Europe's energy bills stay high as fresh data lands on EV residuals and power use

Follow the Money reported on 30 September that the sentence in von der Leyen's State of the European Union address announcing a new Congress of Europe was cut after the fact. The version first posted to the Commission's website said the Congress "will bring together thinkers and writers, artists and scientists, citizens, and civil society". Those words were not spoken, and were later removed from the written text too.

A Commission official told the outlet the intention to involve civil society was unchanged. The omission, the newsletter says, reopens an old complaint from civil society groups about business access to the Commission. That is the newest item in the dossier, and everything else bearing on European industry and energy prices is dated 29 or 30 September.

The strongest numbers this week come from Transport & Environment, whose analysis CleanTechnica covered on 29 September. In the four largest EU markets, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, 2025 used-car transaction data shows a 12.9 percentage point depreciation gap between combustion and electric cars. T&E says five variables are left out of the industry's calculations. Adjust for them and the gap falls by 80 per cent, to 2.6 percentage points. Subsidies that lower EV purchase prices and acquisition taxes that raise them for fossil-fuel cars account for 5.2 points of the reduction, and falling new electric car prices should take off another 5.1 points.

Stef Cornelis, who directs T&E's electric fleets and freight programmes, is quoted in the piece. "The industry is painting an overly simplistic picture of EV depreciation to justify opposing EU fleet electrification targets," he said. T&E wants leasing firms to offer longer terms and carmakers to standardise battery health certificates, and it backs the upcoming Corporate Clean Vehicles Regulation.

Two country-level data points in the same piece cut the other way from the industry line. Used EV values in Ireland rose almost twice as fast as petrol and diesel year on year in July 2026, per the country's largest online car marketplace, and German used BEV sales rose 64 per cent year on year in the first seven months. None of that settles what industry pays for power today.

On the supply side, Japan's Helical Fusion told reporters on Tuesday that it expects preliminary power-on tests at its Helix HARUKA demonstration reactor in 2027, according to The Asahi Shimbun. Construction of the first spiral coil at the National Institute for Fusion Science site in Toki, Gifu Prefecture, started early this year and is largely complete. The company said a second coil and a liquid-metal wall blanket would follow before power-on tests of the completed integrated facility around 2030.

It plans a 50 MW net-output successor, HELIX KANATA, with full-scale investment in the 2030s, and CEO Takaya Taguchi said a commercial plant could come as early as the 2040s, subject to cost, safety and construction-speed hurdles. The Japanese government has designated fusion as one of 17 strategic sectors and plans 3.1 trillion yen, about $19.7 billion, in public and private funding by the 2040 financial year.

On the demand side, a paper presented at the SOSP '26 symposium on 28 September argues that chasing GPU utilisation in inference clusters can raise energy use. The authors, from a group including Prasoon Sinha and Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, describe EnerTune, which models per-model performance and power and the draw of colocated models on shared GPUs, then uses an energy-aware bin-packing algorithm to pick placement and configuration.

The abstract claims energy reductions of 1.4 to 2.3 times and power-draw reductions of 1.3 to 2.6 times against state-of-the-art baselines, while still meeting performance SLOs. It is a research result, not a deployment, but it is the kind of figure data centre operators and their electricity suppliers now argue over.

"Robots have been running blind for fifty years," Tech.eu quotes Inbolt as saying. "Fixing that isn't about better hardware. It's about giving every robot"

Tech.eu reported on 30 September that Inbolt, a Paris industrial robotics company founded in 2019 by Rudy Cohen, Albane Dersy and Louis Dumas, raised 11 million euros in a round led by Shift4Good, with Bridges Climate Transition Partners and existing investors BNP Paribas Développement and Ora Global. Total funding is now 30 million euros.

Tech.eu says the technology pairs 3D vision with a hardware-agnostic AI layer that adjusts robot control loops in real time, and that it is deployed on more than 200 robots in over 100 factories across three continents, with customers including Bosch, Beko, Flex, Ford, Stellantis and Toyota. The company is targeting data centre and electronics manufacturing.

Lenovo, meanwhile, used a paid post in the South China Morning Post on 30 September to push "Industry 5.0", citing the European Commission's definition of human-centricity, sustainability and resilience. It claims a Singapore logistics customer achieved up to 40 per cent faster order processing and a 30 per cent cut in energy consumption after integrating AI and autonomous robots. It is vendor material, and the numbers are the vendor's own.

Outside the industrial beat, University College Dublin said on 30 September that a study in Nature, involving 137 researchers from 64 countries in the Bat1K consortium, examined 103 bat genomes including 42 newly generated chromosome-level assemblies, plus 44 fossil bats. The conclusion: bats most likely originated in Europe during the late Paleocene, roughly 65 to 60 million years ago. Professor Emma Teeling, a co-founding director of Bat1K, said the field finally has a phylogenetic tree after decades of conflicting findings.

What the week does and does not show

Two of the eight dossier items are not about energy or industry at all, and one is a design essay. That is worth saying plainly, because the temptation in a week like this is to stitch unrelated items into a single thesis.

The T&E numbers are the most consequential for European industrial policy because they attack a figure that leasing companies use when pricing deals. If depreciation is overstated by 10 points, lease rates are wrong, and the cost of switching a fleet to electric is overstated with them. T&E's own framing is that binding EU fleet targets create the predictability that lets lessors manage residual values, and that member states with outdated car tax systems would be pushed to reform. That is a policy argument built on the group's own modelling, and the industry calculation it criticises has not been published alongside it in the dossier.

The fusion and GPU items are further out. Helical Fusion's 2027 test is a milestone, not a power plant, and 70 years of research have not produced a commercially viable reactor, as The Asahi Shimbun notes. EnerTune's savings are measured against named baselines in a paper, not audited on a live cluster.

Marcin Wichary's essay on modular industrial dashboards, published on 30 September, is a reminder of what the control room looked like before any of this was software. He photographed panels at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Fernmeldemuseum and tram museum in Stuttgart, a railway museum in Nuremberg, Warsaw's train museum and the DASA Museum in Dortmund. "I imagine have by now all been replaced by software," he writes, and asks readers who know more to get in touch. The panels are gone. The bills are not.