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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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Hydro-Quebec Rate Freeze maintains current electricity rates, aligned with Bill 34, inflation indexing, and energy board oversight, delivering rebates to residential, commercial, and industrial customers and projecting nearly $1 billion in savings across Quebec.

Key Points

A Bill 34 policy holding power rates, adding 2020 rebates, and indexing 2021-2024 rates to inflation for Quebec customers.

✅ 2020-21 rates frozen; savings near $1B over five years.

✅ $500M rebate: residential, commercial, industrial shares.

✅ 2021-2024 rates index to inflation; five-year reviews after 2025.

Hydro-Quebec Distribution will not file a rate adjustment application with the province’s energy board this year, amid a class-action lawsuit alleging customers were overcharged.

In a statement released on Friday the Crown Corporation said it wants current electricity rates to be maintained for another year, as pandemic-driven demand pressures persist, starting April 1. That is consistent with the recently tabled Bill 34, and echoes Ontario legislation to lower electricity rates in its aims, which guarantees lower electricity rates for Quebecers.

The bill also provides a $500 million rebate in 2020, similar to a $535 million refund previously issued, half of which will go to residential customers while $190 million will go to commercial customers and another $60 million to industrial ones.

Hydro-Quebec said the 2020-21 rate freeze will generate savings of nearly $1 billion for its clients over the next five years, even as Manitoba Hydro scales back increases in a different market.

Bill 34, which was tabled in June, also proposes to set rates based on inflation for the years 2021 to 2024, contrasting with Ontario rate increases over the same period. After 2025 Hydro-Quebec would have to ask the energy board to set new rates every five years, as opposed to the current annual system, while BC Hydro is raising rates by comparison.

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EU Power Market Overhaul targets soaring electricity prices by decoupling gas from power, boosting renewables, refining price caps, and stabilizing grids amid inflation, supply shocks, droughts, nuclear outages, and intermittent wind and solar.

Key Points

EU plan to redesign electricity pricing, curb gas-driven costs, boost renewables, and protect consumers from volatility.

✅ Decouples power prices from marginal gas generation

✅ Caps non-gas revenues to fund consumer relief

✅ Supports grid stability with storage, demand response, LNG

While energy prices are soaring around the world, Europe is in a particularly tight spot. Its heavy dependence on Russian gas -- on top of droughts, heat waves, an unreliable fleet of French nuclear reactors and a continent-wide shift to greener but more intermittent sources like solar and wind -- has been driving electricity bills up and feeding the highest inflation in decades. As Europe stands on the brink of a recession, and with the winter heating season approaching, officials are considering a major overhaul of the region’s power market to reflect the ongoing shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

1. How is electricity priced? 
Unlike oil or natural gas, there’s no efficient way to save lots of electricity to use in the future, though projects to store electricity in gas pipes are emerging. Commercial use of large-scale batteries is still years away. So power prices have been set by the availability at any given moment. When it’s really windy or sunny, for example, then more is produced relatively cheaply and prices are lower. If that supply shrinks, then prices rise because more generators are brought online to help meet demand -- fueled by more expensive sources. The way the market has long worked is that it is that final technology, or type of plant, needed to meet the last unit of consumption that sets the price for everyone. In Europe this year, that has usually meant natural gas. 

2. What is the relationship between power and gas? 
Very close. Across western Europe, gas plants have been a vital part of the energy infrastructure for decades, with Irish price spikes highlighting dispatchable power risks, fed in large part by supplies piped in from Siberia. Gas-fired plants were relatively quick to build and the technology straightforward, at least compared with nuclear plants and burns cleaner than coal. About 18% of Europe’s electricity was generated at gas plants last year; in 2020 about 43% of the imported gas came from Russia. Even during the depths of the Cold War, there’d never been a serious supply problem -- until the relationship with Russia deteriorated this year after it invaded Ukraine. Diversifying away from Russia, such as by increasing imports of liquefied natural gas, requires new infrastructure that takes a lot of time and money.

3. Why does it work this way? 
In theory, the relationship isn’t different from that with coal, for example. But production hiccups and heatwave curbs on plants from nuclear in France to hydro in Spain and Norway significantly changed the generation picture this year, and power hit records as plants buckled in the heat. Since coal-fired and nuclear plants are generally running all the time anyway, gas plants were being called upon more often -- at times just to keep the lights on as summer temperatures hit records. And with the war in Ukraine resulting in record gas prices, that pushed up overall production costs. It’s that relationship that has made the surging gas price the driver for electricity prices. And since the continent is all connected, it has pushed up prices across the region. The value of the European power market jumped threefold last year, to a record 836 billion euros ($827 billion today).

4. What’s being considered? 
With large parts of European industry on its knees and households facing jumps in energy bills of several hundred percent, as record electricity prices ripple through markets, the pressure on governments and the European Union to intervene has never been higher. One major proposal is to impose a price cap on electricity from non-gas producers, with the difference between that and the market price channeled to relief for consumers. While it sounds simple, any such changes would rip up a market design that’s worked for decades and could threaten future investments because of unintended consequences.

5. How did this market evolve?
The Nordic region and the British market were front-runners in the 1990s, then Germany followed and is now the largest by far. A trader can buy and sell electricity delivered later on same day in blocks of an hour or even down to 15-minute periods, to meet sudden demand or take advantage of price differentials. The price for these contracts is decided entirely by the supply and demand, how much the wind is blowing or which coal plants are operating, for example. Demand tends to surge early in the morning and late afternoon. This system was designed when fossil fuels provided the bulk of power. Now there are more renewables, which are less predictable, with wind and solar surpassing gas in EU generation last year, and the proposed changes reflect that shift. 

6. What else have governments done?
There are also traders who focus on longer-dated contracts covering periods several years ahead, where broader factors such as expected economic output and the extent to which renewables are crowding out gas help drive prices. This year’s wild price swings have prompted countries including Germany, Sweden and Finland to earmark billions of euros in emergency liquidity loans to backstop utilities hit with sudden margin calls on their trading.

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Canadian Clean Hydrogen is surging, driven by net-zero goals, tax credits, and exports. Fuel cells, electrolysis, and low-emissions power and transport signal growth, though current production is largely fossil-based and needs decarbonization.

Key Points

Canadian Clean Hydrogen is the shift to make and use low-emissions hydrogen for energy and industry to reach net-zero.

✅ $17B tax credits through 2035 to scale electrolyzers and hubs

✅ Export MOUs with Germany and the Netherlands target 2025 shipments

✅ IEA: 99% of hydrogen from fossil fuels; deep decarbonization needed

As the world races to find effective climate solutions, and toward an electric planet vision, hydrogen is earning buzz as a potentially low-emitting alternative fuel source. 

The promise of hydrogen as a clean fuel source is nothing new — as far back as the 1970s hydrogen was being promised as a "potential pollution-free fuel for our cars."

While hydrogen hasn't yet taken off as the fuel of the future  — a 2023 report from McKinsey & Company and the Hydrogen Council estimates that there is a grand total of eight hydrogen vehicle fuelling stations in Canada — many still hope that will change.

The hope is hydrogen will play a significant role in combating climate change, serving as a low-emissions substitute for fossil fuels in power generation, home heating and transportation, where cleaning up electricity remains critical, and today, interest in a Canadian clean hydrogen industry may be starting to bubble over.

"People are super excited about hydrogen because of the opportunity to use it as a clean chemical fuel. So, as a displacement for natural gas, diesel, gasoline, jet fuel," said Andrew Gillis, CEO of Canadian hydrogen company Aurora Hydrogen. 

Plans for low or zero-emissions hydrogen projects are beginning to take shape across the country. But, at the moment, hydrogen is far from a low-emissions fuel, which is why some experts suggest expectations for the resource should be tempered. 

The IEA report indicates that in 2021, global hydrogen production emitted 900 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — roughly 180 million more than the aviation industry — as roughly 99 per cent of hydrogen production came from fossil fuel sources. 

"There is a concern that the role of hydrogen in the process of decarbonization is being very greatly overstated," said Mark Winfield, professor of environmental and urban change at York University. 

A growing excitement 

In 2020, the government released a hydrogen strategy, aiming to "cement hydrogen as a tool to achieve our goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and position Canada as a global, industrial leader of clean renewable fuels." 

The latest budget includes over $17 billion in tax credits between now and 2035 to help fund clean hydrogen projects.

Today, the most common application for hydrogen in Canada is as a material in industrial activities such as oil refining and ammonia, methanol and steel production, according to Natural Resources Canada. 

But, the buzz around hydrogen isn't exactly over its industrial applications, said Aurora Hydrogen's Gillis.

"All these sorts of things where we currently have emitting gaseous or liquid chemical fuels, hydrogen's an opportunity to replace those and access the energy without creating emissions at the point of us," Gillis said. 

When used in a fuel cell, hydrogen can produce electricity for transportation, heating and power generation without producing common harmful emissions like nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons and particulate matter — BloombergNEF estimates that hydrogen could meet 24 per cent of global energy demand by 2050.

A growing industry

Canada's hydrogen strategy aims to have 30 per cent of end-use energy be from clean hydrogen by 2050. According to the strategy, Canada produces an estimated three million tonnes of hydrogen per year from natural gas today, but the strategy doesn't indicate how much hydrogen is produced from low-emissions sources.

In recent years, the Canadian clean hydrogen industry has earned international interest, especially as Germany's hydrogen strategy anticipates significant imports.

In 2021, Canada signed a memorandum of understanding with the Netherlands to help develop "export-import corridors for clean hydrogen" between the two countries. Canada also recently inked a deal with Germany to start exporting the resource there by 2025.

But while a low-emissions hydrogen plant went online in Becancour, Que., in 2021, the rest of Canada's clean-hydrogen industry seems to be in the early stages.

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Yukon SMR Feasibility Study examines small modular reactors as low-emissions nuclear power for Yukon's grid and remote communities, comparing costs, safety, waste, and reliability with diesel generation, renewables, and energy efficiency.

Key Points

An official assessment of small modular reactors as low-emission power options for Yukon's grid and remote sites.

✅ Compares SMR costs vs diesel, hydro, wind, and solar

✅ Evaluates safety, waste, fuel logistics, decommissioning

✅ Considers remote community loads and grid integration

The Yukon government is looking for ways to reduce the territory's emissions, and wondering if nuclear power is one way to go.

The territory is undertaking a feasibility study, and, as some developers note, combining multiple energy sources can make better projects, to determine whether there's a future for SMRs — small modular reactors — as a low-emissions alternative to things such as diesel power.

The idea, said John Streicker, Yukon's minister of energy, mines and resources, is to bring the SMRs into the Yukon to generate electricity.

"Even the micro ones, you could consider in our remote communities or wherever you've got a point load of energy demand," Streicker said. "Especially electricity demand."

For remote coastal communities elsewhere in Canada, tidal energy is being explored as a low-emissions option as well.

SMRs are nuclear reactors that use fission to produce energy, similar to existing large reactors, but with a smaller power capacity. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) defines reactors as "small" if their output is under 300 MW. A traditional nuclear power plant produces about three times as much power or more.

They're "modular" because they're designed to be factory-assembled, and then installed where needed. 

Several provinces have already signed an agreement supporting the development of SMRs, and in Alberta's energy mix that conversation spans both green and fossil power, and Canada's first grid-scale SMRs could be in place in Ontario by 2028 and Saskatchewan by 2032.

A year ago, the government of Yukon endorsed Canada's SMR action plan, at a time when analysts argue that zero-emission electricity by 2035 is practical and profitable, agreeing to "monitor the progress of SMR technologies throughout Canada with the goal of identifying potential for applicability in our northern jurisdiction."

The territory is now following through by hiring someone to look at whether SMRs could make sense as a cleaner-energy alternative in Yukon. 

The territorial government has set a goal of reducing emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, excluding mining emissions, even as some analyses argue that zero-emissions electricity by 2035 is possible, and "future emissions actions for post-2030 have not yet been identified," reads the government's request for proposals to do the SMR study. 

Streicker acknowledges the potential for nuclear power in Yukon is a bit of "long shot" — but says it's one that can't be ignored.

"We need to look at all possible solutions," he said, as countries such as New Zealand's electricity sector debate their future pathways.

"I don't want to give the sense like we're putting all of our emphasis and energy towards nuclear power. We're not."

According to Streicker, it's nothing more than a study at this point.

Don't bother, researcher says
Still, M.V. Ramana, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, said it's a study that's likely a waste of time and money. He says there's been plenty of research already, and to him, SMRs are just not a realistic option for Yukon or anywhere in Canada.

"I would say that, you know, that study can be done in two weeks by a graduate student, essentially, all right? They just have to go look at the literature on SMRs and look at the critical literature on this," Ramana said.

Ramana co-authored a research paper last year, looking at the potential for SMRs in remote communities or mine sites. The conclusion was that SMRs will be too expensive and there won't be enough demand to justify investing in them.

He said nuclear reactors are expensive, which is why their construction has "dried up" in much of the world.

"They generate electricity at very high prices," he said.

'They just have to go look at the literature,' said M.V. Ramana, a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. (Paul Joseph)
"[For] smaller reactors, the overall costs go down. But the amount of electricity that they will generate goes down even further."

The environmental case is also shaky, according to a statement signed last year by dozens of Canadian environmental and community groups, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Council of Canadians and the Canadian Environmental Law Associaton (CELA). The statement calls SMRs a "dirty, dangerous distraction" from tackling climate change and criticized the federal government for investing in the technology.

"We have to remember that the majority of the rhetoric we hear is from nuclear advocates. And so they are promoting what I would call, and other legal scholars and academics have called, a nuclear fantasy," said Kerrie Blaise of CELA.

Blaise describes the nuclear industry as facing an unknown future, with some of North America's larger reactors set to be decommissioned in the coming years. SMRs are therefore touted as the future.

"They're looking for a solution. And so that I would say climate change presents that timely solution for them."

Blaise argues the same safety and environmental questions exist for SMRs as for any nuclear reactors — such as how to produce and transport fuel safely, what to do with waste, and how to decommission them — and those can't be glossed over in a single-minded pursuit of lower carbon emissions.  

Main focus is still renewables, minister says
Yukon's energy minister agrees, and he's eager to emphasize that the territory is not committed to anything right now beyond a study.

"Every government has a responsibility to do diligence around this," Streicker said.

A solar farm in Old Crow, Yukon. The territory's energy minister says Yukon is still primarily focussed on renewables, and energy efficiency. (Caleb Charlie)
He also dismisses the idea that studying nuclear power is any sort of distraction from his government's response to climate change right now. Yukon's main focus is still renewable energy such as solar and wind power, though Canada's solar progress is often criticized as lagging, increasing efficiency, and connecting Yukon's grid to the hydro project in Atlin, B.C., he said.

Streicker has been open to nuclear energy in the past. As a federal Green Party candidate in 2008, Streicker broke with the party line to suggest that nuclear could be a viable energy alternative. 

He acknowledges that nuclear power is always a hot-button issue, and Yukoners will have strong feelings about it. A lot will depend on how any future regulatory process works, he says.

In taking action on climate, this Arctic community wants to be a beacon to the world
Cameco signs agreement with nuclear reactor company
"There's some people that think it's the 'Hail Mary,' and some people that think it's evil incarnate," he said. 

"Buried deep within Our Clean Future [Yukon's climate change strategy], there's a line in there that says we should keep an eye on other technologies, for example, nuclear. That's what this [study] is — it's to keep an eye on it."

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Electric tractors are surging, with battery-powered models, grid-tethered JD GridCON, and solar-charged designs delivering autonomous guidance, high efficiency, low maintenance, quiet operation, robust PTO compatibility, and durability for sustainable, precision agriculture.

Key Points

Electric tractors use battery or grid power to run implements with high efficiency, low noise, and minimal maintenance.

✅ Battery, grid-tethered, or solar-charged power options

✅ Lower operating costs, reduced noise, fewer moving parts

✅ Autonomous guidance, PTO compatibility, and quick charging

Car and truck manufacturers are falling off the fossil fuel bandwagon in droves and jumping on the electric train.

Now add tractors to that list.

Every month, another e-tractor announcement comes across our desks. Environmental factors drive this trend, along with energy efficiency, lower maintenance, lower noise level and motor longevity, and even autonomous weed-zapping robots are emerging.

Let’s start with the Big Daddy of them all, the 400 horsepower JD GridCON. This tractor is not a hybrid and it has no hassle with batteries. The 300 kilowatts of power come to the GridCON through a 1,000 metre extension cord connected to the grid, including virtual power plants or an off-field generator. A reel on the tractor rolls the cable in and out. The cable is guided by a robotic arm to prevent the tractor from running over it.

It uses a 700 volt DC bus for electric power distribution onboard and for auxiliary implements. It uses a cooling infrastructure for off-board electrical use. Total efficiency of the drive train is around 85 percent. A 100 kilowatt electric motor runs the IVT transmission. There’s an auxiliary outlet for implements powered by an electric motor up to 200 kW.

GridCON autonomously follows prescribed routes in the field at speeds up to 12 m.p.h., leveraging concepts similar to fleet management solutions for coordination. It can also be guided manually with a remote control when manoeuvring the tractor to enter a field. Empty weight is 8.5 tonnes, which is about the same as a 6195R but with double the power. Deere engineers say it will save about 50 percent in operating costs compared to battery powered tractors.

Solectrac
Two California-built all-battery powered tractors are finally in full production. While the biggest is only 40 horsepower, these are serious tractors that may foretell the future of farm equipment.

The all-electric 40 h.p. eUtility tractor is based on a 1950s Ford built in India. Solectrac is able to buy the bare tractor without an engine, so it can create a brand new electric tractor with no used components for North American customers. One tractor has already been sold to a farmer in Ontario. | Solectrac photo
The tractors are built by Solectrac, owned by inventor Steve Heckeroth, who has been doing electric conversions on cars, trucks, race cars and tractors for 25 years. He said there are three main reasons to take electric tractors seriously: simplicity, energy efficiency and longevity.

“The electric motor has only one moving part, unlike small diesel engines, which have over 300 moving parts,” Heckeroth said, adding that Solectrac tractors are not halfway compromise hybrids but true electric machines that get their power from the sun or the grid, particularly in hydro-rich regions like Manitoba where clean electricity is abundant, whichever is closest.

Neither tractor uses hydraulics. Instead, Heckeroth uses electric linear actuators. The ones he installs provide 1,000 pounds of dynamic load and 3,000 lb. static loads. He uses linear actuators because they are 20 times more efficient than hydraulics.

The eUtility and eFarmer are two-wheel drive only, but engineers are working on compact four-wheel drive electric tractors. Each tractor carries a price tag of US$40,000. Because production numbers are still limited, both tractors are available on a first to deposit basis. One e-tractor has already been sold and delivered to a farmer in Ontario.

The eUtility is a 40 h.p. yard tractor that accepts all Category 1, 540 r.p.m. power take-off implements on the rear three-point hitch, except those requiring hydraulics. An optional hydraulic pump can be installed for $3,000 for legacy implements that require hydraulics. For that price, a dedicated electricity believer might instead consider converting the implement to electric.

“The eUtility is actually a converted new 1950s Ford tractor made in a factory in India that was taken over after the British were kicked out in 1948,” Heckeroth said.

“I am able to buy only the parts I need and then add the motor, controller and batteries. I had to go to India because it’s one of the few places that still makes geared transmissions. These transmissions work the best for electric tractors. Gear reduction is necessary to keep the motor in the most efficient range of about 2,000 r.p.m. It has four gears with a high and low range, which covers everything from creep to 25 m.p.h.

On his eUtility, a single 30 kWh onboard battery pack provides five to eight hours of run time, depending on loads. It can carry two battery packs. The Level 2 quick charge gives an 80 percent charge for one pack in three hours. Two packs can receive a full charge overnight with support from home batteries like Powerwall for load management.

The integrated battery management system protects the batteries during charging and discharging, while backup fuel cell chargers can keep storage healthy in remote deployments. Batteries are expected to last about 10 years, depending on the number of operating cycles and depth of discharge.

Exchangeable battery packs are available to keep the tractor running through the full work day. These smaller 20 kWh packs can be mounted on the rear hitch to balance the weight of the optional front loader or carried in the optional front loader to balance the weight of heavy implements mounted on the rear hitch.

The second tractor is the 20 kWh eFarmer, which features high visibility for row crop farms at a fraction of the cost of diesel fuel tractors. The 30 h.p. eFarmer is basically just a tube frame with the necessary components attached. A simple joystick controls steering, speed and brakes.

Harvest
Introduced to the North American public this spring by Motivo Engineering in California, the Harvest tractor is simply a big battery on wheels. The complex electrical system takes power in through a variety of renewable energy sources, such as solar panels with smart solar inverters enabling optimized PV integration, water wheels, wind turbines or even intermittent electrical grids. It stores electrical power on-board and delivers it when and where required, putting power out to a large number of electrical tools and farm implements. It operates in AC or DC modes.

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