Batteries

The solar farm has permits, financing, a signed land lease, and grid-tie equipment sitting in a Pennsylvania warehouse. The developer cannot break ground. PJM Interconnection — the grid operator covering thirteen states from Chicago to the Atlantic — closed its queue in 2022 and only reopened it on April 29, 2026. The developer’s project is now one of 811 in the new cycle, behind hundreds of gigawatts of generation waiting for engineering studies under PJM’s reformed cluster process. ...

Every Machine in China’s Battery Line Is Chinese A procurement manager at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters is sourcing cells for the next ID-series platform. The most competitive bids on her desk come from China — and the gap is widening. Not because European batteries don’t exist as a concept, but because every factory that was supposed to make them is now bankrupt, shuttered, or repurposed. ...

The 10,700-Ton Hole in Glencore’s Cobalt Supply A cathode materials procurement manager in Shenzhen stopped waiting for Glencore’s containers from Kolwezi in February. Now she places weekly cobalt orders from a warehouse 120 kilometers away, on the Wuxi Stainless Steel Exchange, competing with every other buyer whose African supply just got rationed. ...