Five items this week. China’s Wave 2 rare earth controls reimpose today, restoring the full extraterritorial licensing framework after a six-month suspension that built up a substantial backlog of EU manufacturer applications. EU battery storage grew tenfold in four years and grid-scale installations reached a majority of new capacity for the first time. The global copper market is forecast to swing from a 178,000-tonne surplus in 2025 to a 150,000-tonne deficit in 2026, a reversal driven by ore grade depletion rather than a demand event. Meshtastic, the open-source LoRa mesh project, has passed hundreds of thousands of active nodes and demonstrated multi-day resilience in 2024 and 2025 disaster events. And the EU parts-pairing software ban is now in force, making it illegal for manufacturers to use firmware to disable third-party replacement components.
- China’s Wave 2 rare earth export controls reimpose today, extending a 12-element licensing framework to its full extraterritorial reach after a six-month suspension.
The October 2025 package, covering five additional heavy rare earth elements (holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, and ytterbium) alongside controls on processing equipment and technical know-how, was suspended in May 2026 for trade negotiations. That suspension expires on 10 November 2026. The framework now covers 12 elements across the heavy rare earth spectrum. The 0.1 per cent rule applies at the component level: any product manufactured outside China containing Chinese-origin rare earth material worth 0.1 per cent or more of total product value requires a Chinese government export licence before it can cross a border. Of roughly 2,000 licence applications submitted by EU companies during the six-month suspension window, just over half had been approved by the halfway point, with actual processing times stretching well beyond the statutory 45-day limit.
Why it matters: Manufacturers who treated the suspension as a supply reprieve are re-entering a queue that was already backlogged before today’s reimposition. The price pressure has not yet reached retail, but the conditions for it are now fully in place. For context on the elements and product categories affected, see our rare earths and critical minerals buyers guide. Our neodymium driver headphones piece, published today, covers the specific category most exposed to Wave 2 price movement.
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Rare Earths – US Geological Survey; IEA Critical Minerals Market Review 2026 – IEA
- EU battery storage capacity has grown tenfold in four years, with grid-scale costs falling 45 per cent in 2025 alone.
Solar Power Europe reports that the EU installed 27.1 gigawatt-hours of new battery storage in 2025, a twelfth consecutive record year, lifting total installed capacity from under 8 GWh at end of 2021 to 77.3 GWh today. Grid-scale installations accounted for the majority of new build for the first time, at 55 per cent, with projects now profitable without subsidy support. March 2026 alone saw 1.4 GW deployed across seven large projects in Germany, France, Belgium, and Scotland, more than Europe’s full-year total of only a few years prior. Residential batteries fell 6 per cent to 9.8 GWh, a second consecutive year of decline.
Why it matters: Grid-scale battery dominance changes the household electricity calculation. Large batteries arbitrage cheap midday solar against peak-hour prices at scale, and in markets where 6 per cent of hours already see negative wholesale prices (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain), the gap between what the grid pays for power and what households pay for it will widen further. A household without storage pays peak retail rates while the grid clears surplus. The economics of a home battery system are driven by this spread, not by subsidies.
Source: Solar Power Europe: EU Battery Storage Outlook 2026 – Solar Power Europe
- The global copper market is forecast to swing from a 178,000-tonne surplus in 2025 to a 150,000-tonne deficit in 2026, a reversal of more than 300,000 tonnes driven by declining refined production growth.
The International Copper Study Group projects the reversal as concentrate availability becomes a bottleneck, with refined production growth falling from 3.4 per cent to 0.9 per cent. The structural cause is ore grade depletion: average copper grades have fallen below 0.7 per cent, down from the 1 to 2 per cent range historically, meaning miners must process exponentially more rock per tonne of refined metal. Slow permitting and a thin project pipeline compound the constraint.
Why it matters: The demand side of the copper story is well understood: electrification, AI infrastructure, and grid expansion are all pulling consumption upward. The supply side is what the market has been slow to price. A surplus-to-deficit swing of this scale in a single year, driven by grade depletion rather than a demand disruption, is the kind of structural signal that sets a floor under prices for years rather than months. For the long-term demand case, see Why Copper Is the Quiet Protagonist of the AI Boom.
Source: International Copper Study Group: Market Forecast – International Copper Study Group
- Meshtastic, the open-source LoRa mesh radio project, has passed hundreds of thousands of active nodes globally, with real-world deployments demonstrating multi-day communications resilience when cellular and internet infrastructure has failed.
Meshtastic runs on hardware costing EUR 20 to 80 per node: small LoRa radio boards that form a decentralised mesh network, relaying encrypted text messages and GPS positions across 1 to 3 km in urban environments and beyond 20 km line-of-sight, with no subscription, no infrastructure dependency, and no amateur radio licence required for the licence-exempt bands in common use. Nodes operated continuously for days during the 2024 North Carolina hurricane response and 2025 Texas flood events, carrying mutual-aid traffic after commercial networks were down. Each additional node extends range and redundancy; the network gets more useful as density grows.
Why it matters: Satellite connectivity provides communications when you can afford the subscription and when the operator is serving your location. Mesh radio provides it when the grid is down, when the cell towers are damaged, and when no commercial service exists at all. It is infrastructure you own outright, built from repairable off-the-shelf hardware, with no recurring cost. The entry point is low enough that equipping a household and two neighbours is a one-evening project.
Source: Meshtastic Project – Meshtastic
- The EU parts-pairing ban is now in force across all member states, making it illegal for manufacturers to use software to prevent third-party replacement parts from functioning.
The Right to Repair Directive, transposed into national law by 31 July 2026, prohibits manufacturers from requiring proprietary authentication before a replacement component will operate in devices including washing machines, refrigerators, electronic displays, mobile phones, tablets, and servers. Manufacturers must supply spare parts, tools, and repair documentation to independent repairers for up to 10 years from date of sale. The directive targets integrated-ecosystem manufacturers whose previous practice was to use firmware to steer consumers back to proprietary service channels.
Why it matters: The parts-pairing ban does not make a poorly built object worth repairing. It makes a well-built one worth buying, because the repair path is now legally protected for a decade rather than dependent on manufacturer goodwill. An object with an enforceable 10-year parts supply does not depreciate on the same curve as one without it. Durability and repairability have always been genuine quality signals; they are now also legal obligations in the world’s largest consumer market. For the broader argument, see Why Right to Repair Is Not About the Environment.
Source: EU Right to Repair Directive: Summary – EUR-Lex / European Union