU container ships. The technology, developed by Anemoi Marine Technologies, is expected to be fitted by mid-2027 and tested during the vessel’s regular commercial operations. Unlike a traditional fabric sail, a rotor sail is a tall, rotating cylinder that uses wind to generate additional forward thrust.

Every conversation about decarbonizing container shipping starts with the engine. Dual-fuel LNG or dual-fuel methanol, ammonia later, and a newbuild order that locks the answer in for twenty-five years. It’s the decision that gets the press release. For the compliance math a European carrier actually faces this decade, it isn’t the decision that moves the number most. FuelEU Maritime has been in force since January 2025. It doesn’t regulate fuel choice directly.

The slow destruction of Venice by motor traffic has a name that residents use without needing to explain it. Moto ondoso is the wave motion generated by powered boats, and it is doing measurable structural damage to a city built on brick, timber piles, and Istrian stone that were never designed to be hit repeatedly at the waterline. The mechanism is straightforward. Wake washes against the quay walls and building foundations, scours out the mortar, and exposes the brick.

The scene repeats itself at every water expo in Tel Aviv. A delegation arrives, badges printed with names nobody at the booth can pronounce, and within ten minutes the brochures are open on the table and somebody is pointing at a spec sheet. The conversation is rarely about the product on display. It is about whether the thing can be built at scale in a province with twelve million people and a shrinking aquifer.