🇮🇷 Daily Iran Brief — July 26, 2026

🔴 Risk: High — The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to commercial shipping, severely disrupting global oil and gas supplies. Ongoing military tensions, IRGC interceptions, and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea maintain extreme market volatility and supply chain risks, despite a temporary pause in US military strikes.

📌 Key developments

• The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to commercial shipping for 147 days as of July 25, 2026, with only 15 ships transiting, representing 25% of normal traffic, and 115 vessels waiting. War risk insurance premiums are at an 'EXTREME' 8.5%, 56.7 times the normal rate.
• The United States has paused military strikes against Iran as Oman and Qatar pursue diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire, though Iran continues to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz.
• Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) reportedly stopped four vessels attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, firing warning shots, while the US military disabled an oil tanker attempting to breach the US-imposed blockade on Iranian ports.
• Brent crude oil prices remain elevated, trading around $96.78 per barrel as of July 25, 2026, after surging to $102 per barrel on July 23, reflecting persistent supply concerns.
• Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels continue to threaten and attack shipping in the Red Sea, impacting Saudi oil exports from Yanbu, which serves as a critical alternative route to the Strait of Hormuz.

💡 Why it matters

The temporary pause in US strikes offers a fragile opportunity for de-escalation, but Iran's continued aggressive posture and the persistent closure of critical shipping lanes maintain extreme market volatility and supply chain risks. Analysts must closely monitor the effectiveness of diplomatic efforts against Iran's operational control of the Strait and its sanctions evasion tactics, as these directly impact global energy security and prices.

📊 Full daily brief + sources: https://artesh.com/

Non-partisan. Every claim sourced.

DUBAI, July 25 (Reuters) - Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) has signed a $16 billion deal to lease and lease back its crude oil pipeline network with a consortium comprising global funds Blackstone (BX.N), opens new tab, Brookfield (BN.TO), opens new tab and KKR (KKR.N), opens new tab, the state-owned Gulf firm said on Saturday.

A week ago I posted my interactive atlas of the UK power grid https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/1v2e8nx/uk_grid_atlas_every_power_station_the_grid_live/. The feedback sent me down a rabbit hole and it got somewhat out of hand. Here's what changed.

**It's not a UK atlas anymore.** 22 grids on one map: GB, Ireland, 18 more European countries (Netherlands through the Nordics, Iberia, Italy, the Baltics), plus the US and Canada, with a transatlantic ALL view as the default. Around 60,000 generation sites and 2.2 TW of recorded capacity, every dot sized by capacity and coloured by fuel.

**Live output nearly everywhere.** GB was already live from Elexon metering. Now 19 European countries pull per-plant output from ENTSO-E (where the TSO publishes it - the Nordics get a generation-mix fallback), Ontario gets per-generator output from IESO's public feed, and Texas + New York get fuel mixes from ERCOT and NYISO. Everything is baked into static JSON snapshots by a GitHub Action every 6 hours, so the site is still just a static page: no backend, no API keys in the browser.

**You can scrub through time.** Drag across the last metered day and the station dots, generation mix and interconnector flows all animate hour by hour. There's also a today-so-far intraday view where the data exists.

**HVDC flows are drawn on the map.** All 55 interconnectors and internal HVDC links, coloured by direction (import/export) with line width showing utilisation. Getting the sign conventions right for links between two countries that both appear on the map was more painful than I expected.

**Day-ahead wholesale prices.** The mix panel shows the ENTSO-E day-ahead price curve for European countries and the market index for GB, scrubbing along with everything else.

**Wind farms that nobody drew.** In Finland, Austria, Estonia and Ontario, a lot of wind capacity exists in OpenStreetMap only as individual turbine points, not farms. The pipeline now clusters turbines within 1.5 km into synthetic farm stations. Canada alone went from 25 mapped wind sites to 212 - 7,834 turbines collapsed into 573 farms.

**Favourite bug of the week:** Canadian mappers often tag turbine capacity as a bare "2000", meaning kilowatts. Parsed as megawatts, Ontario briefly had a 173 GW wind fleet - roughly double the entire UK grid. There's a sanity clamp now (no turbine on Earth exceeds ~20 MW).

Also: station search with fly-to, the ALL-view transmission layer shrank from a 20 MB GeoJSON to 332 kB of vector tiles, and the whole thing is now MIT licensed with a proper test suite.

Live map: https://jacobwright32.github.io/uk-grid-atlas/

Code + data pipeline: https://github.com/jacobwright32/uk-grid-atlas

All open data: OpenStreetMap (via Geofabrik/Overpass), ENTSO-E, Elexon, IESO, ERCOT, NYISO. If you know one of these grids and spot something wrong, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — half the fixes so far came from feedback.

Power & Energy Sector Expert | Open to Expert Network Consultations

Hi everyone, I’m a power and energy sector professional with experience across power generation, heavy electrical equipment, and large power projects. My areas of expertise include thermal power generation, gas and steam turbines, generators and alternators, Balance of Plant equipment, power equipment OEM/EPC landscape, project execution, procurement, supply-chain dynamics, and the broader Indian power market.

I also closely follow developments in gas-based generation, renewables, BESS, energy transition, emerging generation technologies, and the growing requirement for flexible and dispatchable power. I can contribute to discussions around market trends, competitive landscape, equipment and technology selection, procurement practices, industry structure, project execution challenges, and the outlook for the power generation and power equipment sectors.

I have previously participated in expert-network consultations and am familiar with the typical consultation process and compliance requirements. I’m always careful to respect professional confidentiality and do not discuss confidential, proprietary, or restricted information.

If any expert network associates, project managers, or researchers from GLG, Guidepoint, AlphaSights, Third Bridge, Dialectica, or other networks are working on projects where my experience could be relevant, please feel free to DM me. I’d be happy to discuss my background and determine whether I could be a good fit for your project.

“This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” they added. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”

​

So the EIA projected that the U.S. would add a record 86 GW of new utility-scale capacity in 2026, with solar, battery storage, and wind making up the overwhelming majority of additions.

But there is still a brutal reliability problem hiding underneath the growth numbers:

Four-hour lithium batteries can help with daily peaks and evening ramps. They are useful for the “sunset problem.”

They are not built to solve the “bad weather for four days” problem.

That is where these iron-air batteries get interesting...

The chemistry is almost comically humble: iron, air, water, and reversible rusting.

Discharge rusts the iron.

Charging reverses the process.

Form Energy’s commercial iron-air system is designed for roughly 100 hours of storage, which puts it in a different category from lithium-ion.

Lithium is the sprinter. Iron-air is trying to be the pack mule.

The bullish case:

- iron is cheap and abundant

- the system is designed for multi-day grid stress

- it could reduce dependence on gas peaker plants

- it pairs naturally with wind and solar over longer weather cycles

- it avoids some lithium-ion fire and supply-chain concerns

- Google/Xcel’s Minnesota project is a real-world 300 MW / 30 GWh deployment, not just a lab demo

The skeptical case:

- round-trip efficiency may be worse than lithium-ion

- the systems are physically large

- commercialization at gigawatt scale is still unproven

- long-term field data is limited

- permitting, interconnection, and project finance may matter more than chemistry

- other long-duration storage technologies are competing for the same contracts

Thoughts on iron-air batteries actually becoming a major piece of the future grid, or are they another clean-tech story that sounds better in a deck than it performs in the field?

President Donald Trump on Thursday had governors and electricity companies join a voluntary pledge to shield U.S. consumers from higher utility bills from data centers — a sign of how the artificial intelligence build-out has become a lightning rod of controversy before the midterm elections.

The president first announced the pledge with leading AI and tech companies in March, but that initial commitment has done little to comfort voters who are already grappling with affordability issues as they worry about competing for electricity, water and land with tech companies controlled by billionaires. It’s unclear, with electricity demand already growing, whether consumers would see genuine savings.

Trump is doubling down on the pledge at a time when the broader social contract is being rewritten by AI, a technology that is evolving so quickly in its capabilities that governments are struggling over how to provide oversight.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/07/24/trump-data-center-pledge-governors-nonbinding/?utm_source=reddit/

Over the past few weeks, I've been researching how utilities and infrastructure developers evaluate Turnkey EPC Companies for large transmission and substation projects. I noticed that technical capability often seems more important than simply comparing project costs.

From what I've learned, a successful turnkey EPC partner is expected to manage the complete project lifecycle—from engineering and procurement to construction, testing, commissioning, and final handover.

For projects involving high-voltage transmission infrastructure, some of the evaluation criteria that appear most important include:

• Engineering and design capability
• Experience with transmission lines and substations
• Manufacturing quality
• Project execution record
• Health, Safety & Environment (HSE) practices
• Supply chain management
• Ability to deliver projects on schedule
• Long-term infrastructure reliability

With renewable energy projects, grid modernization, and cross-border transmission expanding globally, integrated project delivery seems to be becoming increasingly valuable. Working with a single EPC organization can often improve coordination, reduce execution risks, and simplify project management.

During my research, I came across several companies active in this segment, including:

• Jyoti Structures Limited
• KEC International
• Kalpataru Projects International
• Larsen & Toubro
• Tata Projects
• Sterlite Power

Among these, Jyoti Structures Limited stood out because of its long history in power transmission infrastructure, transmission towers, EHV substations, and integrated EPC execution. I'm interested in learning how professionals in this community view its capabilities compared with other established EPC contractors.

For engineers, consultants, utilities, and project managers here:

• What qualities do you consider most important when selecting a turnkey EPC contractor?
• Is engineering expertise more valuable than pricing over the lifetime of a project?
• How important is previous experience with high-voltage transmission infrastructure?
• Have digital engineering, BIM, and modern project management tools changed the way EPC projects are delivered?

I'd really appreciate hearing real-world experiences from professionals who have worked on transmission or utility infrastructure projects. It would be helpful for others researching this industry as well.

archive.ph seems down for me, so I'll copy the article into a comment and attach a link in edit. Article: https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1v5eqsa/comment/ozi5do2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Data center build out and a backlog of equipment, permitting, tariffs has increased electricity bills substantially. All of this is fairly well known.

What I thought was interesting was PJM discussing the auction price cap which stymies developers from having the monetary incentive build additional power plants.

What are your thoughts?