Elon Musk announced Monday that Tesla is laying off 9 percent of salaried employees at the company. This is not the first round of sweeping layoffs at Tesla — the most recent came after the SolarCity acquisition. But this appears to be the biggest so far.

This week, we'll discuss Elon's new quest for profitability.

Then, we'll cover the neverending saga in Washington over saving coal plants. The Trump administration is now trying to invoke national security to prop up closing coal and nuke plants — and the nation’s top energy regulators are giving it the cold shoulder.

Finally, The Energy Gang is

It’s time to take off the rose-tinted blockchain glasses. 

The transparency and decentralization that accompanies blockchain helps provide innovation to the energy industry; however, it is by no means a one-size-fits-all solution that will necessarily transform the electricity sector.

Blockchain will face significant hurdles to truly disrupting organized power markets. While there is room for blockchain or a similar technology in the energy market of the future, scaling timelines are dependent on technical and regulatory barriers. Blockchain could have outsized implications for monitoring Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) and natural gas markets, and it seems likely that these use cases will be first to commercialize.

Blockchain energy evangelism

A U.K. flexible power developer recently chose Fluence, a Siemens and AES Energy Storage joint venture, to supply three 20-megawatt storage systems to serve the country's increasingly renewables-heavy grid.

U.K. Power Reserve will use the 1-hour duration Advancion systems to fulfill the first half of its obligation under the 2016 Capacity Market auctions. They are expected to be operational this winter. The 15-year capacity contract will anchor the storage business case, but the system will play in other grid services markets in the meantime.

The move comes at a time of transition for the British grid.

The nation is phasing out

SQN Capital Management issued a statement Thursday that is has released solar module manufacturer Suniva from bankruptcy, and plans to "restart operations as soon as possible."

Suniva filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last April. Shortly after, the Georgia-based solar manufacturer filed a Section 201 trade case, seeking relief from "destructive" foreign trade practices. At the time, Suniva was majority Chinese-owned.  

Financial firm SQN backed Suniva through the trade petition last year, which resulted in the Trump administration imposing a 30 percent step-down tariff on virtually all imported solar products.

SolarWorld Americas, formerly the U.S. arm

Italian energy giant Enel plans to install 10-megawatt-hour batteries on Russian railways to help trains move more quickly and smoothly along the rail network.

The move to create what was termed as a “first-of-its-kind innovative storage system” will allow the Russian rail network to accommodate bigger and faster trains without spending money on grid upgrades, Enel said. 

Enel’s CEO and general manager, Francesco Starace, inked a deal on the project with Belozerov Oleg Valentinovich, general director of Russian Railways, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last month. 

“The two players will team up mainly for the development of innovative energy storage systems to be

Bloom Energy’s filing for an initial public offering this week has offered long-time watchers of the well-funded Silicon Valley fuel cell firm reams of hitherto unavailable data. 

Now it’s up to would-be investors to decide whether the data paints a clear picture of how Bloom will turn its $1.5 billion in equity investment into a public company that won’t also collapse under the weight of its business ambitions. 

Here’s our take on the key data points in Bloom’s S-1, starting with the top-line figures.

A $2.3 billion deficit, and no profitability for the foreseeable future 

Bloom’s financials revealed that the

Where it’s beneficial, state utilities in Sub-Saharan Africa can leverage distributed private-sector business models to extend the grid to areas without electricity access or make critical upgrades —without going further into debt.

In the industrialized world, public electric utilities in regulated markets are tasked with a universal service mandate, an obligation to extend and maintain service to all customers in their service territory.

In contrast (with a few notable exceptions) their Sub-Saharan African counterparts are either unregulated, are not necessarily obligated to provide universal service, have such serious cost-recovery issues that they cannot fulfil the obligation, or face unenforced or unfunded mandates to maintain and