Emerald Horizon | Extreme drought is tipping Europe's power supply

Extreme drought is tipping Europe's power supply.

Graz (AT), August 4, 2026 –When Romania's government shuts down car plants to save its own power grid, energy security finally becomes a matter of business location – and Romania is not alone: in Hungary, the Paks nuclear power plant had to go completely offline for the first time in its history due to historically low Danube water levels; in Romania itself, a reactor unit at Cernavodă was shut down; in Switzerland, Beznau went offline; and in France, operators at several sites had to throttle output because the returned cooling water would have placed additional strain on rivers that were already overheated.

The reason is the same in every case: conventional nuclear power plants require large volumes of cooling water drawn from rivers. When the water's temperature rises or its level falls, output has to be reduced. Until now, such outages were mainly a question of grid stability. As of this week, they are also, to a significant degree, a question of economic value creation – as the example of Romania shows.

There, the government has now halted car production. As Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan announced in Bucharest on August 3, Renault subsidiary Dacia and the US group Ford have completely shut down their Romanian plants until August 19. The companies were responding to a government call to voluntarily cut energy consumption. When two well-known automotive plants stand idle for two weeks so that a power grid doesn't collapse, security of supply has definitively become a major factor in where companies choose to operate.

Emerald Horizon CEO Florian Wagner on the matter: "What we're experiencing this summer is a fundamental design flaw of the old energy policy and its technology. During a drought, it's not one pillar of the grid that fails, but two at once: hydropower and nuclear power. Both depend on the same resource. It's precisely this double risk that our technology rules out from the outset."

The SMRX system developed by Emerald Horizon, consisting of ADES (Accelerator Driven Energy Source) and DUALstorePLUS (Emerald Horizon's proprietary energy storage system, which can store both electricity and heat), differs fundamentally in this respect not only from conventional nuclear power plants but also from most other small modular reactor concepts.

ADES is a thorium-based, accelerator-driven, permanently subcritical energy system with 25 megawatts of thermal output. Heat is carried in a closed molten-salt circuit. No water is used for cooling anywhere in the system. Heat, drought, and low water levels therefore have no adverse effect on it.

Added to this are the properties of the subcritical principle: the chain reaction is not self-sustaining but depends on an externally operated particle accelerator. If the accelerator is switched off, the process stops. A meltdown is physically impossible. The fuel is thorium; the concept requires no uranium or plutonium and is designed to avoid transuranic waste.

Shares of Emerald Horizon AG (ticker: SMRX, ISIN: AT0000A3UZE1) have been listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange since June 26, 2026. Subscriptions were already carried out in July 2025 as part of a capital increase at a price of €760 per share. Emerald Horizon therefore began trading on an already-established valuation base.

With the start of trading, the shares became freely tradable for the first time. The associated liquidity premium led to an adjustment toward the €1,000 mark. The price then held around that level for roughly a month with notable trading volume. In connection with the recent news flow, the share reached a level of around €1,150.

Florian Wagner points out that the development since the initial listing comprises two effects that should be considered separately: on one hand, the one-time liquidity premium associated with any listing; on the other, the subsequent share price development driven by news flow. Measured against the consolidation level of around €1,000, the latter amounts to roughly 15 percent. All underlying data is publicly available – in the securities prospectus, in the Vienna Stock Exchange's price data, and in the financial analysis referenced below.

On July 8, 2026, the Hamburg-based research house NuWays AG initiated coverage of the company. The analyst rates the stock "Buy" with a price target of €1,300. This rating and price target reflect solely the analyst's own assessment. They do not constitute a statement by Emerald Horizon AG regarding future share price performance.

Florian Wagner: "I already regarded Emerald Horizon as a valuable company before the IPO – one that will solve the problems of energy supply. What has changed since the listing is not the value, but its visibility. The value of this company arose, and continues to arise, from our outstanding employees, and it is created in the lab, in development, and in manufacturing. Every technical milestone on the path to the prototype ultimately turns an expectation into a fact. That is the work of the coming years, and I look at it with great confidence."

Note:

"The information contained in this release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for securities, nor is it a recommendation to buy or sell securities of the company. Under no circumstances is this release, or the information it contains, intended for publication, distribution, or dissemination, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, in or into the United States of America (USA), Australia, Canada, Japan, or South Africa, or any other jurisdiction in which such publication or distribution would be unlawful. Accordingly, this information is not directed, in particular, at "U.S. Persons" (as defined in Regulation S of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933) or at persons resident or located in the aforementioned jurisdictions."

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