FuelCell Energy Sinks 14%, Bloom Energy Slides 8% After $225M Share Sale Prices at $21

Daimler Truck laid out what it says Europe needs to move battery-electric and hydrogen trucks from early adopters into mainstream fleets, including public megawatt chargers, truck-ready hydrogen stations and road tolls that reward zero-emission vehicles, with CEO Karin Rådström making the case at the company's Media Night in Hanover, Germany, ahead of IAA Transportation 2026. Mercedes-Benz Trucks held about 38% of Europe's market for locally CO2-free medium- and heavy-duty trucks in the first half of 2026, and customers have driven the eActros 600 more than 160 million kilometers since series production began at the end of 2024. Heavy-duty battery-electric trucks took 2% of Europe's market in 2025, and Daimler Truck estimates about 35% of new trucks would need to run on batteries or hydrogen by 2030 to meet EU CO2 targets. Europe has fewer than 2,000 public truck charge points today, most of them standard CCS chargers, and Rådström said it needs 35,000 megawatt charging points by 2030, along with 1,000 hydrogen stations, up from around 187 today, most of which supply only 350 bar. On cost, she pointed to CO2-based road tolls, saying the toll difference between a diesel truck and an electric truck in Germany comes out to about 33 to 35 cents per kilometer, but only 13 of the EU's 27 member states have adopted CO2-based tolls. Dachser chief development officer Stefan Hohm said the German logistics provider has 25 emission-free delivery areas in Europe and more than 200 battery-electric trucks on the road, including more than 160 Mercedes-Benz Actros models, out of a fleet of more than 15,000, and called grid access and capacity the main pain point. The eActros Lowliner opened for orders Sept. 15, with series production at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Wörth, Germany, set for the second quarter of 2027, and a small series of 100 Mercedes-Benz NextGenH2 fuel-cell trucks enters customer operations from the end of 2026 with Dachser as the first customer. Daimler Truck is asking the EU for an early review of its heavy-duty CO2 regulation, whose 2030 target calls for a 43% cut in CO2 emissions from new heavy-duty vehicles compared with 2019, and puts the cost of falling short at about €120 million in penalties for each percentage point Mercedes-Benz Trucks misses.

Bloom Energy shares surged as much as 15% to a three-month high on Tuesday after fresh evidence the fuel-cell maker is preparing to increase production and a utility unveiled a large fuel-cell proposal. The City of Fremont, California, said in a LinkedIn post that Bloom acquired a 158,000-square-foot facility on Encyclopedia Circle to expand manufacturing operations, a site nearly as large as Bloom's existing 164,000-square-foot plant in Fremont. Bloom has been expanding annual production capacity at Fremont from about 1 gigawatt to 2 GW by the end of 2026, and has said its facilities could ultimately accommodate approximately 5 GW of annual capacity, with each additional gigawatt taking an estimated six to nine months to install and requiring about $100 million to $150 million of investment. Separately, Ameren Missouri on Monday unveiled a 20-year energy plan that includes the addition of 500 megawatts of natural-gas fuel cells by 2030, though Ameren has not selected Bloom as a supplier, making the proposal an opportunity rather than an order. Ameren said it has signed agreements to serve 2.8 GW of aggregate large-load demand by 2030, and Bloom said in August that its AI-infrastructure business included nearly two dozen customers representing about 250 MW of capacity.