Noble Carbon's smart breakers aim to make EV charger installs cheaper

Plenty of people want to buy electric vehicles, but not everyone is prepared to pay for an upgrade to their home’s electrical service just to add a charger — a real concern, since one study found that upgrading equipment like electrical panels can more than double charger installation costs. Rather than rip out the old panel, Noble Carbon has developed circuit breakers designed to remove that headache. The Pittsfield, Massachusetts, startup is one of 200 companies in this year’s TechCrunch Startup Battlefield, a pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in October in which 20 finalists will present on the main stage.

Noble Carbon’s breakers adjust how much electricity they deliver to a charger in real time, letting chargers fit into panels that would otherwise already be at capacity. Home electrical panels are typically designed to handle absolute peak usage — something that might happen only “a handful of hours per year,” Spencer Fields, Noble Carbon’s head of marketing, told TechCrunch. If a household is running the water heater, air conditioning, oven, and several TVs simultaneously while every light is on, the panel is at its limit; the rest of the time, it has room to spare. In that scenario, Noble Carbon’s smart breakers turn down power flowing to the devices they control, essentially guaranteeing the house never draws more power than the panel can provide. “In order to avoid a main panel upgrade, you really only need control on your three to six largest loads [the biggest power-drawing appliances],” Fields said.

Co-founder and CEO Jared Lebos was inspired to build the product after experiencing rolling blackouts in his home country of South Africa, and worked with co-founder and CTO Andrew Crane to turn the idea into a product. The result is a breaker that fits into existing slots in a home’s electrical panel and, according to the company, takes less than five minutes to install. Some of the startup’s employees have tested the breakers in their own homes for more than a year, and the product is now undergoing evaluation for UL certification, a widely recognized electrical safety standard. Noble Carbon is currently partnering with utility Eversource to install its breakers in up to 200 multifamily units in Massachusetts.

Why it matters

If smart breakers can reliably avoid costly panel upgrades, they could remove one of the biggest hidden cost barriers slowing EV and electrification adoption in older housing stock.