... and it took 150 firefighters 4 days to put out Australian local authorities said on Monday. The Victorian Big Battery project, where the fire started on Friday morning, is made up of 210 Megapacks. It was built by French renewable energy giant Neoen using Tesla's 300 megawatt battery packs and is on track to be operational by the end of next year.

China’s top policy makers urged an easing of the aggressive measures taken to reduce carbon emissions. The Politburo’s recommendation comes as coal, China’s principal energy source, is in short supply. Coal prices in China have climbed toward record levels as the country’s electricity providers struggle to keep the power on during heat waves.

The U.K. government has picked its preferred type of small nuclear reactor for a £170 million demonstration program. Alongside electricity, this type of reactor can produce clean hydrogen and heat. Britain’s decision to explore advanced modular reactor technology comes days after plans for new, large-scale plants were thrown into doubt.

The ECB president spoke Thursday as the central bank put into action the new monetary policy strategy. The measures reinforce the ECB’s efforts to convince markets that it will keep ultra-loose policy, including record-low negative interest rates. The ECB’s promise of continued ultra-loose policy sets it apart from some of the world’s biggest central banks.

Demand for exchange traded funds investing in senior loans has rocketed this year as investors hunt for respite from rising inflation. A net $7.3bn has been pumped into the sector so far this year. The trend is linked to rising inflation and interest rate expectations in the US and elsewhere, leading investors to favour floating-rate loans over fixed-rate bonds.

The government is committed to shutting down the country’s three nuclear plants over the next decade or so. Switzerland will lose a third of its current energy generation and become more dependent on imported energy, just as it faces the growing risk it may decouple from the EU’s electricity grid thanks to an increasingly fractious diplomatic tussle with Brussels.

The government plan includes a potential nationalization of EDF’s nuclear and hydropower activities, along with a stock-market listing of a minority stake for its wind, solar, electricity distribution and retail business. The new publicly traded entity would be able to consider a “significant capital increase as soon as it’s listed” and to sell bonds to finance projects.

Five of the advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) plants are due to be shut down in the next three years, removing more than 5.2GW of the current 8.9GW of the UK's nuclear energy capacity. Only one new plant is under construction, the 3.2GW Hinkley Point C in Somerset. The government said it was “committed to the future of nuclear energy”.

Have politicians made a fundamental miscalculation when it comes to the contribution of electric cars? In 6,000 of the 8,760 hours a year, more electricity from fossil-fuel power plants will be needed in addition to green electricity. Then the real CO2 emissions could be much higher than the politicians estimate, in total even twice as high.

The 11 largest banks in the EU have €532 billion of investments and loans financing everything from extraction to transportation of fossil fuels, equivalent to 95% of their total common equity tier 1 capital. A sudden drop in value of these “fossil-fuel assets” would deplete the banks’ capacity to absorb losses and might even leave them vulnerable to bankruptcy.

The central bank said bond purchases under the €1.85tn pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP) would continue in the three months to September. Although the economy was “gradually reopening” and inflation was expected to continue rising this year, the central bank expected price growth to fade again next year.

The rich across the globe have big ambitions for sustainable investing. More than half still believe they have to sacrifice returns to invest in a sustainable way. The results from the study come after a survey last year showed the new generation of wealthy people prioritizes financial returns over do-good strategies just as much as their parents did.