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Brain Stimulation is transforming neuromodulation, from TMS and DBS to closed loop devices, targeting neural circuits for addiction, depression, Parkinsons, epilepsy, and chronic pain, powered by advanced imaging, AI analytics, and the NIH BRAIN Initiative.

Key Points

Brain stimulation uses pulses to modulate neural circuits, easing symptoms in depression, Parkinsons, and epilepsy.

✅ Noninvasive TMS and invasive DBS modulate specific brain circuits

✅ Closed loop systems adapt stimulation via real time biomarker detection

✅ Emerging uses: addiction, depression, Parkinsons, epilepsy, chronic pain

In June 2015, biology professor Colleen Hanlon went to a conference on drug dependence. As she met other researchers and wandered around a glitzy Phoenix resort’s conference rooms to learn about the latest work on therapies for drug and alcohol use disorders, she realized that out of the 730 posters, there were only two on brain stimulation as a potential treatment for addiction — both from her own lab at Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Just four years later, she would lead 76 researchers on four continents in writing a consensus article about brain stimulation as an innovative tool for addiction. And in 2020, the Food and Drug Administration approved a transcranial magnetic stimulation device to help patients quit smoking, a milestone for substance use disorders.

Brain stimulation is booming. Hanlon can attend entire conferences devoted to the study of what electrical currents do—including how targeted stimulation can improve short-term memory in older adults—to the intricate networks of highways and backroads that make up the brain’s circuitry. This expanding field of research is slowly revealing truths of the brain: how it works, how it malfunctions, and how electrical impulses, precisely targeted and controlled, might be used to treat psychiatric and neurological disorders.

In the last half-dozen years, researchers have launched investigations into how different forms of neuromodulation affect addiction, depression, loss-of-control eating, tremor, chronic pain, obsessive compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and more. Early studies have shown subtle electrical jolts to certain brain regions could disrupt circuit abnormalities — the miscommunications — that are thought to underlie many brain diseases, and help ease symptoms that persist despite conventional treatments.

The National Institute of Health’s massive BRAIN Initiative put circuits front and center, distributing $2.4 billion to researchers since 2013 to devise and use new tools to observe interactions between brain cells and circuits. That, in turn, has kindled interest from the private sector. Among the advances that have enhanced our understanding of how distant parts of the brain talk with one another are new imaging technology and the use of machine learning, much as utilities use AI to adapt to shifting electricity demand, to interpret complex brain signals and analyze what happens when circuits go haywire.

Still, the field is in its infancy, and even therapies that have been approved for use in patients with, for example, Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy, help only a minority of patients, and in a world where electricity drives pandemic readiness expectations can outpace evidence. “If it was the Bible, it would be the first chapter of Genesis,” said Michael Okun, executive director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at University of Florida Health.

As brain stimulation evolves, researchers face daunting hurdles, and not just scientific ones. How will brain stimulation become accessible to all the patients who need it, given how expensive and invasive some treatments are? Proving to the FDA that brain stimulation works, and does so safely, is complicated and expensive. Even with a swell of scientific momentum and an influx of funding, the agency has so far cleared brain stimulation for only a handful of limited conditions. Persuading insurers to cover the treatments is another challenge altogether. And outside the lab, researchers are debating nascent issues, such as the ethics of mind control, the privacy of a person’s brain data—concerns that echo efforts to develop algorithms to prevent blackouts during rising ransomware threats—and how to best involve patients in the study of the human brain’s far-flung regions.

Neurologist Martha Morrell is optimistic about the future of brain stimulation. She remembers the shocked reactions of her colleagues in 2004 when she left full-time teaching at Stanford (she still has a faculty appointment as a clinical professor of neurology) to direct clinical trials at NeuroPace, then a young company making neurostimulator systems to potentially treat epilepsy patients.

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“When I started working on this, everybody thought I was insane,” said Morrell. Nearly 20 years in, she sees a parallel between the story of jolting the brain’s circuitry and that of early implantable cardiac devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators, which initially “were used as a last option, where all other medications have failed.” Now, “the field of cardiology is very comfortable incorporating electrical therapy, device therapy, into routine care. And I think that’s really where we’re going with neurology as well.”

Reaching a ‘slope of enlightenment’
Parkinson’s is, in some ways, an elder in the world of modern brain stimulation, and it shows the potential as well as the limitations of the technology. Surgeons have been implanting electrodes deep in the brains of Parkinson’s patients since the late 1990s, and in people with more advanced disease since the early 2000s.

In that time, it’s gone through the “hype cycle,” said Okun, the national medical adviser to the Parkinson’s Foundation since 2006. Feverish excitement and overinflated expectations have given way to reality, bringing scientists to a “slope of enlightenment,” he said. They have found deep brain stimulation to be very helpful for some patients with Parkinson’s, rendering them almost symptom-free by calming the shaking and tremors that medications couldn’t. But it doesn’t stop the progression of the disease, or resolve some of the problems patients with advanced Parkinson’s have walking, talking, and thinking.

In 2015, the same year Hanlon found only her lab’s research on brain stimulation at the addiction conference, Kevin O’Neill watched one finger on his left hand start doing something “funky.” One finger twitched, then two, then his left arm started tingling and a feeling appeared in his right leg, like it was about to shake but wouldn’t — a tremor.

“I was assuming it was anxiety,” O’Neill, 62, told STAT. He had struggled with anxiety before, and he had endured a stressful year: a separation, selling his home, starting a new job at a law firm in California’s Bay Area. But a year after his symptoms first began, O’Neill was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

In the broader energy context, California has increasingly turned to battery storage to stabilize its strained grid.

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Doctors prescribed him pills that promote the release of dopamine, to offset the death of brain cells that produce this messenger molecule in circuits that control movement. But he took them infrequently because he worried about insomnia as a side effect. Walking became difficult — “I had to kind of think my left leg into moving” — and the labor lawyer found it hard to give presentations and travel to clients’ offices.

A former actor with an outgoing personality, he developed social anxiety and didn’t tell his bosses about his diagnosis for three years, and wouldn’t have, if not for two workdays in summer 2018 when his tremors were severe and obvious.

O’Neill’s tremors are all but gone since he began deep brain stimulation last May, though his left arm shakes when he feels tense.

It was during that period that he learned about deep brain stimulation, at a support group for Parkinson’s patients. “I thought, ‘I will never let anybody fuss with my brain. I’m not going to be a candidate for that,’” he recalled. “It felt like mad scientist science fiction. Like, are you kidding me?”

But over time, the idea became less radical, as O’Neill spoke to DBS patients and doctors and did his own research, and as his symptoms worsened. He decided to go for it. Last May, doctors at the University of California, San Francisco surgically placed three metal leads into his brain, connected by thin cords to two implants in his chest, just near the clavicles. A month later, he went into the lab and researchers turned the device on.

“That was a revelation that day,” he said. “You immediately — literally, immediately — feel the efficacy of these things. … You go from fully symptomatic to non-symptomatic in seconds.”

When his nephew pulled up to the curb to pick him up, O’Neill started dancing, and his nephew teared up. The following day, O’Neill couldn’t wait to get out of bed and go out, even if it was just to pick up his car from the repair shop.

In the year since, O’Neill’s walking has gone from “awkward and painful” to much improved, and his tremors are all but gone. When he is extra frazzled, like while renovating and moving into his new house overlooking the hills of Marin County, he feels tense and his left arm shakes and he worries the DBS is “failing,” but generally he returns to a comfortable, tremor-free baseline.

O’Neill worried about the effects of DBS wearing off but, for now, he can think “in terms of decades, instead of years or months,” he recalled his neurologist telling him. “The fact that I can put away that worry was the big thing.”

He’s just one patient, though. The brain has regions that are mostly uniform across all people. The functions of those regions also tend to be the same. But researchers suspect that how brain regions interact with one another — who mingles with whom, and what conversation they have — and how those mixes and matches cause complex diseases varies from person to person. So brain stimulation looks different for each patient.

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Each case of Parkinson’s manifests slightly differently, and that’s a bit of knowledge that applies to many other diseases, said Okun, who organized the nine-year-old Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank, where leading researchers convene, review papers, and publish reports on the field’s progress each year.

“I think we’re all collectively coming to the realization that these diseases are not one-size-fits-all,” he said. “We have to really begin to rethink the entire infrastructure, the schema, the framework we start with.”

Brain stimulation is also used frequently to treat people with common forms of epilepsy, and has reduced the number of seizures or improved other symptoms in many patients. Researchers have also been able to collect high-quality data about what happens in the brain during a seizure — including identifying differences between epilepsy types. Still, only about 15% of patients are symptom-free after treatment, according to Robert Gross, a neurosurgery professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

“And that’s a critical difference for people with epilepsy. Because people who are symptom-free can drive,” which means they can get to a job in a place like Georgia, where there is little public transit, he said. So taking neuromodulation “from good to great,” is imperative, Gross said.

Renaissance for an ancient idea
Recent advances are bringing about what Gross sees as “almost a renaissance period” for brain stimulation, though the ideas that undergird the technology are millenia old. Neuromodulation goes back to at least ancient Egypt and Greece, when electrical shocks from a ray, called the “torpedo fish,” were recommended as a treatment for headache and gout. Over centuries, the fish zaps led to doctors burning holes into the brains of patients. Those “lesions” worked, somehow, but nobody could explain why they alleviated some patients’ symptoms, Okun said.

Perhaps the clearest predecessor to today’s technology is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which in a rudimentary and dangerous way began being used on patients with depression roughly 100 years ago, said Nolan Williams, director of the Brain Stimulation Lab at Stanford University.

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More modern forms of brain stimulation came about in the United States in the mid-20th century. A common, noninvasive approach is transcranial magnetic stimulation, which involves placing an electromagnetic coil on the scalp to transmit a current into the outermost layer of the brain. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), used to treat epilepsy, zaps a nerve that contributes to some seizures.

The most invasive option, deep brain stimulation, involves implanting in the skull a device attached to electrodes embedded in deep brain regions, such as the amygdala, that can’t be reached with other stimulation devices. In 1997, the FDA gave its first green light to deep brain stimulation as a treatment for tremor, and then for Parkinson’s in 2002 and the movement disorder dystonia in 2003.

Even as these treatments were cleared for patients, though, what was happening in the brain remained elusive. But advanced imaging tools now let researchers peer into the brain and map out networks — a recent breakthrough that researchers say has propelled the field of brain stimulation forward as much as increased funding has, paralleling broader efforts to digitize analog electrical systems across industry. Imaging of both human brains and animal models has helped researchers identify the neuroanatomy of diseases, target brain regions with more specificity, and watch what was happening after electrical stimulation.

Another key step has been the shift from open-loop stimulation — a constant stream of electricity — to closed-loop stimulation that delivers targeted, brief jolts in response to a symptom trigger. To make use of the futuristic technology, labs need people to develop artificial intelligence tools, informed by advances in machine learning for the energy transition, to interpret large data sets a brain implant is generating, and to tailor devices based on that information.

“We’ve needed to learn how to be data scientists,” Morrell said.

Affinity groups, like the NIH-funded Open Mind Consortium, have formed to fill that gap. Philip Starr, a neurosurgeon and developer of implantable brain devices at the University of California at San Francisco Health system, leads the effort to teach physicians how to program closed-loop devices, and works to create ethical standards for their use. “There’s been extraordinary innovation after 20 years of no innovation,” he said.

The BRAIN Initiative has been critical, several researchers told STAT. “It’s been a godsend to us,” Gross said. The NIH’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative was launched in 2013 during the Obama administration with a $50 million budget. BRAIN now spends over $500 million per year. Since its creation, BRAIN has given over 1,100 awards, according to NIH data. Part of the initiative’s purpose is to pair up researchers with medical technology companies that provide human-grade stimulation devices to the investigators. Nearly three dozen projects have been funded through the investigator-devicemaker partnership program and through one focused on new implantable devices for first-in-human use, according to Nick Langhals, who leads work on neurological disorders at the initiative.

The more BRAIN invests, the more research is spawned. “We learn more about what circuits are involved … which then feeds back into new and more innovative projects,” he said.

Many BRAIN projects are still in early stages, finishing enrollment or small feasibility studies, Langhals said. Over the next couple of years, scientists will begin to see some of the fruits of their labor, which could lead to larger clinical trials, or to companies developing more refined brain stimulation implants, Langhals said.

Money from the National Institutes of Mental Health, as well as the NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL), has similarly sweetened the appeal of brain stimulation, both for researchers and industry. “A critical mass” of companies interested in neuromodulation technology has mushroomed where, for two decades, just a handful of companies stood, Starr said.

More and more, pharmaceutical and digital health companies are looking at brain stimulation devices “as possible products for their future,” said Linda Carpenter, director of the Butler Hospital TMS Clinic and Neuromodulation Research Facility.

‘Psychiatry 3.0’
The experience with using brain stimulation to stop tremors and seizures inspired psychiatrists to begin exploring its use as a potentially powerful therapy for healing, or even getting ahead of, mental illness.

In 2008, the FDA approved TMS for patients with major depression who had tried, and not gotten relief from, drug therapy. “That kind of opened the door for all of us,” said Hanlon, a professor and researcher at the Center for Research on Substance Use and Addiction at Wake Forest School of Medicine. The last decade saw a surge of research into how TMS could be used to reset malfunctioning brain circuits involved in anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other conditions.

“We’re certainly entering into what a lot of people are calling psychiatry 3.0,” Stanford’s Williams said. “Whereas the first iteration was Freud and all that business, the second one was the psychopharmacology boom, and this third one is this bit around circuits and stimulation.”

Drugs alleviate some patients’ symptoms while simultaneously failing to help many others, but psychopharmacology clearly showed “there’s definitely a biology to this problem,” Williams said — a biology that in some cases may be more amenable to a brain stimulation.

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The exact mechanics of what happens between cells when brain circuits … well, short-circuit, is unclear. Researchers are getting closer to finding biomarkers that warn of an incoming depressive episode, or wave of anxiety, or loss of impulse control. Those brain signatures could be different for every patient. If researchers can find molecular biomarkers for psychiatric disorders — and find ways to preempt those symptoms by shocking particular brain regions — that would reshape the field, Williams said.

Not only would disease-specific markers help clinicians diagnose people, but they could help chip away at the stigma that paints mental illness as a personal or moral failing instead of a disease. That’s what happened for epilepsy in the 1960s, when scientific findings nudged the general public toward a deeper understanding of why seizures happen, and it’s “the same trajectory” Williams said he sees for depression.

His research at the Stanford lab also includes work on suicide, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which the FDA said in 2018 could be treated using noninvasive TMS. Williams considers brain stimulation, with its instantaneity, to be a potential breakthrough for urgent psychiatric situations. Doctors know what to do when a patient is rushed into the emergency room with a heart attack or a stroke, but there is no immediate treatment for psychiatric emergencies, he said. Williams wonders: What if, in the future, a suicidal patient could receive TMS in the emergency room and be quickly pulled out of their depressive mental spiral?

Researchers are also actively investigating the brain biology of addiction. In August 2020, the FDA approved TMS for smoking cessation, the first such OK for a substance use disorder, which is “really exciting,” Hanlon said. Although there is some nuance when comparing substance use disorders, a primal mechanism generally defines addiction: the eternal competition between “top-down” executive control functions and “bottom-up” cravings. It’s the same process that is at work when one is deciding whether to eat another cookie or abstain — just exacerbated.

Hanlon is trying to figure out if the stop and go circuits are in the same place for all people, and whether neuromodulation should be used to strengthen top-down control or weaken bottom-up cravings. Just as brain stimulation can be used to disrupt cellular misfiring, it could also be a tool for reinforcing helpful brain functions, or for giving the addicted brain what it wants in order to curb substance use.

Evidence suggests many people with schizophrenia smoke cigarettes (a leading cause of early death for this population) because nicotine reduces the “hyperconnectivity” that characterizes the brains of people with the disease, said Heather Ward, a research fellow at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She suspects TMS could mimic that effect, and therefore reduce cravings and some symptoms of the disease, and she hopes to prove that in a pilot study that is now enrolling patients.

If the scientific evidence proves out, clinicians say brain stimulation could be used alongside behavioral therapy and drug-based therapy to treat substance use disorders. “In the end, we’re going to need all three to help people stay sober,” Hanlon said. “We’re adding another tool to the physician’s toolbox.”

Decoding the mysteries of pain
Afavorable outcome to the ongoing research, one that would fling the doors to brain stimulation wide open for patients with myriad disorders, is far from guaranteed. Chronic pain researchers know that firsthand.

Chronic pain, among the most mysterious and hard-to-study medical phenomena, was the first use for which the FDA approved deep brain stimulation, said Prasad Shirvalkar, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at UCSF. But when studies didn’t pan out after a year, the FDA retracted its approval.

Shirvalkar is working with Starr and neurosurgeon Edward Chang on a profoundly complex problem: “decoding pain in the brain states, which has never been done,” as Starr told STAT.

Part of the difficulty of studying pain is that there is no objective way to measure it. Much of what we know about pain is from rudimentary surveys that ask patients to rate how much they’re hurting, on a scale from zero to 10.

Using implantable brain stimulation devices, the researchers ask patients for a 0-to-10 rating of their pain while recording up-and-down cycles of activity in the brain. They then use machine learning to compare the two streams of information and see what brain activity correlates with a patient’s subjective pain experience. Implantable devices let researchers collect data over weeks and months, instead of basing findings on small snippets of information, allowing for a much richer analysis.

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Germany Energy Price Hikes are driving electricity tariffs, gas prices, and heating costs higher as wholesale markets surge after the Ukraine invasion; households face inflationary pressure despite relief measures and a renewables levy cut.

Key Points

Germany Energy Price Hikes reflect surging power and gas tariffs from wholesale spikes, prompting relief measures.

✅ Electricity tariffs to rise 19.5% in Apr-Jun

✅ Gas tariffs up 42.3%; heating and fuel costs soar

✅ Renewables levy ends July; saves €6.6 billion yearly

Record prices for electricity and gas in Germany will continue to rise in the coming months, the dpa agency, citing estimates from the consumer portal Verivox.

According to him, electricity suppliers and local utilities, in whose area of ​​responsibility there are 13 million households, made an announcement of tariff increases in April, May and June by 19.5%. Gas tariffs increased by an average of 42.3%.

According to Verivox, electricity prices in Germany have approximately doubled over the year - a pattern seen as European electricity prices rose more than double the EU average - if previously a household with a consumption of 4,000 kWh paid 1,171 euros a year, now the amount has risen to 1,737 euros. Gas prices have risen even more, though European gas prices later returned to pre-Ukraine war levels: last year, a household with a consumption of 20,000 kWh paid 1,184 euros in annual terms, and now it is 2,787 euros. 

Energy costs for the average German household are 52 percent higher than a year ago, adding to EU inflation pressures, according to energy contract sales website Check24. In a press release, the company said the wholesale electricity price was at €122.93 per megawatt-hour in February 2022, compared to €49 this time last year, while in the United States US electricity prices climbed at the fastest pace in 41 years. In addition, electricity prices on the power exchange haven been rising rapidly since Russian troops invaded Ukraine, comparison portal Strom Report said. Costs for heating rose the most, triggered by the high gas price (105 euros per megawatt-hour on the wholesale market) and around 100 USD per barrel of oil – its highest price since 2014. Driving also became more expensive with costs for petrol up 25 percent and diesel 30 percent, Check24 said.

The German government has decided on relief measures for low-income households, including a 200 billion euro energy shield, in response to high consumer energy costs. In July, it will abolish the renewables levy on the power price, saving consumers around €6.6 billion annually. In a reform proposal released this week, the ministry for economy and climate also detailed how it will legally oblige power suppliers to reduce their power bills when the levy is abolished.

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Ontario electricity emissions forecast highlights rising grid CO2 as nuclear refurbishments and the Pickering closure drive more natural gas, limited renewables, and delayed Quebec hydro imports, pending advances in storage and transmission upgrades.

Key Points

A projection that Ontario's grid CO2 will rise as nuclear units refurbish or retire, increasing natural gas use.

✅ Nuclear refurbs and Pickering shutdown cut zero-carbon baseload

✅ Gas plants fill capacity gaps, boosting GHG emissions

✅ Quebec hydro imports face cost, transmission, and timing limits

Ontario's energy grid is among the cleanest in North America — but the province’s nuclear plans mean that some of our progress will be reversed over the next decade.

What was once Canada’s largest single source of greenhouse-gas emissions is now a solar-power plant. The Nanticoke Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant in Haldimand County, was decommissioned in stages from 2010 to 2013 — and even before the last remaining structures were demolished earlier this year, Ontario Power Generation had replaced its nearly 4,000 megawatts with a 44-megawatt solar project in partnership with the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

But neither wind nor solar has done much to replace coal in Ontario’s hydro sector, a sign of how slowly Ontario is embracing clean power in practice across the province. At Nanticoke, the solar panels make up less than 2 per cent of the capacity that once flowed out to southern Ontario over high-voltage transmission lines. In cleaning up its electricity system, the province relied primarily on nuclear power — but the need to extend the nuclear system’s lifespan will end up making our electricity dirtier again.

“We’ve made some pretty great strides since 2005 with the fuel mix,” says Terry Young, vice-president of corporate communications at the Independent Electricity System Operator, the provincial agency whose job it is to balance supply and demand in Ontario’s electricity sector. “There have been big changes since 2005, but, yes, we will see an increase because of the closure of Pickering and the refurbs coming.”

“The refurbs” is industry-speak for the major rebuilds of both the Darlington and Bruce nuclear-power stations. The two are both in the early stages of major overhauls intended to extend their operating lives into the 2060s: in the coming years, they’ll be taken offline and rebuilt. (The Pickering nuclear plant will not be refurbished and will shut down in 2024.)

The catch is that, as the province loses its nuclear capacity in increments, Ontario will be short of electricity in the coming years and the IESO will need to find capacity elsewhere to make sure the lights stay on. And that could mean burning a lot more natural gas — and creating more greenhouse-gas emissions.

According to the IESO’s planning assumptions, electricity will be responsible for 11 megatonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions annually by 2035 (last year, it was three megatonnes). That’s the “reference case” scenario: if conservation and efficiency policies shave off some electricity demand, we could get it down to something like nine megatonnes. But if demand is higher than expected, it could be as high as 13 megatonnes — more than quadruple Ontario’s 2018 emissions.

Even in the worst-case scenario, the province’s emissions from electricity would still be less than half of what they were in 2005, before the province began phasing out its coal generation. But it’s still a reversal of a trend that both Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have boasted about — the Liberals to justify their energy policies, the PCs to justify their hostility to a federal carbon tax.

Young emphasized that technology can change and that the IESO’s planning assumptions are just that: projections based on the information available today. A revolution in electricity storage could make it possible to store the province’s cleaner power sources overnight for use during the day, but that’s still only in the realm of speculation — and the natural-gas infrastructure exists in the real world, today.

Ontario Power Generation — the Crown corporation that operates many of the province’s power plants, including Pickering and Darlington — recently bought four gas plants, two of them outright (two it already owned in part). All were nearly complete or already operational, so the purchase itself won’t change the province’s emissions prospects. Rather, OPG is simply looking to maintain its share of the electricity market after the Pickering shutdown.

“It will allow us to maintain our scale, with the upcoming end of Pickering’s commercial operations, so that we can continue our role as the driver of Ontario’s lower carbon future,” Neal Kelly, OPG’s director of media, issues, and management, told TVO.org via email. “Further, there is a growing need for flexible gas fired generation to support intermittent wind and solar generation.”

The shift to more gas-fired generation has been coming for a while, and critics say that Ontario has missed an opportunity to replace the lost Pickering capacity with something cleaner. MPP Mike Schreiner, leader of the Green party, has argued for years that Ontario should have pursued an agreement with Quebec to import clean hydroelectricity.

“To me, it’s a cost-effective solution, and it’s a zero-emissions solution,” Schreiner says. “Regardless of your position on sources of electricity, I think everyone could agree that waterpower from Quebec is going to be less expensive.”

Quebec is eager to sell Ontario its surplus hydro power, but not everyone agrees that importing power would be cheaper. A study published by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce (and commissioned by Ontario Power Generation) calls the claim a “myth” and states that upgrading electric-transmission wires between Ontario and Quebec would cost $1.2 billion and take 10 years, while some estimates suggest fully greening Ontario's grid would cost far more overall.

With Quebec imports seemingly a non-starter and major changes to Ontario’s nuclear fleet already underway, there’s only one path left for this province’s greenhouse-gas emissions: upwards.

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Texas Electricity Prices are shifting as deregulation matures, with competitive market shopping lowering residential rates, narrowing gaps with regulated areas, and EIA data showing long term declines versus national averages across most Texans.

Key Points

Texas Electricity Prices are average residential rates in deregulated and regulated markets across the state.

✅ Deregulated areas saw 17.4% residential price declines since 2006

✅ Regulated zones experienced a 5.5% increase over the same period

✅ Competitive shopping narrowed the gap; Texas averaged below US

Shopping for electricity is becoming cheaper for most Texans, according to a new study from the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power. But for those who live in an area with only one electricity provider, prices have increased in a recent 10-year period, the study says.

About 85 percent of Texans can purchase electricity from a number of providers in a deregulated marketplace, while the remaining 15 percent must buy power from a single provider, often an electric cooperative, in their area.

The report from the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, which advocates for cities and local governments and negotiates their power contracts, pulls information from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to compare prices for Texans in the two models. Most Texans could begin choosing their electricity provider in 2002.

Buying power tends to be more expensive for Texans who live in a part of the state with a deregulated electricity market. But that gap is continuing to shrink as Texans become more willing to shop for power, even as electricity complaints have periodically risen. In 2015, the gap “was the smallest since the beginning of deregulation,” according to the report.

Between 2006 and 2015, the last year for which data is available, average residential electric prices for Texans in a competitive market decreased by 17.4 percent, while average prices increased by 5.5 percent in the regulated areas, even as the Texas power grid has periodically faced stress.

“These residential price declines are promising, and show the retail electric market is maturing,” Jay Doegey, executive director for the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, said in a statement. “We’re encouraged by the price declines, but more progress is needed.”

The study attributes the decline to the prevalence of “low-priced individual deals” in the competitive areas, while policymakers consider market reforms to bolster reliability.

Overall, the average price of electricity in Texas (which produces and consumes the most electricity in the U.S.) — including the price in the deregulated marketplace, for the third time in four years — was below the national average in 2015.

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Japan Electricity Crunch exposes vulnerabilities in a liberalised power market as LNG shortages, JEPX price spikes, snow-hit solar, and weak hedging strain energy security and retail providers amid cold snap demand and limited reserve capacity.

Key Points

A winter demand shock and LNG shortfalls sent JEPX to records, exposing gaps in hedging, data, and energy security.

✅ JEPX wholesale prices spiked to an all-time high

✅ LNG inventories and procurement proved insufficient

✅ Snow disabled solar; new entrants lacked hedging

Japan's worst electricity crunch since the aftermath of the Fukushima crisis has exposed vulnerabilities in the country's recently liberalised power market, although some of the problems appear self-inflicted.

Power prices in Japan hit record highs last month, mirroring UK peak power prices during tight conditions, as a cold snap across northeast Asia prompted a scramble for supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a major fuel for the country's power plants. Power companies urged customers to ration electricity to prevent blackouts, although no outages occurred.

The crisis highlighted how many providers were unprepared for such high demand. Experts say LNG stocks were not topped up ahead of winter and snow disabled solar power farms, while China's power woes strained solar supply chains.

The hundreds of small power companies that sprang up after the market was opened in 2016 have struggled the most, saying the government does not disclose the market data they need to operate. The companies do not have their own generators, instead buying electricity on the wholesale market.

Prices on the Japan Electric Power Exchange (JEPX) hit a record high of 251 yen ($2.39) per kilowatt hour in January, equating to $2,390 per megawatt hour of electricity, above record European price surges seen recently and the highest on record anywhere in the world. One megawatt hour is roughly what an average home in the U.S. would consume over 35 days.

But the vast majority of the new, smaller companies are locked into low, fixed rates they set to lure customers from bigger players, crushing them financially during a price spike like the one in January.

More than 50 small power providers wrote on Jan. 18 to Japan's industry minister, Hiroshi Kajiyama, who oversees the power sector, asking for more accessible data on supply and demand, reserve capacity and fuel inventories.

"By organising and disclosing this information, retail electricity providers will be able to bid at more appropriate prices," said the companies, led by Looop Co.

They also called on Kajiyama to require transmission and distribution companies to pass on some of the unexpected profits from price spikes to smaller operators.

The industry ministry said it had started releasing more timely market data, and is reviewing the cause of the crunch and considering changes, echoing calls by Fatih Birol to keep electricity options open amid uncertainty.

Japan reworked its power markets after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, liberalizing the sector in 2016 while pushing for more renewables.

But Japan is still heavily reliant on LNG and coal, and only four of 33 nuclear reactors are operating. The power crisis has led to growing calls to restart more reactors.

Kazuno Power, a small retail provider controlled by a municipality of the same name in northern Japan, where abundant renewable energy is locally produced, buys electricity from hydropower stations and JEPX.

During the crunch, the company had to pay nearly 10 times the usual price, Kazuno Power president Takao Takeda said in an interview. Like most other new providers, it could not pass on the costs, lost money, and folded. The local utility has taken over its customers.

"There is a contradiction in the current system," Takeda said. "We are encouraged to locally produce power for local consumption as well as use more renewable energy, but prices for these power supplies are linked to wholesale prices, which depend on the overall power supply."

The big utilities, which receive most of their LNG on long-term contracts, blamed the power shortfall on a tight spot market and glitches at generation units.

"We were not able to buy as much supply as we wanted from the spot market because of higher demand from South Korea and China, where power cuts have tightened supply," Kazuhiro Ikebe, the head of the country's electricity federation, said recently.

Ikebe is also president of Kyushu Electric Power, which supplies the southern island of Kyushu.

Utilities took extreme measures - from burning polluting fuel oil in coal plants to scavenging the dregs from empty LNG tankers - to keep the grid from breaking down.

"There is too much dependence on JEPX for procurement," said Bob Takai, the local head of European Energy Exchange, where electricity pricing reforms are being discussed, and which started offering Japan power futures last year. He added that new entrants were not hedging against sharp price moves.

Three people, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, were more blunt. One called the utilities arrogant in assuming they could find LNG cargoes in a pinch. Prices were already rising as China snapped up supplies, the sources noted.

"You had volatility caused by people saying 'Oh, well, demand is going to be weak because of coronavirus impacts' and then saying 'we can rely more on solar than in the past,' but solar got snowed out," said a senior executive from one generator. "We have a problem of who is charge of energy security in Japan."

Inventories of LNG, generally about two weeks worth of supplies, were also not topped up enough to prepare for winter, a market analyst said.

The fallout from the crunch has become more apparent in recent days, with new power companies like Rakuten Inc suspending new sales and Tokyo Gas, along with traditional electricity utilities, issuing profit downgrades or withdrawing their forecasts.

Although prices have fallen sharply as temperatures warmed up slightly and more generation units have come back online, the power generator executive said, "we are not out of the woods yet."
 

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Coal-to-Clean Energy Hubs leverage Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funding to repurpose mine lands with microgrids, advanced nuclear, carbon capture, and rare earth processing, boosting energy security, jobs, and grid modernization.

Key Points

They are federal projects converting coal communities and mine lands into clean energy hubs, repurposing infrastructure.

✅ DOE demos on mine lands: microgrids, nuclear, carbon capture.

✅ Funding from BIL, CHIPS and IRA targets energy communities.

✅ Rare earths from coal waste bolster EV supply chains.

The Biden administration is channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in clean energy funding from recent legislation into its efforts to turn coal communities into clean energy hubs, the White House said.

The administration gave an update on its push across agencies to kick-start projects nationwide with funding Congress approved during Biden’s first two years in office. The effort includes $450 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that the Department of Energy will allocate to an array of new clean energy demonstration projects on former mine lands.

“These projects could focus on a range of technologies from microgrids to advanced nuclear to power plans with carbon capture,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on a call with reporters Monday. “They’ll prove out the potential to reactivate or repurpose existing infrastructure like transmission lines and substations across an aging U.S. power grid, and these projects could spur new economic development in these communities.”

Among the projects the White House highlighted, it said $16 million from the infrastructure law will go to the University of North Dakota and West Virginia University to create design studies for the first-ever full-scale refinery facility in the U.S. that could extract and separate rare earth elements and minerals from coal mine waste streams. The materials are critical for electric vehicle-battery components that are currently heavily sourced from outside the U.S.

“Those efforts will pave the way toward building a first of its kind facility that produces essential materials for solar panels, wind turbines, EVs and more while cleaning up polluted land and water and creating good-paying jobs for local workers,” Granholm said.

Biden created an interagency working group focused on revitalizing coal-power communities through federal investments when he took office. In 2021, the group selected 25 priority areas ranging from West Virginia to Wyoming to focus on development, as high natural gas prices strengthened the case for clean electricity. There are nearly 18,000 identified mine sites across 1.5 million acres in the United States, according to the White House.

The massive effort fits into a broader Biden administration push to both fight climate change and support communities that have lost economic activity during a transition away from fossil fuel sources such as coal. While Biden’s most ambitious clean energy plans fell flat in Congress in the face of opposition from Republicans and some Democrats after the previous administration’s power plant overhaul, three major laws still unlocked funding for his administration to deploy.

Many of the initiatives are made possible through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, even without a clean electricity standard on the books. The task force aims to make sure communities most affected by the changing energy landscape are taking maximum advantage of the federal benefits.

“Those new and expanded operations are coming to energy communities and creating good paying jobs,” Biden’s senior advisor for clean energy innovation and implementation John Podesta said on the call. “These laws can provide substantial federal support to energy communities like capping abandoned oil and gas wells, extracting critical minerals, building battery factories and launching demonstration projects in carbon capture or green hydrogen.”

The administration touted the potential benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill passed by Democrats to spur clean energy investments last year, even as early assessments show mixed results to date. At the time, U.S. consumers were dealing with decades-high inflation fueled in part by an energy crisis and high gas prices that drove debate — a point Republicans emphasized as the plan moved through Congress.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said the Inflation Reduction Act aims to both “lower the deficit, as well as promote our energy security, lowering energy costs for consumers and combatting climate change.”

“As the Treasury works to implement the law, we’re focused on ensuring that all Americans benefit from the growth of the clean energy economy, particularly those who live in communities that have been dependent on the energy sector for job for a long time,” Adeyemo told reporters. “Economic growth and productivity are higher when all communities are able to reach their full potential.”

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