This kite could harness more of the world's wind energy

Ford Electric Transit is an all electric cargo van for US and Canada, launching 2021, with 4G LTE hotspot, fleet telematics, GPS tracking, and driver assistance safety tech; battery, range, and performance specs TBD.

Key Points

An all electric cargo van with fleet telematics, 4G LTE, and driver assistance features for US and Canada.

✅ 4G LTE hotspot, live GPS tracking, and diagnostics

✅ Fleet telematics and management tools for operations

✅ Driver assistance: AEB, lane keeping, and collision warning

Ford is making an all-electric version of its popular Transit cargo van for the US and Canadian markets, slated to be released in 2021, aligning with Ford’s EV manufacturing plans to scale production across North America. The company did not share any specifics about the van’s battery pack size, estimated range, or performance characteristics. Ford previously announced an electric Transit for the European market in 2019.

The new cargo van will come equipped with a 4G LTE hotspot and will be outfitted with a number of tech features designed for fleet managers, like live GPS tracking and diagnostics, mirroring moves by Volvo’s electric trucks aimed at connected operations. The electric Transit van will also be equipped with a number of Ford’s safety and driver assistance features, like collision warning and assist, automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection, and automatic lane-keeping.

Ford said it didn’t have any news to share about an electric version of its Transit passenger van “at this time,” even as the market reaches an EV inflection point for adoption.

Ford’s Transit van is the bestselling cargo van in the US, though it has seen increased competition over the last few years from Mercedes-Benz, which recently refreshed its popular Sprinter van, while others pursue electrified freight like Tesla’s electric truck plans that expand options.

Mercedes-Benz has already unveiled an electric version of the Sprinter, which comes in two configurations, targeting delivery networks where UPS’s Tesla Semi orders signal growing demand. There’s a version with a 55kWh battery pack that can travel 168 kilometers (104 miles) on a full charge, and has a payload capacity of 891 kilograms (1,964 pounds). Mercedes-Benz is making a version with a smaller 41kWh battery pack that goes 115 kilometers (72 miles), but which can carry up to 1,045 (2,304 pounds). Both versions come with 10.5 cubic meters (370.8 cubic feet) of storage space.

Mercedes-Benz also announced the EQV concept a year ago, which is an electric van aimed at slightly more everyday use, reflecting broader people-moving trends as electric bus adoption faces hurdles worldwide. The company touted more promising specs with the slightly smaller EQV, saying it will get around 249 miles out of a 100kWh battery pack. Oh, and it has 200 horsepower on offer and will be equipped with the company’s MBUX infotainment system.

Another player in the space is EV startup Rivian, which will build 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon over the next few years. Ford has invested $500 million in Rivian, and the startup is helping build a luxury electric SUV for the automotive giant’s Lincoln brand, though the two van projects don’t seem to be related, as Ford and others also boost gas-electric hybrid strategies in the US. Ford is also collaborating with Volkswagen on commercial vans after the two companies formed a global alliance early last year.

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NB Power Pulp and Paper Subsidies lower electricity rates for six New Brunswick mills using firm power benchmarks and interruptible discounts, while government mandates, utility debt, ratepayer impacts, and competitiveness pressures shape provincial energy policy.

Key Points

Provincial mandates that buy down firm electricity rates for six mills to a national average, despite NB Power's debt.

✅ Mandated buy-down to match national firm electricity rates

✅ Ignores large non-firm interruptible power discounts

✅ Raises equity concerns amid NB Power debt and rate pressure

An effort to fix NB Power's struggling finances that is supposed to involve a look at "all options" will not include a review of the policy that requires the utility to subsidize electricity prices for six New Brunswick pulp and paper mills, according to the Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development.

The program is meant "to enable New Brunswick's pulp and paper companies have access to competitive priced electricity,"  said the department's communications officer Nick Brown in an email Monday 

"Keeping our large industries competitive with other Canadian jurisdictions, amid Nova Scotia rate hike opposition debates elsewhere, is important," he wrote, knocking down the idea the subsidy program might be scrutinized for shortcomings like other NB Power expenses.

Figures released last week show NB Power paid out $9.7 million in rate subsidies to the mills under the program in the fiscal year ended in March 2021, even though the utility was losing $4 million for the year and falling deeper into debt, amid separate concerns about old meter issues affecting households.

Subsidies went to three mills owned by J.D. Irving Ltd. including two in Saint John and one in Lake Utopia, two owned by the AV group in Nackawic and Atholville and the Twin Rivers pulp mill in Edmundston.

The New Brunswick government has made NB Power subsidize pulp and paper mills like Twin Rivers Paper Company since 2012, and is requiring the program to continue despite financial problems at the utility. (CBC)
It was NB Power's second year in a row of financial losses, while it is supposed to pay down $500 million of its $4.9 billion debt load in the next five years to prepare for the refurbishment of the Mactaquac dam, a burden comparable to customers in Newfoundland paying for Muskrat Falls elsewhere under separate policies, under a directive issued by the province

NB Power president Keith Cronkhite said he was "very disappointed" with debt increasing last year instead of  falling and senior vice president and chief financial officer Darren Murphy said everything would be under the microscope this year to turn the utility's finances around.  

"We need to do better," said Murphy on Thursday

"We need to step back and make sure we're considering all options, including approaches like Newfoundland's ratepayer shield agreement on megaproject overruns, to achieve that objective because the objective is quickly closing in on us."

However, reviewing the subsidy program for the six pulp and paper mills is apparently off limits.

The subsidy program requires NB Power to buy down the cost of "firm" electricity bought by pulp and paper mills to a national average that is calculated by the Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development.

Last year the province declared the price mills in New Brunswick pay to be an average of  7.536 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh).  It is higher than rates in five other provinces that have mills, which the province points to as justification for the subsidies, even as Nova Scotia's 14% rate hike approval highlights broader upward pressure, although the true significance of that difference is not entirely clear.

In British Columbia, the large forest products company Paper Excellence operates five pulp and paper mills which are charged 17.2 per cent less for firm electricity than the six mills in New Brunswick.

The Paper Excellence Paper Mill in Port Alberni, B.C. pays lower electricity prices than mills in New Brunswick, a benefit largely offset by higher property taxes. It's a factor New Brunswick does not count in calculating subsidies NB Power must pay. (Paper Excellence)
However, local property taxes on the five BC mills are a combined $7.8 million higher than the six New Brunswick plants, negating much of that difference.

The province's subsidy formula does not account for differences like that or for the fact New Brunswick mills buy a high percentage of their electricity at cheap non-firm prices.

Not counting the subsidies, NB Power already sells high volumes of what it calls interruptible and surplus power to industry at deep discounts on the understanding it can be cut off and redeployed elsewhere on short notice when needed.

Actual interruptions in service are rare.  Last year there were none, but NB Power sold 837 million kilowatt hours of the discounted power to industry at an average price of 4.9 cents per kwh.   

NB Power does not disclose how much of the $22 million or more in savings went to the six mills, but the price was 35 per cent below NB Power's posted rate for the plants and rivaled firm prices big mills receive anywhere in Canada, including Quebec.

Asked why the subsidy program ignores large amounts of discounted interruptible power used by New Brunswick mills in making comparisons between provinces, Brown said regulations governing the program require a comparison of firm prices only.

"The New Brunswick average rate is based on NB Power's published large industrial rate for firm energy, as required by the Electricity from Renewable Resources regulation," he wrote.

The subsidy program itself was imposed on NB Power by the province in 2012 to aid companies suffering after years of poor markets for forest products following the 2008 financial collapse and recession.  

Providing subsidies has cost NB Power $100 million so far and has continued even as markets for pulp products improved significantly and NB Power's own finances worsened.

Report warned against subsidies
NB Power has never directly criticized the program, but in a matter currently in front the of the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board looking at how NB Power might restructure its rates, including proposals such as seasonal rates that could prompt backlash, an independent consultant hired by the utility suggested rate subsidies to large export oriented manufacturing facilities, like pulp and paper mills, is generally a poor idea.

"We do not recommend offering subsidies to exporters," says the report by Christensen Associates Energy Consulting of Madison, Wis.

"There are two serious economic problems with subsidizing exports. The first is that the benefits may be less than the costs. The second problem is that subsidies tend to last forever, even if the circumstances that initially justified the subsidies have disappeared."

The Christensen report did not directly assess the merits of the current subsidy for pulp and paper mills but it addressed the issue because it said in the design of new rates "one NB Power business customer has raised the possibility that their electricity-intensive business ought to be granted subsidies because of the potential to generate extra benefits for the Province through increases in their exports"

That, said Christensen, rarely benefits the public.

"The direct costs of the subsidies are the subsidies themselves, a part of which ends up in the pockets of out-of-province consumers of the exported goods," said the report.  

"But there are also indirect costs due to the fact that the subsidies are financed through higher electricity prices, which means that other electricity customers have less money to spend on services provided by local businesses, thus putting a drag on the local economy."

The province does not agree.

Asked whether it has any studies or cost-benefit reviews that show the subsidy program is a net benefit to New Brunswick, the department cited none but maintained it is an important initiative, even as elsewhere governments have offered electricity bill credit relief to ratepayers.

"The program was designed to give large industrial businesses the ability to compete on a level energy field," wrote Brown.
 

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Ecofiscal Commission EV Policy Shift examines carbon pricing limits, endorsing signal boosters like subsidies, EV incentives, and coal bans, amid advisory changes and public pushback, to accelerate emissions cuts beyond market-based taxes and regulations.

Key Points

An updated stance recognizing carbon pricing limits and backing EV incentives, subsidies, and rules to reduce emissions.

✅ Carbon pricing plus subsidies, EV incentives

✅ Advisory shift; Jack Mintz departs

✅ Focus on emissions cuts, coal power bans

Something strange happened at the Ecofiscal Commission recently. Earlier this month, the carbon-tax advocacy group featured on its website as one of its advisers the renowned Canadian economist (and FP Comment columnist) Jack M. Mintz. The other day, suddenly and without fanfare, Mintz was gone from the website, and the commission’s advisory board.

Advisers come and advisers go, of course, but it turns out there was an impetus for Mintz’s departure. The Ecofiscal Commission in its latest report, dropped just before Canada Day, seemingly shifted from its position that carbon prices were so excellent at mimicking market forces that the tax could repeal and replace virtually the entire vast expensive gallimaufry of subsidies, caps, rules and regulations that are costing Canada a fortune in business and bureaucrats. As some Ecofiscal commissioners wrote just a few months ago, policies that “dictate specific technologies or methods for reducing emissions constrain private choice and increase costs” and were a bad idea.

But, in this latest report, the commission is now musing about the benefits of carbon-tax “signal boosters”: that is, EV subsidies and rules to, for instance, get people to start buying electric vehicles (EVs), as well as bans on coal-fired power. “Even well designed carbon pricing can have limitations,” rationalized the commission. Mintz said he had “misgivings” about the change of tack. He decided it best if he focus his advisory energies elsewhere.

It’s hard to blame the commission for falling like everyone else for the electric-car mania that’s sweeping the nation and the world. Electric cars offer a sexiness that dreary old carbon taxes can never hope to match — especially in light of a new Angus Reid poll last week that showed the majority of Canadians now want governments to shelve any plans for carbon taxes.

So far, because nobody’s really driving these miracle machines, said mania has been limited to breathless news reports about how the electric-vehicle revolution is about to rock our world. EVs comprise just two-tenths of a per cent of all passenger vehicles in North America, despite the media’s endless hype and efforts of green-obsessed governments to cover much of the price tag, like Ontario’s $14,000 rebate for Tesla buyers. In Europe, where virtue-signalling urban environmentalism is the coolest, they’re not feeling the vehicular electricity much more: EVs account for barely one per cent of personal vehicles in France, the U.K. and Germany. When Hong Kong cancelled Tesla rebates in April, sales fell to zero.

Going by the ballyhoo, you’d think EVs were at an inflection point and an unstoppable juggernaut. But it’s one that has yet to even get started. In his 2011 State of the Union address, then president Barack Obama predicted one million electric cars on the road by 2015. Four years later, there wasn’t even a third that many. California offered so many different subsidies for electric vehicles that low-income families could get rebates of up to US$13,500, but it still isn’t even close to reaching its target of having zero-emission vehicles make up 15 per cent of California auto sales by 2025, being stuck at three per cent since 2014. Ontario’s Liberal government last year announced to much laughter its plan to ensure that every family would have at least one zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) by 2024, and Quebec made a plan to make ZEVs worth 15.5 per cent of sales by 2020, while Ottawa’s 2035 EV mandate attracts criticism too. Let’s see how that’s going: Currently, ZEVs make up 0.16 per cent of new vehicle sales in Ontario and 0.38 per cent in Quebec.

The latest sensational but bogus EV news out last week was France’s government announcing the “end of the sale of gasoline and diesel cars by 2040,” and Volvo apparently announcing that as of 2019, all its models would be “electric.” Both announcements made international headlines. Both are baloney. France provided no actual details about this plan (will it literally become a crime to sell a gasoline car? Will hybrids, run partly on gasoline, be allowed?), but more importantly, as automotive writer Ed Wiseman pointed out in The Guardian, a lot will happen in technology and automotive use over the next 23 years that France has no way to predict, with changes in self-driving cars, public car-sharing and fuel technologies. Imagine making rules for today’s internet back in 1994.

Volvo, meanwhile, looked to be recycling and repackaging years-old news to seize on today’s infatuation with electric vehicles to burnish its now Chinese-owned brand. Since 2010, Volvo’s plan has been to focus on engines that were partly electric, with electric turbochargers, but still based on gasoline. Volvo doesn’t actually have an all-electric model, but the gasoline-swigging engine of its popular XC90 SUV is, partly, electrical. When Volvo said all its models would in two years be “electric,” it meant this kind of engine, not that it was phasing out the internal-combustion gasoline engine. But that is what it wanted reporters to think, and judging by all the massive and inaccurate coverage, it worked.

The real story being missed is just how pathetic things look right now for electric cars. Gasoline prices in the U.S. turned historically cheap in 2015 and stayed cheap, icing demand for gasless cars. Tesla, whose founder’s self-promotion had made the niche carmaker magically more valuable than powerhouses like Ford and GM, haemorrhaged US$12 billion in market value last week after tepid sales figures brought some investors back to Earth, even as the company’s new Model 3 began rolling off the line.

Not helping is that environmental claims about environmental cars are falling apart. In June, Tesla was rocked by a controversial Swedish study that found that making one of its car batteries released as much CO2 as eight years of gasoline-powered driving. And Bloomberg reported last week on a study by Chinese engineers that found that electric vehicles, because of battery manufacturing and charging by fossil-fuel-powered electricity sources, emit 50-per-cent more carbon than do internal-combustion engines. Still, the electric-vehicle hype not only continues unabated, it gets bigger and louder every day. If some car company figures out how to harness it, we’d finally have a real automotive revolution on our hands.

Kevin Libin, Financial Post

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Power-to-gas converts surplus renewable electricity into green hydrogen or synthetic methane via electrolysis and methanation, enabling seasonal energy storage, grid balancing, hydrogen injection into gas pipelines, and decarbonization of heat, transport, and industry.

Key Points

Power-to-gas turns excess renewable power into hydrogen or methane for storage, grid support, and clean fuel.

✅ Enables hydrogen injection into existing natural gas networks

✅ Balances grids and provides seasonal energy storage capacity

✅ Supplies low-carbon fuels for industry, heat, and heavy transport

Last month Denmark’s biggest energy firm, Ørsted, said wind farms it is proposing for the North Sea will convert some of their excess power into gas. Electricity flowing in from offshore will feed on-shore electrolysis plants that split water to produce clean-burning hydrogen, with oxygen as a by-product. That would supply a new set of customers who need energy, but not as electricity. And it would take some strain off of Europe’s power grid as it grapples with an ever-increasing share of hard-to-handle EU wind and solar output on the grid.

Turning clean electricity into energetic gases such as hydrogen or methane is an old idea that is making a comeback as renewable power generation surges and crowds out gas in Europe. That is because gases can be stockpiled within the natural gas distribution system to cover times of weak winds and sunlight. They can also provide concentrated energy to replace fossil fuels for vehicles and industries. Although many U.S. energy experts argue that this “power-to-gas” vision may be prohibitively expensive, some of Europe’s biggest industrial firms are buying in to the idea.

European power equipment manufacturers, anticipating a wave of renewable hydrogen projects such as Ørsted’s, vowed in January that, as countries push for hydrogen-ready power plants across Europe, all of their gas-fired turbines will be certified by next year to run on up to 20 percent hydrogen, which burns faster than methane-rich natural gas. The natural gas distributors, meanwhile, have said they will use hydrogen to help them fully de-carbonize Europe’s gas supplies by 2050.

Converting power to gas is picking up steam in Europe because the region has more consistent and aggressive climate policies and evolving electricity pricing frameworks that support integration. Most U.S. states have goals to clean up some fraction of their electricity supply; coal- and gas-fired plants contribute a little more than a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, European countries are counting on carbon reductions of 80 percent or more by midcentury—reductions that will require an economywide switch to low-carbon energy.

Cleaning up energy by stripping the carbon out of fossil fuels is costly. So is building massive new grid infrastructure, including transmission lines and huge batteries, amid persistent grid expansion woes in parts of Europe. Power-to-gas may be the cheapest way forward, complementing Germany’s net-zero roadmap to cut electricity costs by a third. “In order to reach the targets for climate protection, we need even more renewable energy. Green hydrogen is perceived as one of the most promising ways to make the energy transition happen,” says Armin Schnettler, head of energy and electronics research at Munich-based electric equipment giant Siemens.

Europe already has more than 45 demonstration projects to improve power-to-gas technologies and their integration with power grids and gas networks. The principal focus has been to make the electrolyzers that convert electricity to hydrogen more efficient, longer-lasting and cheaper to produce.

The projects are also scaling up the various technologies. Early installations converted a few hundred kilowatts of electricity, but manufacturers such as Siemens are now building equipment that can convert 10 megawatts, which would yield enough hydrogen each year to heat around 3,000 homes or fuel 100 buses, according to financial consultancy Ernst & Young.

The improvements have been most dramatic for proton-exchange membrane electrolyzers, which are akin to the fuel cells used in hydrogen vehicles (but optimized to produce hydrogen rather than consume it). The price of proton-exchange electrolyzers has dropped by roughly 40 percent during the past decade, according to a study published in February in Nature Energy. They are also five times more compact than older alkaline electrolysis plants, enabling onsite hydrogen production near gas consumers, and they can vary their power consumption within seconds to operate on fluctuating wind and solar generation.

Many European pilot projects are demonstrating “methanation” equipment that converts hydrogen to methane, too, which can be used as a drop-in replacement for natural gas. Europe’s electrolyzer plants, however, are showing that methanation is not as critical to the power-to-gas vision as advocates long believed. Many electrolyzers are injecting their hydrogen directly into natural gas pipelines—something that U.S. gas firms forbid—and they are doing so without impacting either the gas infrastructure or natural gas consumers.

Europe’s first large-scale hydrogen injection began in eastern Germany in 2013 at a two-megawatt electrolyzer installed by Essen-based power firm E.ON. Germany has since ratcheted up the amount of hydrogen it allows in natural gas lines from an initial 2 percent by volume to 10 percent, in a market where renewables now outpace coal and nuclear in Germany, and other European states have followed suit with their own hydrogen allowances. Christopher Hebling, head of hydrogen technologies at the Freiburg-based Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, predicts that such limits will rise to the 20-percent level anticipated by Europe’s turbine manufacturers.

Moving renewable hydrogen and methane via natural gas pipelines promises to cut the cost of switching to renewable energy. For example, gas networks have storage caverns whose reserves could be tapped to run gas-fired electric generation power plants during periods of low wind and solar output. Hebling notes that Germany’s gas network can store 240 terawatt-hours of energy—roughly 25 times more energy than global power grids can presently store by pumping water uphill to refill hydropower reservoirs. Repurposing gas infrastructure to help the power system could save European consumers 138 billion euros ($156 billion) by 2050, according to Dutch energy consultancy Navigant (formerly Ecofys).

For all the pilot plants and promise, renewable hydrogen presently supplies a tiny fraction of Europe’s gas. And, globally, around 4 percent of hydrogen is supplied via electrolysis, with the bulk refined from fossil fuels, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Power-to-gas is catching up, however. According to the February Nature Energy study, renewable hydrogen already pays for itself in some niche applications, and further electrolyzer improvements will progressively extend its market. “If costs continue to decline as they have done in recent years, power-to-gas will become competitive at large scale within the next decade,” says study co-author Gunther Glenk, an economist at the Technical University of Munich.

Glenk says power-to-gas could scale up faster if governments guaranteed premium prices for renewable hydrogen and methane, as they did to mainstream solar and wind power.

Tim Calver, an energy storage researcher turned consultant and Ernst & Young’s executive director in London, agrees that European governments need to step up their support for power-to-gas projects and markets. Calver calls the scale of funding to date, “not proportionate to the challenge that we face on long-term decarbonization and the potential role of hydrogen.”

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Texas Electricity Market Bailout proposes securitization bonds and ERCOT-backed fees after Winter Storm Uri, spreading costs via ratepayer charges on power bills to stabilize generators, co-ops, and retailers and avert bankruptcies and investor flight.

Key Points

State plan to securitize storm debts via ERCOT fees, adding bill charges to stabilize Texas power firms.

✅ Securitization bonds finance unpaid ancillary services and energy costs

✅ ERCOT fee spreads Winter Storm Uri debts across ratepayers statewide

✅ Aims to prevent bankruptcies, preserve grid reliability, reassure investors

An approximately $2.5 billion plan to bail out Texas’ distressed electricity market from the financial crisis caused by Winter Storm Uri in February has been approved by the Texas House.

The legislation would impose a fee — likely for the next decade or longer — on electricity companies, which would then get passed on to residential and business customers in their power bills, even as some utilities waived certain fees earlier in the crisis.

House lawmakers sent House Bill 4492 to the Senate on Thursday after a 129-15 vote. A similar bill is advancing in the Senate.

Some of the state’s electricity providers and generators are financially underwater in the aftermath of the February power outages, which left millions without power and killed more than 100 people. Electricity companies had to buy whatever power was available at the maximum rate allowed by Texas regulations — $9,000 per megawatt hour — during the week of the storm (the average price for power in 2020 was $22 per megawatt hour). Natural gas fuel prices also spiked more than 700% during the storm.

Several companies are nearing default on their bills to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the Texas power grid that covers most of the state and facilitates financial transactions in it.

Rural electric cooperatives were especially hard hit; Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, which supplies electricity to 1.5 million customers, filed for bankruptcy citing a $1.8 billion debt to ERCOT.

State Rep. Chris Paddie, R-Marshall, the bill’s author, said a second bailout bill will be necessary during the current legislative session for severely distressed electric cooperatives.

“This is a financial crisis, and it’s a big one,” James Schaefer, a senior managing director at Guggenheim Partners, an investment bank, told lawmakers at a House State Affairs Committee hearing in early April. He warned that more bankruptcies would cause higher costs to customers and hurt the state’s image in the eyes of investors.

“You’ve got to free the system,” Schaefer said. “It’s horrible that a bunch of folks have to pay, but it’s a system-wide failure. If you let a bunch of folks crash, it’s not a good look for your state.”

If approved by the Senate and Gov. Greg Abbott, a newly-created Texas Electric Securitization Corp. would use the money raised from the fees for bonds to help pay the companies’ debts, including costs for ancillary services, a financial product that helps ensure power is continuously generated and improve electricity reliability across the grid.

Paddie told his colleagues Wednesday that he could not yet estimate how long the new fee would be imposed, but during committee hearings lawmakers estimated it’s likely to be at least a decade. Several other bills to spread out the costs of the winter storm and consider market reforms are also moving through the Legislature.

ERCOT’s independent market monitor recommended in March that energy sold during that period be repriced at a lower rate, which would have allowed ERCOT to claw back about $4.2 billion in payments to power generators, but the Public Utility Commission declined to do so, even as a court ruling on plant obligations in emergencies drew scrutiny among market participants.

Instead, lawmakers are pushing for bailouts that several energy experts have said is needed, both to ensure distressed companies don’t pass enormous costs on to their customers and to prevent electricity investors and companies from leaving the state if it’s viewed as too risky to continue doing business.

Becky Klein, an energy consultant in Austin and former chair of the Public Utility Commission who played a key role in de-regulating Texas’ electricity market two decades ago, said during a retail electricity panel hosted by Integrate that legislation is necessary to provide “some kind of backstop during a crazy market crisis like this to show the financial market that we’re willing to provide some relief.”

Still, some lawmakers are concerned with how they will win public support, including potential voter-approved funding measures, for bills to bail out the state’s electricity market.

“I have to go back to Laredo and say, ‘I know you didn’t have electricity for several days, but now I’m going to make you pay a little more for the next 20 years,’” state Rep. Richard Peña Raymond, D-Laredo, said during an early April discussion on the plan in the House State Affairs Committee. He said he voted for the bill because it’s in the best interest of the state.

Paddie, during the same committee hearing, acknowledged that “none of us want to increase fees or taxes.” However, he said, “We have to deal with the reality set before us.”

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Solid-State AC Switching reimagines electrification with silicon-based, firmware-driven controls, smart outlets, programmable circuit breakers, AC-DC conversion, and embedded sensors for IoT, energy monitoring, surge protection, and safer, globally compatible devices.

Key Points

Solid-state AC switching replaces mechanical switches with silicon chips for intelligent, programmable power control.

✅ Programmable breakers trip faster and add surge and GFCI protection

✅ Shrinks AC-DC conversion, boosting efficiency and device longevity

✅ Enables sensor-rich, IoT-ready outlets with energy monitoring

Electricity is a paradox. On the one hand, it powers our most modern clean cars and miracles of computing like your phone and laptop. On the other hand, it’s one of the least updated, despite efforts to build a smarter electricity infrastructure nationwide, and most ready-for-disruption parts of our homes, offices, and factories.

A startup in Silicon Valley plans to change all that, in California’s energy transition where reliability is top of mind, and has just signed deals with leading global electronics manufacturers to make it happen.

“The end point of the electrification infrastructure of every building out there right now is based on old technology,” Thar Casey, CEO of Amber Solutions, told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. “Basically some was invented ... last century and some came in a little bit later on in the fifties and sixties.”

Ultimately, it’s an almost 18th century part of modern homes.

Even smart homes, with add-ons like the Tesla Powerwall, still rely on legacy switching.

The fuses, breakers, light switches, and electrical outlets in your home are ancient technology that would easily understood by Thomas Edison, who was born in 1847. When you flip a switch and instantly flood your room with light, it feels like a modern right. But you are simply pushing a piece of plastic which physically moves one wire to touch another wire. That completes a circuit, electricity flows, and ... let there be light.

Casey wants to change all that. To transform our hard-wired electrical worlds and make them, in a sense, soft wired. And the addressable market is literally tens of billions of devices.

The core innovation is a transition to solid-state switches.

“Take your table, which is a solid piece of wood,” Casey says. “If you can mimic what an electromechanical switch does, opening and closing, inside that table without any actual moving parts, that means you are now solid state AC switching.”

And solid-state is exactly what Silicon Valley is all about.

“Solid state it means it can be silicon,” Casey says. “It can be a chip, it can be smaller, it can be intelligent, you can have firmware, you can add software ... now you have a mini computer.”

That’s a significant innovation with a huge number of implications. It means that the AC to DC converters attached to every appliance you plug into the wall — the big “bricks” that are part of your power cord, for instance — can now be a tiny fraction of the size. Appliance run on DC, direct current, and the electricity in your walls is AC, alternating current; similar principles underpin advanced smart inverters in solar systems, and it needs to be converted before it’s usable, and that chunk of hardware, with electrolytics, magnetics, transformers and more, can now be replaced, saving space in thermostats, CO2 sensors, coffee machines, hair dryers, smoke detectors ... any small electric device.

(Since those components generally fail before the device does, replacing them is a double win.)

Going solid state also means that you can have dynamic input range: 45 volts all the way up to 600 volts.

So you can standardize one component across many different electric devices, and it’ll work in the U.S., it’ll work in Europe, it’ll work in Japan, and it will work whether it’s getting 100 or 120 or 220 volts.

Building it small and building it solid state has other benefits as well, Casey says, including a much better circuit breaker for power spikes as the U.S. grid faces climate change impacts today.

“This circuit breaker is programmable, it has intelligence, it has WiFi, it has Bluetooth, it has energy monitoring metering, it has surge protection, it has GFCI, and here’s the best part: we trip 3000 times faster than a mechanical circuit breaker.”

What that means is much more ambient intelligence that can be applied all throughout your home. Rather than one CO2 sensor in one location, every power outlet is now a CO2 sensor that can feed virtual power plant programs, too. And a particulate matter sensor and temperature sensor and dampness sensor and ... you name it.

Amber’s next-generation system-on-chip complete replacement for smart outlets
Amber’s next-generation system-on-chip complete replacement for smart outlets JOHN KOETSIER
“We put as many as fifteen functions ... in one single gang box in a wall,” Casey told me.

Solid state is the gift that keeps giving, because now every outlet can be surge-protected. Every outlet can have GFCI — ground fault circuit interruption — not just the ones in your bathroom. And every outlet and light switch in your home can participate in the sensor network that powers your home security system. Oh, and, if you want, Alexa or Siri or the Google Assistant too. Plus energy-efficient dimmers for all lighting appliances that don’t buzz.

So when can you buy Amber switches and outlets?

In a sense, never.

Casey says Amber isn’t trying to be a consumer-facing company and won’t bring these innovations to market themselves. This July, Amber announced a letter of intent with a global manufacturer that includes revenue, plus MOUs with six other major electronics manufacturers. Letters of intent can be a dime a dozen, as can memoranda of understanding, but attaching revenue makes it more serious and significant.

The company has only raised $6.7 million, according to Craft, and has a number of competitors, such as Blixt, which has funding from the European Union, and Atom Power, which is already shipping technology. But since Amber is not trying to be a consumer product and take its innovations to market itself, it needs much less cash to build a brand and a market. You’ll be able to buy Amber’s technology at some point; just not under the Amber name.

“We have over 25 companies that we’re in discussions with,” Casey says. “We’re going to give them a complete solution and back them up and support them toward success. Their success will be our success at the end of the day.”

Ultimately, of course, cost will be a big part of the discussion.

There are literally tens of billions of switches and outlets on the planet, and modernizing all of them won’t happen overnight. And if it’s expensive, it won’t happen quickly either, even as California turns to grid-scale batteries to ease strain.

Casey is a big cagey with costs — there are still a lot of variables, after all. But it seems it won’t cost that much more than current technology.

“This can’t be $1.50 to manufacture, at least not right now, maybe down the road,” he told me. “We’re very competitive, we feel very good. We’re talking to these partners. They recognize that what we’re bringing, it’s a cost that is cost effective.”

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