LG Chem is pursuing a recovery in battery materials and expanding its semiconductor and automotive materials while seeking a year-end decision on petrochemical restructuring, with customer production schedules determining how quickly its newer businesses can grow.
LG Chem's expanding battery business is cushioning the group against another petrochemical downturn, but its latest results show that stronger shipments alone are insufficient to restore profitability. The company is pursuing more specialized chemicals and battery materials as pressure returns to its commodity operations.
Electric vehicles (EVs) represent the single-most effective starting point for the automotive industry's net-zero transition, as their energy efficiency is nearly four times that of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, according to Adam Chen, President of Foxtron Vehicle Technologies.
Scope 3 emissions are emerging as a major test of corporate management capabilities, requiring companies to move beyond carbon accounting and translate data into measurable supply chain action. Taiwan's Pegatron is tackling the challenge through digital tools, targeted supplier engagement, and collaborative decarbonization initiatives, said Min-hsiang Chen, senior manager at Pegatron's Quality and Sustainability Development Center, at the 2026 Net-Zero Sustainability Summit on November 4.
Taiwan's deep geothermal sector is reporting fresh progress after a 2,049-meter well that reached temperatures of 140 degrees Celsius was completed in a challenging metamorphic rock zone in the eastern county of Taitung. The breakthrough strengthens the case for deep geothermal energy as a valuable baseload renewable power source alongside solar and offshore wind.
With Taiwan's electricity prices poised to rise, large power users set to bear the brunt, and the government planning to broaden the definition of large power users, pairing electricity supply with energy storage has become a global trend. However, as Taiwan's energy storage market faces competition from low-cost lithium battery cells, whether government subsidies can translate into actual profits has become a focus for many local supply chains.
California startup Reflect Orbital plans to reflect sunlight from space onto designated areas of Earth at night, targeting solar power, nighttime search-and-rescue and lighting markets through a "Sunlight as a Service" model. The company aims to deploy up to 50,000 large mirror satellites by 2035, but its first demonstration satellite and recent ground tests have raised concerns over potential light pollution.
As AI and unmanned systems see wider adoption, the military's reliance on electricity continues to grow, making energy transition critical to maintaining combat capabilities. The South Korean Army made its debut at Smart Energy Plus (SEP) 2026, showcasing microgrids integrating solar power, energy storage systems (ESS), and hydrogen fuel cells, along with hydrogen-powered tactical vehicles and hydrogen fuel-cell drones to reduce dependence on external power grids.
The aggressive deployment of infrastructure-scale AI projects is rapidly driving up compute demand as chip architectures continue to scale across an expanding ecosystem of data-center racks. At the same time, sustaining those massive buildouts is pushing one of the industry's most critical bottlenecks beyond raw compute toward power delivery and thermal efficiency.
Doosan Enerbility is strengthening its position in the AI-driven power infrastructure market, backed by 12 gas turbine orders in the US and an expanding nuclear energy portfolio. At Smart Energy Plus (SEP) 2026 in South Korea, the company showcased technologies spanning gas turbines, large nuclear reactors, small modular reactors (SMRs), and offshore wind, highlighting delivery speed, manufacturing capacity, and long-term maintenance as increasingly critical competitive factors.
Power shortages and a shortage of high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) technicians in the US are slowing AI data center construction and making delivery schedules harder to predict, Delta Electronics chairman Ping Cheng said at an investor conference on October 29. Delta will continue developing HVDC and solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) systems to pursue opportunities in data center power supply and energy efficiency.
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