It's Monday. The machine Victoria just picked to help move past its coal country runs on compressors and turbines, the same spinning steel the Latrobe Valley has tended for generations. What is new is the working fluid: carbon dioxide, squeezed to a liquid on charge and released back through a turbine on demand.
In today's edition:
⚡ Big Story: A CO2 battery for Victoria's first long-duration storage
🔌 Quick Hits: A home-battery subscription, DOE's transmission math, and Poland's first offshore wind
💰 Capital Stack: Fusion lands its first public stock, plus a 2.8 GWh European battery
🏛️ Policy Watch: A tax-credit reprieve, a threat to FERC's independence, and Greece's balcony-solar opening
📊 Chart of the Day: A year of clean-energy cancellations, counted in jobs
The Big Story
Victoria bets on a CO2 battery for long-duration storage
Victoria's State Electricity Commission and Italian clean-tech company Energy Dome will build the state's first long-duration storage facility, a 20 MW / 200 MWh system that uses compressed carbon dioxide rather than lithium-ion cells. The plant will sit at SEC Energy Works, a 143-hectare site at Hazelwood North in the Latrobe Valley, the heart of Victoria's retiring coal fleet, and is Australia's first commercial deployment of closed-loop compressed-CO2 storage. Planning and design have begun, with early community consultation underway.
"Our CO2 battery delivers 10 to 12 hours of clean, dispatchable power, using proven compressor and turbine technology familiar to the Latrobe Valley workforce. This project will help support the region's transition from coal while maintaining the engineering skills that have powered Victoria for generations."
The system charges by compressing CO2 into a liquid and discharges by expanding it back through a turbine in a sealed loop, delivering 10 to 12 hours of dispatchable output, well beyond the two-to-four-hour batteries that dominate Australia's fleet.
It leans on conventional rotating equipment, compressors and turbines, that the Latrobe Valley's coal-plant workforce already knows how to run and maintain.
Energy Dome's first commercial CO2 battery, a matching 20 MW / 200 MWh plant in Sardinia, has operated for about a year with utility Engie as offtaker.
The company also has projects advancing with Google in Ireland (23 MW / 200 MWh) and with Salt River Project in Arizona (19 MW / 190 MWh, targeted for 2029), and ranked as the highest-placed non-lithium firm in Sightline Climate's January LDES supplier leaderboard.
Source: Energy-Storage News
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Three today, spanning a new way to pay for a home battery, Washington's latest transmission math, and a first for Polish offshore wind.
Palmetto launched a standalone home-battery subscription, leasing residential batteries on a 12-year term from about $98 a month across 25 states, a storage-as-a-service model that strips the upfront cost out of home backup and bill management. pv magazine USA
The DOE released a draft National Transmission Needs Study finding that new interregional links, especially between ERCOT and its neighbors and between the Eastern and Western interconnections, hold the most value for easing congestion that added $12 billion to US wholesale power costs in 2024; comments run through Sept 7. Utility Dive
Baltic Power fed its first electricity into Poland's grid, making ORLEN and Northland Power's 1.2 GW project the country's first offshore wind farm, with 54 of 76 turbines installed and full commissioning due this autumn to cover roughly 3% of Polish demand. CEENERGYNEWS
The Capital Stack
Fusion lands its first pure-play public stock
General Fusion has completed its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III and will begin trading on Nasdaq as GFUZ on July 13, making it the first publicly listed pure-play fusion company. The Vancouver-based firm enters public markets with about $150 million in cash to fund its Lawson program, whose LM26 machine, the first magnetized-target-fusion demonstration built at commercially relevant scale, is targeting key technical milestones through 2028. It is a rare public-market test of investor appetite for pre-commercial fusion at a moment when AI-driven power demand is pulling capital toward every corner of generation.
Source: StockTitan
Also in the capital stack:
Giga Storage secured financing for its 700 MW / 2.8 GWh "Green Turtle" battery project in Belgium, one of Europe's largest BESS financings, backed by a 10-bank consortium plus InfraVia, with construction set to start in September. ESS News
Policy Watch
A federal court ended a 13-year fight over how solar investment tax credits are valued, a ruling developers say defuses the risk of a retroactive IRS clawback that could have destabilized the tax-equity market financing US solar and storage, keeping billions in existing deals intact. pv magazine USA
Former FERC chairs from both parties warned that the Supreme Court's June 29 Trump v. Slaughter ruling, which expands the president's power to fire regulators at will, could erode FERC's independence and even cost it a quorum, injecting the kind of market uncertainty that, as one put it, "decreases the market certainty necessary to ensure critical investment" in grid infrastructure. Utility Dive
Greece opened a public consultation on its first self-consumption framework, which would legalize up to 800-watt balcony solar and standalone home batteries for own-use, simplify grid-connection rules, and speed a smart-meter rollout to pull more households and energy communities into the distributed-energy market. CEENERGYNEWS
Chart of the Day
A year of clean-energy cancellations, counted in jobs.
Nearly half a million potential jobs have been lost as 216 major clean-energy generation and manufacturing projects were scrapped, closed, or downsized between January 2025 and May 2026, according to a new report from the business group E2.
Source: Canary Media, July 10, 2026, using data from E2.
Who We Follow
And you should too!
Loved it? Forward it.
And reply back with some news and stories we should include tomorrow!