News briefs curated from February 2026 by the editors of POWER, highlighting key developments across global power markets, technology, finance, and energy infrastructure.
Hatch and Hydrostor Partner to Deliver World’s Largest Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage Project. Global engineering firm Hatch and long-duration energy storage (LDES) developer Hydrostor announced Feb. 25 a strategic project execution partnership and equity investment agreement to advance Hydrostor’s Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) technology globally. Hatch will take an equity stake in Hydrostor and lead design and execution for the flagship Willow Rock Energy Storage Center in California. In February, the 500-MW/4,000-MWh Willow Rock project—slated to become the largest A-CAES facility in the world—received final permitting approval from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and is designed to deliver eight hours of continuous discharge to the grid, providing long-duration reliability capacity as California’s electricity demand grows. Hydrostor’s A-CAES technology stores energy using compressed air and water in underground caverns, requiring no lithium or other battery materials, and the company is targeting groundbreaking at Willow Rock in 2026. Hatch joins existing Hydrostor equity investors Goldman Sachs Alternatives, CPP Investments, and Canada Growth Fund. Separately, Willow Rock has also signed a 50-MW offtake agreement with California Community Power on behalf of six community choice aggregator members, and deepened a strategic technology and equity collaboration with Baker Hughes, which will integrate its turbomachinery capabilities—covering up to 1.4 GW of A-CAES projects—into Hydrostor’s core design offering.
Rolls-Royce SMR Taps Yokogawa for Fleet-Wide Control Systems. Rolls-Royce SMR and Yokogawa Electric Corp. on Feb. 2 announced a strategic agreement to co-develop and deliver the data processing and control systems (DPCS) for the Rolls-Royce SMR’s global reactor fleet. Yokogawa’s scope will include design engineering, validation and qualification, hardware procurement, system build and testing, and installation and commissioning. Work will be executed primarily from Yokogawa’s Runcorn, Cheshire facility alongside engineering centers in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. Rolls-Royce SMR has been selected as preferred bidder by Great British Energy–Nuclear to build the UK’s first SMRs at Wylfa, Ynys Môn—a site expected to deliver up to 1.5 GW of low-carbon generation—and by Czech utility CEZ to deploy up to 3 GW of new nuclear capacity in the Czech Republic. Yokogawa committed to “considerable investments” in the UK nuclear supply chain as part of the agreement.
Soluna Energizes 83-MW Wind-Powered Computing Campus in South Texas. Soluna Holdings announced Feb. 9 that it began energization of Project Kati 1, an 83-MW behind-the-meter Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing campus in Willacy County, South Texas, powered exclusively by the Las Majadas wind energy project. The facility will build out in two phases: Kati 1A (48 MW, fully online early second quarter [Q2] 2026) and Kati 1B (35 MW, complete Q3 2026), the latter including a 12-MW co-deployment with Cormint Data Systems across eight modular data center units. Full completion is targeted in fall 2026 at a projected $17.3–$19.6 million in annual revenue and 3.5 exahashes per second (EH/s) of hashrate capacity, representing a more than 67% increase in Soluna’s total compute capacity.
DOE Awards $19 Million to Five Companies for Used Nuclear Fuel Recycling R&D. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy announced awards on Feb. 5 of more than $19 million to five U.S. companies for research and development (R&D) of recycling technologies for used nuclear fuel, a resource of which less than 5% of potential energy is extracted after five years of operation in a commercial reactor. The DOE projects that recycling could increase resource utilization by 95%, reduce waste volume by 90%, and decrease the amount of uranium needed to operate reactors. Projects will last up to three years with a minimum 20% cost share required from each recipient. The five awardees are: Alpha Nur, to recover highly enriched uranium (HEU) from research reactor spent fuel and transform it into high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for reuse in small modular reactor designs; Curio Solutions, to develop a process to produce uranium hexafluoride gas from used fuel; Flibe Energy, to study electrochemical methods to process used nuclear fuel; Oklo, to study heavy element deposition in molten salt to optimize a pyroprocessing plant design; and Shine Technologies, to develop an integrated process design incorporating transport, storage, disposal, and hydroprocessing of used fuel. “Used nuclear fuel is an incredible untapped resource in the U.S.,” said Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
TotalEnergies Agrees to Acquire 50% of EPH’s 14-GW European Gas Power Portfolio in €5.1B All-Share Deal. TotalEnergies disclosed in its Feb. 10 full-year 2025 results announcement that it signed an agreement to acquire 50% of a portfolio of flexible gas-fired power generation assets with more than 14 GW of gross capacity from Czech energy group EPH, in an all-share transaction valued at €5.1 billion. The deal, which is expected to close mid-2026, accelerates TotalEnergies’ gas-to-power integration strategy in Europe, where the company ended 2025 with 7 GW of net installed flexible gas capacity contributing 16.7 TWh of net electricity production. TotalEnergies’ Integrated Power segment produced 48 TWh of net electricity in 2025, up 17% year-on-year, and the company is targeting electricity production of more than 60 TWh in 2026—an increase of approximately 25%—enabled in part by the EPH portfolio. In February, TotalEnergies also signed long-term power supply contracts with Google covering 30 TWh over 15 years in the U.S. and 1 TWh over 21 years in Malaysia.
In This Issue
Full issueValmet to Supply Flue Gas Heat Recovery System for Veolia’s Biomass CHP Plant in Poland. Finland-based Valmet on Feb. 18 said that it will deliver a flue gas condensing heat recovery system and automation solution to Veolia’s EC4 combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Łódz, Poland, as part of Veolia’s “HeatUp!” project, which is part of the company’s broader GreenUp decarbonization program. The three-stage condensing system will capture more than 50 MW of thermal energy from flue gases and return it to Łódz’s district heating network, increasing renewable heat production at EC4 by one-third without burning additional biomass. Valmet’s scope includes the condensing plant, a condensate treatment system that converts recovered flue gas condensate into process water, and an extension of the existing Valmet DNA automation platform already in service at the facility. Startup is scheduled for the third quarter of 2027. The project is a key milestone in Veolia’s plan to achieve a complete coal phase-out across the Łódz district heating system by 2031, and it will be supplemented by a new gas-fired unit and a heat accumulator. Financial terms were not disclosed.
—Sonal Patel is senior editor at POWER magazine (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine).
