Britain has unveiled a plan to streamline the development of clean energy projects, aiming to accelerate the transition to renewable power, meet climate targets, and create jobs. The initiative addresses longstanding obstacles such as grid connection delays and a complex planning system that have hindered progress on renewable energy expansion…

The global aluminium market is moving from stress toward something closer to outright shortage, and the Iran war has accelerated that shift in a way that could hit far beyond the metals sector itself. Aluminium sits inside a huge range of industrial chains, from construction, packaging, and transport to transmission infrastructure, autos, defense, and the energy transition.

When supply is disrupted in a market that was already thinly buffered, the consequences do not stay confined to smelters and traders. They start to affect manufacturers’ ability to source basic industrial metal at all.

ASML’s next phase of expansion in the Eindhoven region is colliding with a constraint that most advanced economies assumed they had left behind: basic access to grid capacity. The company’s plan to add a major new campus, one that could ultimately support tens of thousands of additional jobs, sounds like a straightforward industrial growth story in a country that has spent decades nurturing the “Brainport” technology cluster.

Instead, it has become a case study in how electrification, digital infrastructure and industrial policy now depend on something far more prosaic than capital or talent: whether the local network can physically deliver enough power at the right place and time.