The Danube fell to roughly 10 centimetres at Budapest on Monday, well under the 33 centimetres that had stood as the record low since 2018. Hungary's Paks plant, normally close to half the country's electricity, was running at 240 megawatts out of 2,000, and Romania shut one of Cernavodă's two reactors as flow dropped to a third of the July average.
Cooling water, not fuel or capital, is capping Central European baseload this week. Three of France's 57 reactors shut in the July heatwave for the same reason.
What forces those shutdowns is usually regulatory rather than thermal: discharge temperature limits written to protect river ecosystems bite long before the reactor does.
The responses are physical and improvised: Romania's navy used explosives and rock-filled barges near the Bala Canal to steer flow toward Cernavodă, Hungary banned electric freight trains between 5pm and 10pm, and Dacia and Ford paused production until 19 August. (AP via ABC News, Carbon Brief)
Energy Transition
Five countries set August solar records, and prices rose anyway
Spain generated 259GWh of solar on 1 August, France 172GWh, Italy 161GWh and Portugal 28GWh, each a daily record for the month. Germany followed with 450GWh on 2 August.
Weekly wholesale prices still cleared above €100/MWh in most markets, and Italy reached €197.71/MWh on 3 August, its highest since January 2023. Solar covers midday; heat-driven demand, weak wind and gas storage at 55% of capacity set the price at the margin. (pv magazine)
The Nordics added more solar than wind for the first time
Nordic investors and utilities added more new solar capacity than wind in 2025, and BloombergNEF expects the lead to hold this year. Solar farms are going up near the Arctic Circle, on northern Scottish rooftops, and in the Faroe Islands.
The logic is seasonal rather than sunny. A northern Finnish project produces about 82% of its annual output between April and September, against 58% in Madrid, which pairs neatly with wind farms that earn their keep in winter. (Energy Connects)
Greenvolt switched on Poland's largest battery
Greenvolt Power inaugurated a 200MW, 800MWh storage plant at Turośń Kościelna near Białystok on 31 July, built from 196 containerised BYD lithium iron phosphate modules and able to answer grid signals within seconds. From 2028 it runs on a 17-year capacity market contract covering 170MW.
Two more are behind it: an identical site at Ełk due in the fourth quarter, and a 600MW, 2.4GWh project at Siedlce. Poland is building the flexibility its coal fleet used to provide, and buying the cells from China to do it. (Energy Global)
Climate Tech
Ore Energy raises $43 million for a battery that rusts
The TU Delft spinout closed a Series A led by Plural and HV Capital, taking its total past $61 million and funding a first manufacturing plant. Its iron-air cells store power for up to 100 hours by rusting and unrusting iron electrodes, using nothing scarcer than iron, water and air.
It has also signed what it calls the largest long-duration storage deal in continental Europe, with Dutch supplier Budget Thuis. Lithium batteries handle hours; weeks like this one are about days. (Tech.eu)
Alfen and CATL commit 5GWh of sodium-ion cells to Europe
The Dutch storage supplier and the Chinese manufacturer extended their 2023 lithium-ion partnership to sodium-ion on 3 August, targeting 5GWh of stationary systems. The cells carry no cobalt or nickel and hold up over 15,000 cycles between -40°C and 70°C.
The companies claim a 30% to 40% cost advantage over lithium iron phosphate, whose prices have climbed about 20% in six months. Slovakia's InoBat, which listed last week, is making the same chemistry bet from the other end of the supply chain. (Energy Storage News)
Batteries out-earned power purchase agreements in July
Swiss consultancy Pexapark found battery revenues rose with July's volatility while long-term renewable contracts barely moved, a reversal of the 2022 pattern. German one-year solar PPAs gained 15.4% to €50/MWh; ten-year contracts rose 3.6% to €36.6/MWh.
Seven-year German battery tolling deals starting in 2028 ended July 5.2% above pre-crisis levels. Volatility is now a storage revenue line rather than only a risk to hedge. (Energy Storage News)
Policy & Regulation
The IEA says Europe is trading fuel imports for technology imports
A commentary published 3 August projects EU fossil fuel imports falling from 55% of supply in 2024 to 40% by 2035, while EU imports of energy technology rise from $65 billion to $165 billion. The Net Zero Industry Act nearly doubled EU manufacturing investment between 2023 and 2024, but China still draws about 70% of global manufacturing investment.
Trade policy is tightening around that gap: the announced trade-weighted tariff across the solar PV supply chain rose ninefold in 2024, to roughly 36%. (IEA)
Southeast Europe's answer to the drought is imports now, batteries later
Montenegro's Pljevlja coal plant went offline on 2 August after a switchyard failure, and Slovenia's TEŠ unit 6 is down until mid-October awaiting turbine repairs in Germany. With hydro and nuclear both constrained, the region is leaning on imports from Central Europe and Greece.
Bulgaria is the exception worth watching: Kozloduy has kept running through the drought, and the country leads the region on installed battery storage. The region is planning its pivot to solar, storage and interconnection during the emergency rather than ahead of it. (Balkan Green Energy News)
Science
Compound river and air heatwaves have tripled since the 1980s
A study of 796 river basins across the United States and Central Europe, published in Nature Geoscience on 30 July, finds heatwaves striking the air and the river at once have roughly tripled since the 1980s. River heatwaves alone grew 114% in frequency, 148% in duration and 95% in intensity between the 1980s and the 2010s.
When the two coincide, water temperature climbs a further 16% and dissolved oxygen falls another 2.9%. Under high emissions, 98.5% of river heatwaves would come paired with atmospheric ones by 2100, which makes this week's Danube a preview rather than an outlier. (Nature Geoscience)
One to Watch
Greece opens a nuclear file
Greece's Council of Ministers has set up an inter-ministerial committee to examine small modular reactors, a reversal for a prime minister who ruled out nuclear power in 2021 on earthquake risk. Kyriakos Mitsotakis framed the brief as "timely scientific investigation" rather than a decision to build anything.
Greece is currently the country its neighbours import from when the Danube runs dry, which is a reasonable argument for looking at firm capacity. Watch whether the committee produces a feasibility study with dates attached, or stays a signal to Brussels and to investors that Athens is open to the technology. (World Nuclear News)