Sand, Mirrors, and the Storage Gap

A thirteen-meter steel silo filled with 2,000 tonnes of crushed soapstone just survived one of Finland's coldest winters on record. Electricity prices swung from €3 per megawatt-hour to €373 in a single week , according to reports from the municipality. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent , Interesting Engineering reported. The technology is deceptively simple: electricity heats air, which circulates through pipes embedded in stationary sand, transferring heat into the material . No lithium. No cobalt. No rare earths.

Pornainen, population 5,000, switched on the world's largest sand battery in 2025, built by Polar Night Energy for district heating company Loviisan Lämpö, and the battery can cover roughly a month of the town's summer heating demand or a week in winter , OilPrice.com reported. It matters because Europe is racing to solve a storage crisis that threatens to undermine its entire renewable buildout—and thermal batteries like this one offer a path forward that doesn't depend on Chinese supply chains or critical minerals markets trading at all-time highs.

Can Europe Store What It Generates?

The continent's energy storage capacity crossed a symbolic threshold in the second quarter of this year. Installed energy storage capacity in Europe surpassed the continent's nuclear fleet during Q2, with cumulative installations ending 2025 at 102.7 GW and continued activity in the first half of 2026 pushing total capacity above Europe's roughly 105 GW nuclear fleet , according to Energy Storage Europe's annual market monitor. A record 13.5 GW / 26.4 GWh of new electrochemical energy storage was deployed during 2025 .

Yet the buildout remains far behind what's needed. The EU's installed storage fleet reached 40 GW and 77 GWh at the end of 2025, and under the Solar+ scenario, capacity is projected to quadruple to 171 GW by 2030, while energy capacity climbs eightfold to 598 GWh , SolarPower Europe reported. The European Commission signed its first tripartite agreement on energy storage between EU Member States, financial institutions and industry that will boost installed capacity by more than 30 gigawatts over the next two years, aiming to more than triple the region's 12 GW of energy storage installed in 2025 to 45 GW by 2028 , according to Industrial Info Resources.

The gap is already costing the continent clean electricity. While the share of renewable energy resources grew from 23 percent in 2020 to 25.2 percent in 2024, the bloc's storage capacity remains too limited to absorb it all, forcing Europe to waste renewable energy surpluses generated during seasonal peaks and increase fossil-fuel power generation , Euronews reported.

India faces the same mismatch at a more acute scale. The Government informed Parliament that India curtailed 8,133 GWh of solar power during April–June 2026 to maintain grid security . Total renewable curtailment in Q1 2026 reached around 470 GWh, of which 300 GWh stemmed directly from transmission constraints, with the Northern region accounting for 178 GWh and the Western region for 122 GWh , energy think tank Ember found. On March 30, 2026 alone, the country lost 34 GWh of clean generation, equivalent to the daily power use of about 5 million urban middle-class households .

What Happens When Sunlight Becomes a Service?

California startup Reflect Orbital received permission from the Federal Communications Commission in July to test a more radical idea. The company was granted permission to test a satellite fitted with an 18-metre-wide mirror, which the company hopes will help power solar farms and provide light at night , OilPrice.com reported. The company plans to launch its Eärendil-1 demo satellite into low Earth orbit later this year, and once there, it will unfurl a giant thin-film reflector that will act as a mirror to reflect sunlight back to the dark side of the Earth, illuminating a roughly three-mile-wide spot , according to Dezeen.

In May 2025, the startup raised a $20 million Series A to accelerate development of its satellite . The startup plans to sell this reflected sunlight to companies and municipalities at up to $5,000 an hour . If successful, Reflect Orbital hopes to launch another 1,000 satellite mirrors by the end of 2028, and a total of 50,000 by 2035 .

Astronomers are alarmed. "Even if just the test satellite works as planned, it will sometimes appear far brighter than the full moon," warned one expert , Interesting Engineering reported. A constellation of such mirrors would be devastating to astronomy and dangerous to astronomers, with the brightness of these mirrors potentially matching the sun's surface and posing a risk of permanent eye damage . A group of astronomers produced a fact sheet stating, "There are already solutions right here on Earth to many of the problems 'sunlight as a service' purports to solve" , Scientific American noted.

Why Is the Bank of England Banning Coal Bonds?

The Bank of England will stop accepting bonds issued by companies deriving revenue from thermal coal mining as eligible collateral in its lending operations from October 2026 , OilPrice.com reported. The Bank said it would no longer allow commercial banks to use bonds linked to thermal coal as collateral when borrowing money from the financial institution, suggesting that any bonds linked to thermal coal are now considered too risky to appear on its balance sheet .

To date, over 200 globally significant financial institutions have formal divestment policies restricting investment in thermal coal mining and/or coal-fired power projects . The Bank of England's move is narrower but more explicit. Rather than issuing vague guidelines about climate risk, the central bank drew a clear line: thermal coal revenue means your bonds don't qualify , according to Crypto Briefing.

Italy is moving in the opposite direction—on nuclear. The legislation does not itself authorise the building of any reactors; instead it hands Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government a mandate to issue implementing decrees within 12 months that would set the rules for the construction and operation of new plants, the management of radioactive waste and nuclear safety oversight , Brussels Signal reported. Nuclear electricity production is targeted for around 2035 . Energy Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin said last month he expected the process to be completed by end-2027 , Reuters reported.

Does China's Solar Milestone Change the Math?

Solar power will soon surpass coal as China's largest source of generation capacity, with the baton to be passed at some point in the third quarter of this year, the China Electricity Council said in its half-year report, and at the end of June, solar's 1,274 gigawatts of capacity was just shy of coal's 1,275 gigawatts , Bloomberg reported.

The crossover is symbolic, not operational. The average capacity factor for solar in China is about 14 percent and for coal 50 percent, so coal power plants still generate about 3.5 times as much electricity as solar power . But the trajectory matters. The growth of solar and other clean sources is now faster than the growth in total power demand, which has started to push down emissions from fossil fuels , one analyst told The Independent.

China expects to add more than 400 million kilowatts of new power generation capacity throughout 2026, with new energy contributing over 300 million kilowatts to that total, and by the end of the year, combined wind and solar power capacity will account for half of China's total installed power generation capacity, with solar capacity alone eclipsing coal for the first time in history , China Daily reported.

Europe's wind turbine makers, meanwhile, are examining whether consolidation can help them compete with Chinese manufacturers. European wind turbine manufacturers are assessing whether larger tie-ups can strengthen their position as Chinese rivals expand beyond their home market and intensify competition in global wind power, with the debate gaining momentum after the European Commission updated merger guidance in April to place greater emphasis on scale, innovation and internal market resilience , according to a Financial Times report cited by Traders Union. Chinese suppliers, led by Goldwind, installed 120 gigawatts last year—over 70% of global new capacity—while European installation was under 20 gigawatts, with Chinese turbines 20%-40% cheaper in export markets .

What Changed This Week

Europe's storage capacity crossed the nuclear threshold, confirming that batteries and pumped hydro now represent a larger installed base than atomic power—though duration and dispatchability remain wildly different. Finland's sand battery completed a full year of operation through a brutal winter, proving thermal storage works at commercial scale without rare earths. China's solar capacity pulled nearly even with coal, a symbolic milestone that doesn't yet translate to generation parity but signals the speed of the country's renewable buildout. And the Bank of England formalized what markets already knew: thermal coal bonds are being priced as stranded assets.

What to Watch

Reflect Orbital's Eärendil-1 satellite is scheduled to launch before the end of 2026, with the FCC approval now in hand. Italy's Chamber of Deputies is expected to finalize the nuclear framework law in the coming weeks, after which the government has twelve months to draft implementing decrees. The European Commission's tripartite storage agreement targets 45 GW of installed capacity by 2028, with the next round of national pledges due later this year. And India's Q2 2026 curtailment data, expected in August, will show whether transmission constraints are worsening as solar additions accelerate.