It's Tuesday. A storage integrator can hold a record backlog and still lose the year to a welding robot.
In today's edition:
🔋 Big Story: Fluence reserves 206 GWh of Chinese cells
⚡ Quick Hits: Generac's Amazon warrant, a 33% tandem cell, a peaker denied
💰 Capital: iron-air borrows against its tax credits
📋 Policy Watch: Texas widens the large-load door
📊 Chart of the Day: diesel at a record
Presented by Moiz Kapadia
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The Big Story
Fluence reserves 206 GWh of Chinese cells as its US ramp stalls.
Eve Energy disclosed in a September 18 Shenzhen filing a non-binding framework with Fluence for 206 GWh of battery supply from 2027 through 2031, 16 GWh of it committed for 2027 and 190 GWh reserved after that, Energy-Storage.news reported. Eve said policy or market conditions could still change it. The filing landed two days after Fluence cut fiscal 2026 revenue guidance a second time, to $2.4 billion against an original $3.4 billion, blaming a Houston plant whose automated welding line runs far below target and is still not grid connected.
"We anticipate a deterioration of utility and data center confidence to challenge the future business prospects. The pitch of batteries today is speedy, relatively cheap capacity: If investors do not have confidence, they will pursue alternatives." Jefferies analysts, in a note cited by Latitude Media
The Houston plant, sized for 15 GWh a year of thermal equipment, planned 11 units a day. It managed under one in August and about three in early September on manual welding.
Fluence expects roughly $200 million in losses and $56 million in late delivery penalties this year, against a record $6.4 billion backlog.
Data centers move fastest in the pipeline, 16 GWh last quarter and up 35%, going from lead to contract in under three months against roughly 18 for everyone else.
Foreign Entity of Concern rules bar Chinese battery technology from clean energy tax credits, and with Fluence silent, Energy-Storage.news reasoned the volumes presumably point outside the US.
Source: Energy-Storage.news · Latitude Media
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five from across the stack.
Generac disclosed a long-term Amazon supply agreement and a warrant vesting as payments for data center backup generators accumulate toward $8 billion, with first deliveries expected to total $2.4 billion across 2027 and 2028. Data Center Dynamics
New York regulators approved the $3.26 billion Propel NY line, 90 miles of underground 138 kV and 345 kV cable tying nine substations across Long Island and the city into the system by 2030. Utility Dive
Nanjing University reported a perovskite silicon tandem cell at 33.3%, independently certified at 33.0%, blade coated in ambient air rather than an inert glovebox, removing the barrier to large-area production. pv magazine
North Carolina regulators rejected Duke Energy's 255 MW combustion turbine, calling the data center load growth behind it insufficiently reliable to act on, though the order came without prejudice. Canary Media
Texas utilities have filed only eight of 160 wildfire mitigation plans ahead of a January deadline under House Bill 145, the Texas Tribune reported, as Xcel Energy deployed 97 AI smoke detection cameras in its Southwestern Public Service territory. The Texas Tribune
The Capital Stack
Form Energy borrows against its own tax credits.
Form Energy closed a $270 million facility pairing a revolver with a line that advances against Section 45X manufacturing credits as components come off the line, with an accordion to $1 billion. Barclays structured it with seven other banks. Turning a production credit into working capital is the financing question every US component maker now faces. It funds iron-air manufacturing at Form Factory 1 in Weirton, West Virginia, after August's $750 million Series G.
Source: Form Energy
Also in the capital stack:
Kairos Power took up to $100 million from Samsung C&T, $70 million equity, the rest in-kind engineering, toward Hermes 2, the 50 MW reactor at Oak Ridge meant to deliver the first slice of Google's half-gigawatt order by 2030. TechCrunch
Policy Watch
The Texas PUC adopted large load interconnection standards on September 18, dropping a proposed $50,000 per MW fee for a flat $100,000 study fee and stretching the window for reporting unused capacity from six months to 24, Utility Dive reported. Roughly 474 GW sits in ERCOT's queue, about 90% of it data centers. Utility Dive
Finland proposed ranking connection requests in constrained areas across four priority groups, households and sub-1 MW data centers first, standalone grid-charged storage last, with consultation open to October 9 and a January 1 start. ESS News
Chart of the Day
Diesel sets a record, and the generators are on order.
US retail diesel averaged $6.29 a gallon on September 14, the highest nominal price since EIA began the series in 1994, with refineries at 97% utilization and distillate inventories 13% below their five-year seasonal average. Source: EIA Today in Energy · September 18, 2026
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