Most people think that coordinating the behavior of thousands of distributed energy resources requires some kind of third-party middleman, like an aggregator managing a VPP. My guest today, veteran research scientist Bruce Nordman, believes there’s a better way: dynamic, time- and location-specific retail prices, communicated directly to consumer devices, which would cut out the middleman and leave more value with customers.

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David Roberts

Hello everyone, this is Volts for May 8, 2026: “The case for using prices rather than VPPs to coordinate distributed energy.” I’m your host, David Roberts.

The electricity grid has more and more participants. There are increasing numbers of small distributed energy resources (DERs) — solar panels, home batteries, EVs, EV chargers, hot water heaters, commercial and residential HVAC systems, and on and on — that need to be coordinated to work as efficiently as possible for the good of the grid as a whole.

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But how should they be coordinated? One answer, which I have discussed many times here on Volts, is what are called virtual power plants, or VPPs. This involves a single aggregator, usually but not always a private party, contracting with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of distributed energy device owners, agreeing to control and coordinate their devices’ behavior, monetize the flexibility, and share the value with them.

My guest today, Bruce Nordman, spent nearly four decades as a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working at the intersection of network technology and energy systems, and he thinks VPPs are the wrong answer. Not because they don’t work — they do — but because the gap they’re exploiting, between the real-time locational value of electricity and the flat, time-invariant rates actually charged to customers, shouldn’t exist. If retail electricity prices actually reflected real-time value, there would be nothing to arbitrage — the flexibility value currently being split with aggregators would just stay with customers, captured automatically by their own devices, without any private third party reaching into their home to do it.

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The technologies needed to do this — basically, a central price server to send the price signal and devices capable of responding to it — have become cost-effective on a mass scale in recent years, and there are limited experiments underway in some places. In this conversation, Nordman and I dig into it pretty deeply. Okay, very deeply. This is an intensely wonky discussion, more technical than most of what happens on Volts, and a pretty punishing two hours, but if you’re a real head and you want to understand how to actually get the most out of DERs, I think it’s worth it.

With no further ado, Bruce Nordman, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Bruce Nordman

Thank you.

David Roberts

This is a lot, Bruce, and I’ve been thinking about how to ease into it. Where I want to start is at the big abstract level. When you first approached me with this, you said, “Hey, let’s use prices instead of VPPs.” I had in mind, “Oh, you’re going to design some novel tariff for PJM or something.” Something like that. But this is much bigger than that. This is a ground-up new vision for how electricity works. It’s a bit more to get into.

Part of the big vision here is similar to Jonas, who we talked to a couple of weeks ago — Jonas Bergerson — in that this is about transitioning the electricity industry from the old unitary model to a networked system. That is what I talked with Jonas about. This is, I think, an excellent adjunct to that or your sequel, or I do not know exactly what you would call it, but you are involved in, broadly speaking, the same project.

You write that the telephone system and the electricity grid were invented at roughly the same time, roughly the same place. They are interesting analogs to track. As listeners know at this point — we covered it a little bit on the Jonas pod — the telephone system has now entirely been transformed into the Internet. This involved, as I said, going from a unitary system to what’s called a networked system.

The electricity grid notably has not. One of the things I want to talk about starting up front is some of the aspects of what it means to go from a unitary to a networked system. Then we can look at how the Internet did it and how the electricity grid has not done it. You have this chart here of qualities of a unitary system and qualities of a network system. A lot of this I think people understand intuitively.

You’re going from a centralized system to a distributed system. You’re going from a largely analog system to a largely distributed digital system. But here’s one that I want to look at because I think it’s important for understanding the electricity grid and why it’s such a problem. One of the things that the telephone system did is go from tightly coupled systems to loosely coupled.

Briefly, and keep in mind briefly because we have a lot of territory to cover, talk about what it means for systems to be tightly coupled or loosely coupled and maybe tell us how the Internet is loosely coupled and then contrast that to tightly coupled systems in the utility grid.

Bruce Nordman

On the telephone system, when I was a child, if I picked up the phone and called my grandmother, a circuit was set up and there was a continuous flow of data at a constant data rate between the two ends of the system over one specific circuit. Even if no one was talking, it was there.

One thing which enables things to be loosely coupled is storage. On the Internet, you can connect links of different communication technologies that run at different speeds because you can store and forward packets, which accounts for the fact that things are running on different technologies and different speeds. For communications, storage changed everything. Data storage was just as essential as digital communications for being able to move to Internet technology.

David Roberts

One of the themes here — and I might as well just put an exclamation point on it now — is normal people, even people who think about electricity, I don’t think anybody has fully absorbed what a big deal it is to go from a system with no storage to a system with storage. It just fundamentally changes the architectural possibilities. It’s more fundamental than people appreciate. Give me an example of a tightly coupled system.

Bruce Nordman

The old phone system was tightly coupled, where everything was interconnected. The old electricity grid was where every customer site was just part of the grid. It didn’t have any functional identity. It couldn’t operate separately. The grid ended at every end-use device.

David Roberts

For every customer to be part of one big pool, that means if I pull on anything in the customer site, it affects everything, because everything is part of the same system. Everybody’s coupled together. Loosely coupled means that you get some distinction — functional distinction — between these systems such that they can operate somewhat in isolation without affecting one another. Is that fair?

Bruce Nordman

Absolutely. Part of this is the AC frequency of 60 Hz, as we use, is part of what enforces this in that things are all very interconnected and all the load affects the frequency.

David Roberts

One advantage of having loosely coupled systems, as opposed to a tightly coupled system, is if you pull on one string, you affect everything. You can’t fiddle with the machine without fiddling with the whole thing. But if you have loosely coupled systems, you can innovate and change and evolve the systems separately and independently.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly.

David Roberts

That enables much faster evolution and expansion and scope. The one underneath that on the list, I think, is similar and related: entangled technologies versus isolated technologies. Similar sort of concept, correct?

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. This is where the Internet technology example is highly informative, where the architecture of the system does this isolating of complexity so that, as you say, systems can evolve separately. Ideally, the technology inside a customer’s site can evolve separately from the technology on the grid and you can minimize the point of interaction between them.

David Roberts

The reason I think that the telephone system was able to make this leap — one of the reasons you point out — is that we were able to build the new system alongside the old system. For a while we had the two systems going, and then we eased our way from the one to the other.

Bruce Nordman

Originally, Internet communications went over phone lines, as with dial-up modems, and then we flipped it so that with Voice over IP, the phone calls went over the Internet lines. There’s a similar transition from where we are to where we want to be.

David Roberts

What I’m trying to get at here is one of the reasons that the electricity system has not been able to make this similar transition is that you can’t really do what you did with the telephones. You cannot build the new system alongside the old system. It is all one big system and you can’t — what’s the analogy? — rebuilding the plane in flight type of thing — that just makes it trickier.

Bruce Nordman

I would push back on that. This gets back to some of the earlier points you made about the podcast with Jonas, about his approach to networking electricity and mine. On the Internet there is the wide area network and there is the local area network. The local area network is what is inside of each customer site, whether it is your house or an office building or a factory. Then you have the modem and router at that boundary. The wide area network is everything else. There are technologies that only exist inside of LANs, and there is technology that only exists inside of the wide area network. Then of course there are things like the Internet protocol and some other ones that exist in both.

David Roberts

We talk about entangled technologies versus isolated technologies. That’s a great example — the WAN and the LAN. You can fiddle with WAN technology, wide area networks, you can fiddle with local area technology, and you don’t implicate the one and the other. You can work on them separately, which enables rapid innovation. As a final thing, transitioning from the unitary to the networked system — and this is, I think, both the most important one and the most difficult for people to wrap their heads around — is going from a deterministic system to a non-deterministic system.

What’s funny is the reason the telephone people didn’t invent the Internet is that they were running a deterministic system and they were convinced that only a deterministic system could work. They could not imagine how a non-deterministic system could do the communications work that telephones did. Of course, they were wrong. People came along, did it, and they faded into history like dinosaurs.

Now we’re in an electricity — the exact same parallel situation, which is right now the people running it are running a deterministic system and they are convinced that only a deterministic system can work and they cannot imagine how a non-deterministic system could work. Just tell us what is a deterministic system and what is a non-deterministic system.

Bruce Nordman

A deterministic system is where you plan out everything in advance and then you operate according to your plan. Airplanes used to do that. They used to file flight plans with the FAA. They said exactly the route they were going to fly and they had to adhere to that unless they got permission to fly differently so that the FAA always knew what they were going to do. Then maybe a decade ago, I don’t remember exactly when, the FAA said, “Other than these military areas where you’re supposed to stay out of, fly wherever you want.” We just transitioned from a deterministic system to a non-deterministic one. It still works.

David Roberts

You can imagine if you ran the old airplane system, why that notion would freak you out. If you are used to working with deterministic systems, the idea that all the planes are going to run themselves their own direction and you’re just going to coordinate on the fly sounds crazy. Yet it works.

Bruce Nordman

Railroads conventionally are quite deterministic, particularly before — where you plan out where the trains are going to be so that they don’t run into each other. That’s certainly quite important. Car traffic is non-deterministic. When you start driving someplace, you don’t tell somebody in advance exactly the route and timing that you’re going to take. You make it up on the fly by observing the traffic, maybe seeing what Google Maps says and such.

David Roberts

To our point here, the communication system, the Internet, has become non-deterministic. As you said, on the telephone system, if I pick up a line, connect to another person, that is a particular physical circuit that the data is traveling to and from. That’s not how the Internet works. I don’t think people necessarily know this. I think this is worth describing briefly. If you send a packet of information out onto the Internet, it is not the same — there’s not a set path that that packet goes along to its destination. What happens and how do we make it work?

Bruce Nordman

Packets for the same chunk of data, whether it’s an email or some streaming video — different packets in that, and there’s going to be an enormous number of these packets — are going to take different paths and arrive at different times and they are reassembled at the end. If any of them don’t arrive, there are ways to retransmit them with TCP to make the whole system work.

To your point about the phone company being blind to this, multiple people went to Bell Labs in the 1950s and said, “Hey, there’s this new thing called packet switching. We think it’s the future of communications.” The smart engineers said, “Yeah, we know that cannot possibly work.” There are people who say it is impossible for a utility to charge a good retail price. Of course, they are wrong also. It is possible for utilities to charge good and better retail prices. They just choose not to.

To your point about deterministic, the wholesale system for electricity has always been deterministic and my guess is always will be because that is how wholesale markets work. But retail electricity has never been deterministic. People are trying to force it to be through things like VPPs, but that is not necessary in general for balancing supply and demand. Deterministic operation is necessary for addressing distribution system capacity issues, which is its own separate topic that I assume will come up later, but that operates at a totally different scale of a few customers at a time versus millions of customers at a time. The two mechanisms operate in parallel.

David Roberts

The idea here is we’re going to go to a non-deterministic electricity system. People get nervous about that because if you don’t get an email, it’s one thing, but power, home and hearth, your medical machines, whatever — electricity is very important. It’s worth emphasizing that despite rubbing our intuitions the wrong way, I’m not sure our brains are naturally wired to think non-deterministically, but we have found through experience that a massive non-deterministic system can in aggregate be as reliable or more reliable than a deterministic system and can scale much faster.

This is all by way of preface. This is all by way of saying that what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about, similarly to what Jonas is thinking about, similarly to what you and other electricity researchers have been beating your heads on for decades now, which is trying to take this unitary deterministic system, transition it to a massively coordinated networked system and thus reap all the benefits in the electricity system that we got by the similar transition from telephone to Internet, airlines, all these other examples. This is all part of that big transition.

Your basic fundamental point and the reason we’re doing this podcast and the core thing here is that your contention, your hypothesis, is that if you’re going to move from a top-down to a networked system, you can’t have top-down coordination anymore. How do you get coordination? How do you make sure all these loosely coupled systems are operating in concert to produce the desired results? How do you coordinate all this stuff? Your contention is that prices are the only mechanism that can do that at every scale and in every context.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. I’ve been looking for the last 20 years for other mechanisms. I’ve never found another mechanism that can do that at any scale, in any context.

David Roberts

Before we jump into what that means and how you envision it working, I just want to go over what you see as a few of the highest, high-level benefits of doing this. Why would we want to do this? Why is it worth hashing through how it works and hashing through the trouble? What is the point of the trouble? The main thing, which we just mentioned, is that you think it is context- and scale-agnostic — price can work for a distribution grid, can work for a microgrid, can work for an individual building, can work for a nanogrid inside the building. At every level of organization, the coordination is being done by pricing.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. One important point here is that I’m a buildings person. I’ve worked on energy use in buildings for the last four decades. I am not a utility grid person, so I try to resist telling people how the utility grid should operate internally. But I also like utility grid people to not tell buildings people how buildings should operate internally because that is not their area of expertise.

David Roberts

I appreciate that. Most of the Volts guests are very grid-centric, but your take is, “I got this covered here in my building, don’t mess with me, just give me my power, tell me the price.” You’re not asking much of the grid. The grid needs to tell you what the price is and supply you power. All the other work, all the flexibility work, all the coordination work is done on the consumer side. This is a very consumer-centric, distributed, building-centric view.

Bruce Nordman

I use the word customer to make clear that this is applicable to all customer types, whether you are residential, commercial, industrial, or agricultural.

David Roberts

Another merit of pricing — and this to me is the most compelling reason to use prices for this coordination — is that it allows the customer to accrue all the benefits and the value of flexibility. If you get a VPP in there, an aggregator in there, the aggregator takes a cut — around 50%. Yes, but if the devices are simply acting flexibly on their own in response to price signals, all of that flexibility value stays with the customer. The customer gets all of it.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly.

David Roberts

When people hear pricing, they think, “Oh, capitalism,” they think exploitation, they think poor people are going to get screwed. Pricing brings up all that stuff. It should be emphasized this is a very customer-centric view here. This is a view of the grid where customers get the value, reap the most value. Customers are in the driver’s seat in this vision and are getting a higher proportion of the value than they would in any other system.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. Yes. This is designed around what’s best for customers and customer devices, in devices that exist today and will even more so in the future. It’s designing the relationship between the grid and the customer around what is best for the customer, but also works for the grid. Remember, we invented the grid to serve customers. We didn’t invent customers to serve the grid. I think a lot of grid people don’t quite understand that the customer is supposed to be always right.

David Roberts

The third benefit of pricing that I want to throw out there is — and I think people are not going to be able to really understand this until we talk a little bit about the model and how it works — this vision of pricing maximizes customer privacy and autonomy and cybersecurity because, and we’ll get into the details, under your model, the customer is not sharing any information with the grid above it. Again, we’ll talk through how that works. The point is, in this model, customer privacy is total. What goes on on the customer site is not known by anyone but the customer, and it is not the business of anyone but the customer.

That is as privacy-maximizing as you could get. There is no grid and third parties can do some work — we will talk about that later — but there does not need to be any third party looking into your customer site. Your devices are doing the work themselves and they are doing it based on your preferences and nobody else needs to know or mess with that.

Bruce Nordman

Yes, but the grid does continue to know what happens at the meter and they should have smart meter readings at whatever time interval, whether it is 15 minutes or five minutes that the grid decides to measure at. The grid absolutely needs to and should have that meter data and needs it to function effectively. But that is the limit of what they need to know. They think they need to know more, but they are wrong.

David Roberts

Just to clarify, you said this before, but just to clarify for everybody, so they know, we’re talking about retail prices here. For the moment, we’re leaving the wholesale system, the wholesale energy market, the transmission system, aside. We’re talking about retail systems coordinating distribution grids.

Let’s talk about the model. The core concept here with your model is that the grid ends at the meter, meaning what goes on on the consumer side of the meter is nobody’s business. The grid consults the meter and two bits of information are exchanged. One, what’s the price? Two, how much energy do you need? That is all the grid knows about a particular customer. How much energy do they need? They don’t know what devices are in there. They don’t know what the devices are doing. The customer is a black box to the grid.

Bruce Nordman

Yes. My physics colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where I was until recently, assured me that the electrons are all the same.

David Roberts

This is crucial. The grid extends to the meter and the meter tells the grid, “At this customer site we need X amount of power.” That is all that the grid knows about what goes on on the customer site. The utility is not poking its nose in and controlling your water heater. All the grid knows about it is how much energy it needs.

Bruce Nordman

It’s how much energy you consumed in the last time interval. It’s after the fact, not before the fact.

David Roberts

But it’s a quantity. This is the information being exchanged — quantity, nothing beyond that. Let’s talk about what you have to have in place to make this work. To make any of it work, you need what you call a highly dynamic price. There have been a lot of — people who discuss this a lot are familiar with time-varying prices and real-time prices. A lot of other terms for this. You use the term highly dynamic price. What are the characteristics of a highly dynamic price?

Bruce Nordman

Its essence is hourly prices that are different every day. Specifically, it is prices that have intervals between hourly and five minutes that bracket the range of what is reasonable. You set those prices no farther in advance than the day before, and the prices are different every day.

David Roberts

Let me ask a couple of questions about this. You draw the line at hourly or smaller. Do you get more benefits the smaller that increment is? Or do you think hourly is frequent enough to do the job?

Bruce Nordman

The important reason to start with hourly is that that is very comfortable for people to move into this. The barrier here is not technology for this. We have invented all the technology we need, all the communication protocols, the price responsive algorithms. The barrier here is the human beings who are fearful of using prices, even though they use prices everywhere else in their life constantly.

David Roberts

You make a point of saying that the prices are different every day. You mean that they need to be responsive to conditions every day.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. The conditions on the grid are different every day. If the prices are not different every day, they are the wrong prices. It is a basic function of any business to set the right price for their product. If they are not competent to do that, they need to let someone else who is competent to run a business run the business.

David Roberts

One other thing is that import and export prices are separate. Explain what that means.

Bruce Nordman

I have solar panels and I have net metering, and I pay almost nothing for electricity, even though I derive huge value from the grid because I overgenerate a huge amount in the summer because there is no air conditioning where I live, and I import lots of electricity in the winter. I derive huge benefit from being connected to the grid, but I pay almost nothing. Other people’s bills are higher because I am not paying enough.

David Roberts

This is the cost shift that everybody’s always talking about.

Bruce Nordman

I don’t have an opinion on what the difference should be between import and export prices, but the principle that they can be different and probably should be different is a very reasonable tool for grid operators to have in their set of tools. It’s something that devices can readily accommodate and use, so that’s not a problem. Having a stream of import prices and, if different, a stream of export prices — if you are an exporting customer — that should be 100% of the financial complexity that devices need to contemplate for deciding how to optimize.

We should not have demand charges, which I would describe as evil. They are pathological to good load optimization and to buildings. They were invented in the 19th century. We have far better tools to address the same issue that demand charges are intended to address. We should just get rid of them. They became obsolete a long time ago.

David Roberts

How geographically granular do you envision highly dynamic pricing being? Is this just a price for a utility area or is it going to get as geographically differentiated as it is temporally differentiated?

Bruce Nordman

From the perspective of any individual customer, they don’t care whether it’s millions of people who pay the same price or dozens. It doesn’t affect the customer technology, the communications, or the automation as to how locational it is. That’s really for the grid operators to decide.

David Roberts

But you need to know that to set a good price. The whole point is that the price is a measure of the value of electricity. The value of electricity changes from time to time and place to place and can change place to place, even relatively proximate places. Theoretically, the value of electricity could be slightly different between two even relatively close places. Getting the geographic scale right seems important to accurately capturing value.

Bruce Nordman

It’s similar to the time interval where there are diminishing returns to getting to smaller, smaller areas and there are diminishing issues about how to treat people equitably. In California, we are planning to have locational prices hopefully as soon as next year. In fact, there are some pilot tariffs from the largest, and soon the second largest, utility in the state that have locational prices today that are hourly and the size of the locations is several hundred thousand people.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Bruce Nordman

These are areas where the distribution system load shape is different and the reasons for wanting to shift load are different in those different locations.

David Roberts

Highly dynamic prices: if you want customer sites to optimize based on highly dynamic prices, you have to transmit the highly dynamic prices to the customer sites. Briefly tell us what a price server is, what role it plays, and why it is necessary.

Bruce Nordman

A price server is like a web server. A web server distributes web pages to computers to show to people. A price server distributes prices to machines to use in their optimization. People are free to look at prices, but we don’t want to encourage them to do so because they have much better things to do with their time and they wouldn’t be good at using them. Maybe three days a year they’ll want to look at the prices, and the other 362 they won’t. They don’t need to.

David Roberts

Let me just blow that out because we need to make this point generally. All of this, all of it, is meant to be automated. The customer is not going to know or care what the hourly variations in prices are. They’re not going to be fiddling with their devices on a day-to-day basis telling their devices what to do. All of this is meant to be automated and happening in the background and you as the customer can just chill out and take your hot showers and drink your cold beers. I think that’s implied, but just to underscore it.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. People express preferences in advance as to how they want their devices to behave, and they can change those preferences anytime they want to.

David Roberts

To return to the original point, the point of a price server is just that you ping it and it tells you the price.

Bruce Nordman

Or really, it pushes out the data to machines on an ongoing basis. It’s technically even simpler than the machine having to ping it when there’s a new price.

David Roberts

This is the very simple point of this: if you’re going to have dynamic prices, you need to tell people. You need to broadcast those prices, which might seem obvious, but it’s hard to get information out of utilities a lot of times. Who has a price server? Is there one of these running somewhere?

Bruce Nordman

Yes, the state of California set one up several years ago called MIDAS and PG&E, my utility, has one. It uses the OpenADR3 protocol. Southern California Edison, the second largest utility, is going to use the same price server. The state will convert theirs to be using that protocol. The concept of a price server dates back to at least 2006, 20 years ago. It is not a new idea because people recognized early on if you are going to have prices to devices, you have to have a way to communicate them.

The price server is the essential part. Then you need communication protocols to move the price from points A to points B, C, and D over both the wide area network and also inside buildings. Then you need the loads, whether they are loads or batteries or EV chargers, whatever they are, that can use the prices. Those are the three elements.

David Roberts

There has relatively recently been developed what’s called OpenADR3, which is a modern, light, replicable, perfectly functional protocol. We know what a price server is. We have a protocol to communicate these things and we know how to create devices that are responsive to them. As you say in your paper, there’s not yet a place in the world, correct me if I’m wrong, where those three pieces are in place and working together.

Bruce Nordman

In California with Pacific Gas and Electric, we do have that. There is a problem with the tariff structure, which is a huge problem that’s not worth our time in this podcast, that makes it problematic. We have the beginnings of it, but we haven’t, for various reasons, had the ability to scale it yet. We have the glimmers of it. California is poised to be the place where this will first happen.

Practically speaking, you’re correct. In some places, we have the price servers but don’t have really good prices yet. Once you have them, manufacturers will spring up and use them because they can deliver more value to their customers and produce a higher quality product.

David Roberts

Here then we get to, in my mind, the really juicy, interesting stuff. This is what I struggled with and this is what I had a little breakthrough about. Let’s talk about the building side. As we say, the only interface in your system between the grid and the building is just this single point of connection, and the only information being exchanged is quantity and price.

Here you are inside your building, your microgrid controller, your central controller of your building devices, which I guess is like a panel or — I don’t know what the central controller looks like. I imagine it will be different for different buildings. Your central controller receives the grid price. This is what’s interesting to me. The value of electricity for that microgrid controller, for that particular building, might be different than the grid controller price. Why is that? What are the considerations at the building level that would mean the value of electricity differs from the grid price? You call this the value of electricity at the building level — you call this the local price, which could be different than the grid price. What are those considerations that would make the value of electricity different for a building than what it says on the tin at the grid level?

Bruce Nordman

New solar customers in California for the last three or four years may be buying electricity at 50 cents, but if they want to sell it to the grid, they’re getting 8 cents. What price should the water heater be getting to decide whether it should be heating water for the next hour or not? If you’re currently importing, presumably you should be getting 50 cents. If you’re currently exporting, if it turned on, it would be consuming 8-cent electricity. It should be getting that signal so that you consume your low-cost electricity instead of higher-cost electricity.

An asymmetric tariff where the import and export are different is the most obvious and widespread reason to have a different local price. I used local as in local area network as in IT, because we want to emulate IT principles and terminology as appropriate as much as possible.

David Roberts

Whether you’re currently importing or exporting will change the local value of electricity. This is where you could import any values that you want. I as a customer might place a very high premium on avoiding greenhouse gases. I can tell my local microgrid controller to adjust the grid price by X amount to reflect that. The value of the electricity inside my building is slightly different than the grid price.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. That’s the second reason that can create a local price — taking into account the climate pollution from the greenhouse gases. You simply take that GHG signal, multiply by the dollar per ton value that you, as the customer, believe is appropriate, add that to the retail price because climate change is real, and then have your devices optimize to that price. It doesn’t change what you pay on your bill, but it changes how your devices shift their load.

David Roberts

This is key. The point of determining the local value of electricity is not that anyone’s paying anybody anything inside the building, it’s just to put a value on the electricity. The whole point is to channel power to its highest value spot application within the building and work down from there. The microgrid controller, your building controller, gets a price from the grid and then translates that grid price into a local price. It takes the grid price as an input and then adds whatever local considerations there are and comes up with the local price, and then it sends that local price down to these little individual nanogrids that I was talking about before that are in your building.

This is the fun bit to me. That little nanogrid controller takes the local price that it got from the microgrid controller and does the same thing. It says, based on my hyperlocal considerations — you might have a nanogrid that’s an EV charger, whatever, or in a washing machine. That nanogrid controller will, based on its hyperlocal considerations, come up with another local price, an even more local price, a hyperlocal price. That price will be used to coordinate the behavior of the devices on that particular individual circuit.

This is what I want to emphasize — this cascade that’s happening. The price server is sending a price to a building, a building then recalculates to a local price, sends that down to a nanogrid, which then recalculates that to an even more local price. What your grid controllers are doing — your microgrid controllers, your nanogrid controllers — are assessing the value of electricity at that particular time, literally that particular time and place, and coordinating the devices accordingly. This answers the question — when I threw this out on Bluesky, a lot of people were saying, “How can prices — the price is the same everywhere in the building, so how could that possibly coordinate all these different devices?”

The answer is that the price is not the same throughout the building. In fact, the value of electricity might not, but might, differ from nanogrid to nanogrid. The reason it unlocks something for me is that I was getting hung up on the word price. I just think the word value, at least for my purposes, for my brain, value captures this better. You’re trying to compute what is the real-time, geographic-specific value of electricity at this particular spot. That calculation is happening everywhere, at every level.

At every level, from the very bottom, the most specific device itself, right up to the nanogrid to the microgrid to the larger microgrid, the value of power is being calculated at every point in that microgrid and power is being channeled to the highest value uses. I want to get people thinking about value rather than price, because the whole point of this is to make sure that the power itself goes to the highest value uses.

Bruce Nordman

Price is just the unit of measurement by which we measure value. It’s dollars per kilowatt hour. That’s what you use for any of these, so long as you’re in a country that uses dollars. It’s always that same unit that you’re using, no matter what the scale is. My house, where I already have several price-responsive devices, I don’t yet have a local price because I have net metering and I haven’t set it up to take into account the greenhouse gas. Most customers will start out with this using the straight import retail price. That’s fine, that’s the starting point. The communications and automation technologies facilitate this more rich utilization of it trivially. That’s just part of how it works. You get all that for free.

David Roberts

One thing I think is important to point out here is that your building is calculating the value of electricity to you individually, your considerations, your local considerations, and acting accordingly. That is something that a VPP can’t do. A VPP is going to round up a bunch of devices or a bunch of houses and treat them as a class, as all the same. A VPP can’t by its nature calculate what is optimal for each individual customer. Only prices can do that for you.

Bruce Nordman

Correct. The VPP doesn’t have access to the correct information to make the right decision. But also the VPP is acting first for its own interests, second for the interests of their customer — which is the utility grid — and only thirdly for the actual electricity customer. With price responsiveness, 100% of the value, as you mentioned, goes to the customer and 100% of the control is with the customer and the customer devices. Customers may choose to have a third party optimize, say, their thermostat, and that could be the product manufacturer, it could be someone else, it could be a nonprofit, it could be the electricity retailer, and that’s fine.

They might even pay a small subscription fee for that service. But the customer is always in control. The optimization is 100% for the value of the customer because the customer is engaging that third party for the customer’s benefit. The key is that if we only had VPPs as an option, I would be an enormous fan because they deliver important value.

There are some things that VPPs do that price is not the right tool for and should not be used. For example, emergency load reduction. If a power plant or transmission line fails and the grid needs an immediate, within one to two second drop in load. That is a great use of VPPs, and that is not something you would do with pricing. There are other things around the edge that are great uses of VPP. It is not that we should not use them, we should use the right tool for the job. Part of the right tool is the most cost-effective tool.

David Roberts

Here we come to a key question, which is: the grid comes to my meter, tells me a price. My building microgrid controller takes that price as an input and computes the local price and then optimizes my devices on my site, on my consumer site accordingly. What does it pay? How does it negotiate? If the price is different, if the local prices or local value is different than the grid value, what happens between the grid and the meter? There is presumably some negotiation.

Bruce Nordman

The grid only sees the meter readings and the price that the grid announces and then computes the bill. That is the only involvement of the grid for balancing supply and demand. There is the related topic of capacity. Putting that aside, there is no negotiation. All of this local price stuff is completely invisible to the grid.

David Roberts

The customer side is computing based on the local value of electricity. To me at this moment, here is how much I need and here is how much I am willing to buy at this price.

Bruce Nordman

The optimization could be in the central controller or in the individual device, and most buildings will use both of those or in the cloud.

David Roberts

This is something I wanted to ask: do you need the central controller? If the devices are smart, couldn’t they just do the work? Is it necessary that you have a central controller?

Bruce Nordman

It’s not. If the retail import price is all you need, then you can just send that price directly to devices and they can use them. You do not need it, you will want it over time. The transition from having no infrastructure to infrastructure devices is a common one. With cable TV, originally the cable went directly into the back of the TV and then we moved to have set-top boxes — infrastructure devices that decoupled between the two domains. With dial-up modems, your computer was directly connected to the Internet.

Now we connect to our local area network through some switches and routers to the modem and then that connects to the wide area network. Creating infrastructures is natural, but to your point, you don’t have to have one to start using it, as long as you’re just optimizing to the direct retail price, which with better prices is going to be much better than what occurs today. We can do this transition incrementally and organically. It doesn’t have to be an all-at-once thing.

David Roberts

Say I’m in a neighborhood. By nature, my neighbors will be experiencing the same climate as me, the same temperature. They will probably be roughly comparable to me socioeconomically. Our price comes to our neighborhood and then all the devices, all these customer sites take in that price and then act on it. Presumably they’re all going to be making roughly similar calculations and they’re going to all act roughly the same way.

Say, for instance, a cheap electricity price comes down one hour and then every EV charger in the neighborhood is like, “Hey, cheap electricity, let’s charge our EVs.” They all go start charging EVs, you get a massive surge and you overwhelm your neighborhood transformer. In other words, how can a single price that’s going to a neighborhood cause individuals in that neighborhood to act differently? It seems like they’re going to act as a school of fish and that’s going to cause all kinds of capacity problems.

Bruce Nordman

Several things are going on here. One is that if you have a precipitous change in price, you’re likely to get a precipitous change in demand. Many utilities around the US and around the world see this with TOU timer spikes where, to your point, EV chargers are all set to start charging at midnight. You create this problem not only locally, but also for the macro grid.

The answer is don’t have a precipitous change in price. If you have these more fine-grained hourly or half-hourly prices, then you can have the price change slowly, not dramatically. Even within the EV chargers, different cars will need to charge for different amounts of time and need to be complete at different times of the day.

David Roberts

But will they though? They’re probably all going to work in the morning and they’re probably most of them coming home in the evening. Their behavior is going to be roughly similar.

Bruce Nordman

Maybe one needs to charge for two hours, one for three, one for five, another for three, so that if there’s a trough of low price times, then the utility needs to just set the size and shape of that trough to result in the load shape which is best for the grid. Prices should be set based on the result that they produce for the grid, not based on the state of grid infrastructure.

Utility people commonly assume that you must set retail prices based on cost causation, which is wrong. They don’t know that it’s wrong, but it’s wrong. Prices should be set to produce the right result. That’s what airlines do. They don’t charge prices based on the state of the infrastructure, their airplanes and their staff. They set it based on past experience with how customers buy tickets, by geography and calendar, et cetera, and then set prices to maximize the most benefit for them. Utilities should set prices for all of their considerations — for generation costs, for transmission issues, distribution issues, environmental goals, et cetera — produce the best load shape, both in aggregate and also by these locational areas. That will have a loose relation to things like wholesale energy costs, but will not have a tight relation.

David Roberts

I’m not sure everybody’s going to understand the distinction here. The two separate questions here are how to distribute power and then what happens if particular circuits are overloaded. In other words, the capacity of the circuit to handle. A price signal goes to the devices. Devices act a certain way, they overload the circuit. What tools do you have to keep capacity in safe boundaries? If you charge an EV, it is a large power draw rapidly, a big burst of draw in a way that a stove or an air conditioner or whatever is not going to be.

Especially if you have a DC fast charger with multiple stalls. If three EVs hook up all at once, all of a sudden you get a ginormous demand out of nowhere almost instantly.

Bruce Nordman

Or if you have a pole-mounted transformer with 10 houses, six of them have EV chargers and maybe one of them has two, you can easily get the same thing. For my house on an annual basis, ignoring my PV panels, it uses about a kilowatt on average over the course of the year. The highest single hour was a little over 4 kW for everything before I got an EV. An EV charger can be 7 or even 9 kW all by itself.

David Roberts

Wild. Running your EV charger more than doubles the previously high point of your instantaneous load.

Bruce Nordman

For the highest single hour and it could be like eight times the typical. That’s incredibly bursty.

David Roberts

Which makes it a new kind of thing on the grid. This is also worth emphasizing. It’s not that we have a lot of experience dealing with giant bursty loads. There haven’t been a ton of them.

Bruce Nordman

The first place that this capacity issue showed up was in Australia, which — to a recent podcast of yours on rooftop PV — there, a number of years ago, had an increasing number of circuits where on certain days in the afternoon when solar production was at its peak, the transformers and wires were approaching their capacity. They said, “Okay, nobody else on this circuit gets to install PV, forever, unless we spend lots of money increasing the capacity of the system.”

David Roberts

Or they can curtail. Now they are writing that into the contract that they can curtail your individual solar in these circumstances.

Bruce Nordman

Rather than saying no one else can install solar, when in fact most of the time there is extra capacity — it is only a few hours of the year — what they started doing was broadcasting out interval power limits to each customer, not to how much the PV can produce, but to how much the customer site as a whole can export. This is called dynamic operating envelopes. Then they can fairly allocate the capacity to each customer and it is different for each customer, different every day, to make maximum use of the capacity that is there and guarantee that the system will not be overloaded. That is an incredibly powerful mechanism.

David Roberts

An individual customer site is told, “Here’s how much you can export this hour.”

Bruce Nordman

Correct.

David Roberts

If its solar is running, it might take this and say, “Okay, well then instead of exporting all the solar, I’m going to put it in my battery.” That’s the kind of calculation that’s going on on the consumer side in response to this.

Bruce Nordman

Correct. Anything that you might have been in danger of having to curtail, you instead put into a battery, you run the air conditioner, you heat some water, whatever it is, and we want people to shift loads those times anyway. This mechanism just reinforces what is good for the customer and good for the grid as well. There is no financial aspect to this. It is purely a requirement for operating to make sure that we keep the system safe.

Doing this kind of digital capacity management is not new. USB, which has now been around for more than a third of a century, from day one, has had capacity management. You plug a device into the USB port in your computer, it can’t just take power, it has to first request capacity. There’s a negotiation about the capacity. This is fundamentally different from the pricing, where the communication is one direction. For the capacity management, when you get to things like EVs, there does need to be some negotiation so that the grid can allocate through some dynamic mechanism capacity. Devices are able to reserve capacity when they need it and plan for it and guarantee that the system will not exceed it.

The details of that mechanism are still being determined. People have different theories and we need to do more experimentation on that. Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison in California are doing experiments with some mechanisms. They are more band-aid rather than permanent ones. The protocol you mentioned, OpenADR3, has two mechanisms for it.

This is an area that needs much more attention, but it can be done in coordination with the customer site as a whole, rather than trying to micromanage individual devices. What happens at the meter is the only thing that affects the grid, it simplifies things so much. If that is the point of interaction rather than trying to work around the meter because you do not have the right arrangement of the meter.

David Roberts

The take home here is you’ve got two separate mechanisms — pricing mechanisms and capacity mechanisms. According to you, once you’ve got those two, you’re mostly done. You need to send out price signals and then you need to send out capacity envelopes that people need to stay inside. With those two bits of information — what is the price and what is the hour, what is the capacity envelope for the hour — that’s all the information customer sites need to do their optimization and to do collective optimization.

Bruce Nordman

Correct. Yes.

David Roberts

This capacity will also be a relatively local thing too. Generally these capacity issues come up on individual transformers or —

Bruce Nordman

It could be the first transformer in front of a house, for example, or it could be a substation or the wire in between. It could occur at different points in the distribution system depending on the details of it. That’s all inside the grid where the constraint is — it doesn’t matter to the customer. The customer only needs to know what’s the mechanism for coordinating with the grid so that things work out the best possible for everybody, which is to use all the capacity that’s there and guarantee that it’s not exceeded.

David Roberts

Here you have — and this I think is what comes up with a lot of people when they first hear this — a system that’s based almost entirely on price. Price — how much does it cost, who can pay? When people hear that, their mind goes immediately to, “What about people who can’t pay? How is this not rapacious capitalism, et cetera, et cetera?” There’s a question of if price and capacity are your two mechanisms and your only two mechanisms, how do you ensure other kinds of social or political goals or guidelines? How do you layer other stuff in?

Bruce Nordman

I care as much about this as anyone else does. When I started thinking about this, I started thinking about it in the context of off-grid systems in developing countries and how to make that work. That’s how I originally came to be using price. Simply changing the price does not increase system costs. In fact, changing the price is a way to reduce system costs and therefore reduce bills. That has to be clear in people’s minds — dynamic pricing is about achieving lower bills. It’s not about achieving higher bills.

In California, what we are doing for the near term and what we should do forever is that you charge an hourly price and you calculate the bill according to that and according to some TOU price. If you would have paid less under the TOU, you pay that to make sure that the people who today are more expensive to serve than others continue to pay the TOU and the people who are less expensive to serve and then also can do additional load shifting, pay the hourly. Over time more and more people will just be doing the hourly and fewer and fewer will be on this TOU backstop. That is easy to understand and easy to implement.

David Roberts

How do you protect low-income ratepayers?

Bruce Nordman

They continue to pay the TOU if they are more expensive to serve. Many low-income people today are less expensive to serve and are paying more than they should because they’re consuming more at the low-price times. Others are the reverse. It’s not that low-income people are some monolith. The current system is not fair. We have to recognize that. Current tariffs are not fair. Absolutely. If we want to make things fair, we can move in that direction and move to it in a way which protects anybody who has non-optimal load shapes. We can help them change their load shapes through acquiring devices, controls, or new appliances as we’ve done with energy efficiency for decades.

David Roberts

Is there any functional distinction between an individual customer site, a building, say, that is its own small microgrid, and a larger microgrid in which that building is a part? To the larger grid, the microgrid is the black box, correct?

Bruce Nordman

That’s absolutely true. This community is essentially a single large customer from the perspective of the utility.

David Roberts

That’s what I’m trying to get at. Theoretically, a whole community could be, from the grid’s point of view, a single customer if they were all on the same microgrid.

Bruce Nordman

Correct.

David Roberts

They could calculate their local price based on their local values.

Bruce Nordman

But that’s the retail price for that community. That would be at best a locational retail price. It’s still not a local price inside of a single customer site. They’re similar, I can see that, but you still have a utility-customer relationship between the community and the final customer. That’s not a problem. That’s just not the same as inside of a customer site.

David Roberts

The whole question is: how do you allocate your power to your highest value? How do you allocate power? The way you want to allocate power is you want to put it where it’s most valuable first and work down from there. To do that, you need to calculate what is the value. The key insight here is that the value from the grid perspective is going to be slightly different than the value from the building perspective. Value is being calculated all the way down, such that when you get to the device level, the actual device optimization is working on extremely local, very specific value information. You are optimizing for value at every level.

Bruce Nordman

Correct.

David Roberts

That, I think, is the point here.

Bruce Nordman

The water heater doesn’t have to know where the price came from or why. It only cares about what the price is. The grid could go down. Your house continues to operate as a microgrid because you have a battery and the price may change. The water heater re-optimizes. You may have a higher price or a lower price, depending on what is going on. The water heater doesn’t care about why, it just cares what the price is. All of this topological complexity in no way affects how devices operate.

David Roberts

Let’s return briefly to the point about non-deterministic systems, because I think now that we have described how this works, how price is being used as a coordination and optimization mechanism down to the device level. In what sense is this system non-deterministic?

Bruce Nordman

Retail customers have always been non-deterministic in their consumption of electricity, with a few niche exceptions. In general, you don’t promise in advance to your utility grid how much electricity you’re going to consume each hour for the next month or the next year. You just consume whenever you want to. That’s always been the case about how electricity works. I’m not changing that at all. We can either charge bad prices or we can charge good prices.

What’s a good price? A good price is a price which results in a better overall situation for the grid, the entity setting the prices — that’s their job, to set the price which produces the best result for them. In the past, the price was just a revenue generation mechanism. That’s all it was. In the present and future, the price is also a control mechanism to shift load. What you need to do to set retail prices in this context is go through two separate calculations.

One calculation occurs today, which is the revenue requirement of the utility. How much revenue do they need to collect at the end of the day, month, or year. This doesn’t change that one bit, except that we will lead to needing less revenue because the system can be more efficient. Secondly, you go through a calculation of what’s the shape of the prices — 24 hourly prices or 48 half-hour prices. The grid, based on past experience, determines what shape for this locality will produce the best result for the grid. Then shift that shape up or down so they collect the right amount of revenue. Those two things happen in parallel so that you meet both objectives: collect the right amount of revenue and charge the right shape so that the right load shifting happens.

In general, the water heater, because you are only shifting load, you are never shedding load with your water heater, only cares about the difference in prices, it does not care about the absolute price. These two things work seamlessly together to shape load and to collect revenue.

David Roberts

I come back again to how this is going to produce a more efficient system. I think one of the advantages of this is that it makes flexibility not something that you try to add on top of the system or that you try to tweak the system afterwards. Flexibility will just be part of normal electricity consumption. In this, the flexibility is part of the operation of the system, not some separate thing.

Bruce Nordman

Precisely. Historically what we do is we sold electricity at the wrong price. Utilities got results that they didn’t like for whatever reasons — too high a generation cost, transmission or distribution issues. Then we created these complicated, expensive mechanisms like VPPs to account for the fact that we charge at the wrong price. Those are expensive bandages on the system or like digital paint on the old analog system. What this is, if you charge the right price to begin with, then you get the result you wanted. You don’t need the band-aid, you don’t have a wound that you need to address because you’re not creating the wound by charging the wrong price.

In other contexts we just charge the right price. Airlines charge the right price. They don’t sell their tickets at a flat price and then have third parties go in and try to convince people to change their flight times to even out the supply and demand of airplane seats. They just charge the right price to begin with.

David Roberts

This is the analogy that finally occurred to me. I was thinking about how to explain this to normal people. This is the analogy that I think works: imagine if airlines sold all seats on all flights for the same flat price. They would get terrible results from that. Some flights would be massively oversubscribed, some undersubscribed. Imagine a third party came along, rounded up all the ticket holders and said, “Hey, the airline’s getting terrible results. There’s some value to the airline of you being flexible. Can you move your flight, individual customers? Can you move your flight?” Then that third party rounded up all the customers, took their flexibility, and sold it to the airlines. That is the VPP model.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. It’s complicated and it’s expensive.

David Roberts

What you are saying is just don’t charge that dumb flat price in the first place. If you charge prices that reflect temporal and geographic value, you will get the results you want and then you won’t have to do this ad hoc flexibility stuff afterward. Is that fair? The airline analogy — you think that works?

Bruce Nordman

Yeah. The key difference in the last few years is that we now have all of the technologies at very low cost, often free, to make the automatic control highly practical. We have the communication protocol — we had communication protocols for pricing for the last 20 years, but they were old and cumbersome and difficult to deal with. Now we have modern, simple ones. We have pervasive Internet connectivity so that devices can get the prices. We have extremely low-cost computation on integrated circuits. The integrated circuits that go into appliances cost four or five dollars.

David Roberts

This is worth emphasizing. This is all cheap, often free. The benefit of all these electronic developments over the last 30 years is this is all just basic circuits and communication stuff that is trivially cheap. It’s not some big, fancy, complicated stuff we’re talking about. Your water heater just needs to ping the Internet, and that is a solved problem.

Bruce Nordman

And ping your local price server in your central building device to get the price.

David Roberts

Who is then pinging the central price server.

Bruce Nordman

The reason many appliances have Wi-Fi on them today — when you think, “Does my dishwasher need to have Wi-Fi?” — no, it doesn’t, but the microprocessors have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the chip whether they are used or not. It is literally free for them to include it. You can’t get much less expensive than free. I will soon have three price-responsive devices today covering my space heat, water heat, and EV charging. Also, my phone optimized it to a GHG, all of it through free software upgrades from the manufacturer for devices that were not grid responsive when I bought them.

David Roberts

No kidding. You bought non-grid responsive appliances and they just had the chips in them that were capable of Wi-Fi communication. Because they included them trivially regardless, a software update from the manufacturer then turned on its ability to communicate with the web.

Bruce Nordman

I should be more specific here. My space heat and hot water come from a heat pump which the heat pump can’t communicate with. But I have a clever controller commercial product. When I bought it, it optimized to time-of-use prices in the manufacturer’s cloud. I then got the free software update where it optimizes to hourly prices in the controller in my house and it receives those prices that were OpenADR3. That was a free software update. The EV charger, when I got it, optimizes to TOU prices in the cloud and they are working on integrating with the PG&E price server to be able to use the hourly prices and optimize in their cloud to it. That PG&E price server uses OpenADR3.

David Roberts

Really most of what you are talking about in this system is software tweaks. There is just not a lot of hardware, certainly not expensive hardware, involved in any of this. Most of this is software, correct?

Bruce Nordman

For any new product or any product that you can get an over-the-air software update, an increasing number, this is pretty trivial. There is this long transition time where lots of people have old water heaters. Maybe it’s an electric resistance water heater. There are commercial products today that will control them and are Internet connected and could readily operate to an hourly price just as well as to the TOU price they’re operating to now.

David Roberts

There’s no barrier to making literally any appliance price responsive. Even if it’s dumb and old, you can get a controller to attach to it to make it —

Bruce Nordman

Well, a dumb device generally only works if you can depower it. For a resistance water heater you can just shut off the power to shift its load. I’m sure there are some devices where that’s not a workable option. Some devices will need replacement. Many devices can have these external controls which do cost something. Doing anything costs something. To have something be part of a VPP, it has to be able to communicate and that’s all you need for the price response. You don’t need anything more for price response than you need for VPPs, you just avoid a whole lot of cost and complexity.

David Roberts

Let’s talk about how to get from here to there, which is part of what’s broken my brain about all this. This is a very wholesale change in the way the electricity system works. Just to review, what we need to make this work is a central price server, a protocol that helps communicate, and price-responsive devices. We have price-responsive devices. That’s a solved technical problem. We have the protocol. That’s a solved technical problem. We know how to make a price server. That’s technologically trivial. Technologically speaking, this is all good to go.

It’s not technology development that is the barrier here. Is the road in this direction — does it start with utilities changing how they charge prices? Just with utilities implementing more dynamic prices? Is that step one here?

Bruce Nordman

That’s step one. It could be either a unitary utility acting on its own, or it could be a utility forced by a regulator, such as in Illinois where the legislature passed a law saying they must offer hourly prices different every day, and they’ve had it for 10 years.

David Roberts

Oh really? Illinois has highly dynamic prices of the type you are talking about.

Bruce Nordman

Yes, but the variation over the course of the day isn’t very much. Your opportunity to save is limited. It’s there, but it’s not that great. They have only very limited automation. They don’t have a price server in the way that we’re talking about. Having the prices is a prerequisite for everything else, the prices and the price server, because it’s not that difficult for manufacturers to put in the ability to be price responsive. In general, they are reluctant to spend time doing so until they have a critical mass of customers who could actually use them.

I’ve had this conversation with many manufacturers over many years and they say, “I’m not going to innovate into a vacuum. I need to have a business case. I need to have the customers and the customers need to be able to pay the prices.” Everything comes down to the prices. It’s not a chicken-and-egg thing. The prices have to come first.

David Roberts

Yeah, but skate to where the puck is going. Everything is going to talk to the Internet eventually. Just go ahead and do it.

Bruce Nordman

Then we also need to get global consensus on the maximum complexity of the tariffs as it affects device optimization. Just to be clear, you can have fixed charges which do not affect device optimization. But the parts of the tariff that affect how devices optimize to reduce bills the most need to be limited to the stream of import prices and stream of export prices. People need to recognize that needs to become the global standard so that a manufacturer in China, shipping products all over the world, can ship products that will work all over the world because everything works the same way.

David Roberts

I see. You want to standardize price format to make this replicable and interoperable across different utilities, different countries —

Bruce Nordman

Everywhere! We’ve done this with IT technology. It’s not that we haven’t done this globally before. We just need to get a critical mass of organizations that operate according to these principles and that other people will see the merit of it and then be consistent with it. The question is how do we get to that initial critical mass? If you take the principles that things should be simple and universal, you’re 80% of the way towards having the right answer. Some utilities will think they’re special and different. You and I know they are special and they aren’t different in this respect.

How you calculate the price can be different everywhere because that doesn’t change the communication. This is like web browsing where you have the web server, HTML, and web browsers, and HTML defines the maximum complexity of the web page. This price structure defines the maximum complexity of how prices should be done on a retail basis.

David Roberts

Got it. It’s a high priority for you to keep this simple, to keep the pricing differentiation as simple as possible.

Bruce Nordman

Exactly.

David Roberts

Import price, export price, but it is going to change hour to hour. It’s not simple in that respect. It’s changing temporally all the time.

Bruce Nordman

It can be a day. The vast majority of people who pay such prices, there are day-ahead prices and that is absolutely the place to start. Once people have the automation, they will realize that you could shift from day-ahead to day-of prices. The communication, the automation do not change and that is going to result in a slightly lower bill. This will happen later on, but we just have to know that the devices do not care if it is day-ahead or day-of.

The key thing here is that we don’t want to put digital paint onto our 19th-century electricity technology. We need electricity technology initially just inside of buildings and then later into the utility grid — which is digitally native and networked — instead of using network technology to manage our 19th-century systems.

David Roberts

This is a very big set of ideas and topics, a very big idea. Do you have a next thing that you are pushing for? You said we can step toward these incrementally. What’s next on your personal list that you would like to see happen moving in this direction?

Bruce Nordman

Aside from every electricity retailer offering hourly prices that are different every day or something that is beyond flexibility?

David Roberts

That’s a big step, Bruce. Much more practically, earthbound — is there a particular utility you’re trying to get a pilot thing started with? Very practically, what needs to happen?

Bruce Nordman

PG&E offers hourly prices different every day to any customer type today and has for more than a year. Southern California Edison is supposed to soon and the state of California’s Energy Commission policy is that every Californian should have access to such prices in less than a year. I don’t think we will make that deadline, but we are trying to get there.

David Roberts

That’s the price server that you’re talking about. Making them available to everyone is just about setting up the price.

Bruce Nordman

It’s about offering the prices and having the price server to communicate them. In some places they have the prices but they don’t have the price server.

David Roberts

Let’s stipulate in our fantasies, two years from now, California has the dynamic prices, has the server. Then what is left to do for Californians, individual consumers, is just to buy the price-responsive devices. Everything will be in place except for the consumers.

Bruce Nordman

In many cases people will get devices that can get software updates to do it or they can acquire a central controller that can do it. When they replace a product, they will replace it with one that does this. Any cloud-connected device can certainly do this and just optimize in the cloud. There are lots of paths for many existing devices to become price responsive very quickly and then it will take time for most of the devices to turn over and get replaced.

David Roberts

Long story short, California is moving in this direction and there is reason to believe that in some amount of time, two years, five years, this is how the California electricity system is going to work.

Bruce Nordman

Yes. We also plan to still have VPPs and use them both. The balance of it should be determined by the market and the need. There’s always going to be some — we will make good use of VPPs for the foreseeable future because we won’t turn everything over instantly, there’ll be just a shift in the balance over time. There are some limited services that VPPs are better at. It’s not that they don’t have a role, it’ll just be changing.

I was thinking the other day that it’s like hybrid cars. Hybrid cars are sort of like VPPs in that they’re kind of a band-aid solution. Hybrid cars are actually growing, as I understand it, even as electric vehicles are also growing. Over time, eventually the EVs will grow and start taking up and the hybrids will decline over time. That’s, I think, a very good way to think about it.

David Roberts

The point I’m trying to make here, and what I want listeners to take away, is that this is not just Bruce’s elaborate fantasy that he’s concocted. This is a thing that’s happening in the world. There are systems moving in this direction, and this is something that could happen within our lifetimes. We could see a system working.

Bruce Nordman

Millions of people in at least 20 countries pay such prices today, unfortunately most without the right automation. The automation is easy to set up. The barriers are all in people’s heads and institutional. They are not technological.

David Roberts

Maybe this is a hard question to answer, but among the nerds who think about stuff like this, the class of nerds in the world who are beavering away investigating electrical systems and thinking about how to reform them, is there a broad consensus behind this basic vision or is it a battle? Is it a debate? Are you an outlier? Are you a minority? What’s the state of opinion in Electricity World about this? Are a lot of people captured by this and want to move this way, or do you feel like you’re fighting the tide?

Bruce Nordman

I feel like I’m fighting the tide, but there are lots of reasons to be optimistic, at least in the long term. More and more places are offering more dynamic prices. The automation of their use — people haven’t figured out that that’s an essential part of this. The desire for privacy and autonomy certainly is only growing. The desire for lower bills is growing. Both of those are facilitated by this.

One problem here is that there’s no group of companies that are making lots of money off of this, that are a trade association lobbying for this, because the customer saves the money. There’s not these companies pulling money out. That’s part of why this is so good. With VPPs you’ve got tons of venture capital, so they can have big PR budgets and get lots of attention to this, whereas there’s no industry behind this for pricing because it’s all about saving money rather than about extracting money from people.

David Roberts

Yes, it is a value shift in the direction of customers and as a cynic, you would expect that not to be hugely popular among the entities who were previously receiving that value. What you really need is consumer groups to get behind this. This gets back to what I was saying earlier — consumer advocates, when they hear “let’s just throw everybody out on the mercy of the market and use nothing but prices,” have negative connotations around that. There is a lot of communications work to be done with the consumer field about this, about why it is consumer friendly.

Bruce Nordman

We’re already at the mercy of the market. We’re already paying all of the revenue requirement for utilities. All this does is reduce how much revenue they need. In a way it’s a path towards lower bills — it’s not a path towards higher bills. That’s the key.

David Roberts

I know that, you know that. But I don’t think ordinary people when they hear pricing necessarily think consumer first. Which is just to say that there’s a lot of translation and communication work to be done here to help people understand why this is a consumer-friendly reform and not rapacious capitalism or whatever.

Bruce Nordman

Internet technology developed from researchers and academics and government labs. It wasn’t in the market where it all developed because it had business backing until it reached scale and then people figured out that they could have businesses around it, but the development wasn’t driven by those business interests. That’s the problem here — we don’t have business interests driving the development of this, even though once it exists people will realize there is lots of opportunity to change existing products or introduce new products.

David Roberts

Obviously, we’ve barely scratched the surface. People can go to your website, got all kinds of papers digging into this further, all the ins and outs. One thing I just leave listeners with is, and this I think is a good provocative question you ask, which is: if not prices, then what? As you say, VPPs are good, but customer sites are going to get very complicated and trying to micromanage 10,000, 50,000 customer sites from a central location is just going to get impractical quickly. We need a coordination and optimization mechanism that can operate locally, that can operate at different scales, that can operate off grid or on grid, et cetera. If not pricing, then what is that going to be?

Bruce Nordman

Exactly. I’ve looked for 20 years and I’ve never found a second mechanism. Let’s suppose that the utility sees their transformers getting overloaded and wants to turn down my EV charger, but I really want to charge my EV and I’ve got a stationary battery I could discharge. They shouldn’t turn down my EV. They should just say, “You can’t import as much power,” in which case I’ll just discharge it from the battery and keep charging my EV. All the decisions need to be made locally because the information to make the right decision is local. The customer’s preferences and economic impacts all occur locally.

David Roberts

The customer is in control here, in the driver’s seat here, getting all the value of flexibility, in control of the preferences, in control of the operation of their devices. One thing I like about this vision is that you have solved the privacy problems at a stroke here and the enshittification problem too. I think this is going to avoid that too, because the utilities are not capturing you, the VPPs are not capturing you. You are running your own stuff.

Bruce Nordman

Because it’s platforms that enshittify, it’s not technologies. You’re not required to be part of any platform. With this, it’s only about technology.

David Roberts

I’ll leave it there. Good Lord. Thank you to any listener who’s still with us. Thank you, Bruce, for walking us through this again. People can go to brucenordman.com and learn a lot more about all this. Thanks, Bruce.

Bruce Nordman

Thank you so much. I would love to hear from other people who have questions or want to help out with this.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.

Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.

💾

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Growth Energy, the nation’s largest biofuel trade association, announced today that the total number of retail locations selling E15—a more affordable fuel blend made with 15% American ethanol—now totals more than 5,000 stores, marking a new milestone in E15 availability.

“More and more fuel retailers across the U.S. are offering E15 because they know it’s a more affordable fuel option that their customers can rely on,” said Growth Energy CEO Emily Skor. “With 5,000 stores now selling E15 across the U.S., more drivers than ever are able to take advantage of E15’s lower prices. We congratulate every fuel retailer that’s made this milestone possible, and look forward to watching the total E15 store count continue to climb as retailers invest in ways to deliver better, more affordable fuel options.”

Since 2020 the number of stores selling E15 in the U.S. increased at an annualized rate of 15%. Between 2024 and 2025, the number of E15 stores jumped from 3,808 to 4,736, a total of more than 900 new stores representing an increase of 24% in that period. This increased rate of adoption was achieved despite the fact that, today, E15 can only be sold all year long if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issues a waiver for retailers to do so. This is an outdated regulatory requirement that’s still on the books from a 35-year-old law that was enacted before E15 was first introduced as a fuel option.

“We’ve seen robust growth in E15 availability even with these outdated waiver-to-waiver regulations,” Skor added. “At the current rate of E15’s expanding retail footprint, we expect to see more than 1,200 additional retail locations begin to sell E15 in 2026. If Congress can deliver a permanent fix for year-round E15, however, that number would be exponentially higher. This is why it’s so important for Congress to take action and vote in favor of year-round E15 now—more consumers deserve access to E15’s cost savings, and that’s exactly what this greater regulatory certainty would provide.”

Congress is set to vote on a bill that would allow for the year-round sale of E15 on May 13. Supporters of E15 should visit growthenergy.org/E15Now and tell their elected officials to support the measure and finally make E15 available all year long.

 

The post Growth Energy Announces that E15 Is Now Offered at 5,000 Locations across the U.S. appeared first on Growth Energy.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., – The Women Presidents Organization (WPO) has named Zūm to its list of the 2026 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies, supported by J.P. Morgan Commercial Banking.

Zum ranks No. 4 on this year’s list, which highlights the impressive scale, growth, and impact of women-owned or led enterprises around the world. To be eligible, all companies must be privately held, women-owned or led, and must have reached annual revenues of at least $500,000 in each of the last five years.

“Zum is proud to be modernizing mobility systems in more than 4,500 schools nationwide through Zum CMX, a fully integrated system designed to eliminate the anxiety, uncertainty, and lack of visibility that have plagued student transportation for decades,” said Ritu Narayan, Founder and CEO of Zum. “We are honored to be recognized on this prestigious list of the 2026 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies, and appreciate all of our team, customers, investors and partners who support our mission.”

“The women leading the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies are not only scaling successful businesses, they are navigating change, seizing opportunity, and setting the pace within their industries,” said Camille Burns, CEO of the Women Presidents Organization. “Their collective impact reflects the growing influence of women at the highest levels of business. These companies are redefining what scalable leadership looks like today.”Companies on the 2026 list represent a wide array of industries, including travel and hospitality, digital marketing, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, human capital solutions, information technology and more. Combined, the 2026 50 Fastest generated $8.5 billion in revenue and employed more than 23,000 people in 2025 alone.

Zum’s technology-led and data-driven approach improves transparency, communication, and efficiency while delivering a safer, more reliable experience for students and families. The company recently announced a $100 million strategic investment from TPG, bringing its total funding to $430 million and valuing Zum at $1.7 billion.

Adopted in 17 states, Zum delivers its unified system across more than 4,500 schools, including Omaha Public Schools, Boston Public Schools, Kansas City Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified, and San Francisco Unified. Zum’s fully integrated Connected Mobility Experience (CMX) system connects people, vehicles, and operations in real time, reducing anxiety and creating reliable, safe and seamless transportation for families and schools.

The 2026 honorees will be formally recognized during the WPO Entrepreneurial Excellence Forum on May 7 in Hollywood, Florida. See the full list of the 2026 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies at women-presidents.com/news-events/50-fastest.

To learn more about how Zum is leading the nation in safe and reliable student mobility, visit www.ridezum.com.

About Women Presidents Organization (WPO)
The Women Presidents Organization (WPO) is a non-profit membership organization where dynamic and diverse women business leaders around the world tap into collective insight with exclusive access to entrepreneurial equals, innovative ideas, and executive education. WPO members have guided their business to generate at least $2 million USD in gross annual sales (or $1 million USD for a service-based business). Each WPO chapter serves as a professionally-facilitated peer advisory group for members where they can harness the momentum of their successes and cultivate new strategies that will take them even farther. Learn more at women-presidents.com.

About J.P. Morgan Commercial Banking
J.P. Morgan Commercial Banking is a business of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), a leading global financial services firm with assets of $4.4 trillion and operations worldwide. Commercial Banking serves emerging startups to mid-corporate businesses as well as government entities, not-for-profit organizations, and commercial real estate investors, developers and owners. Clients are supported through every stage of growth with specialized industry expertise and tailored financial solutions including digital banking and payments solutions, credit and financing, international banking, advisory services and more. Information about J.P. Morgan Commercial Banking is available at www.jpmorganchase.com/commercial.

About Zum
Zum is revolutionizing mass mobility with its Connected Mobility Experience (Zum CMX) system that connects and coordinates people, vehicles, and operations in real time. In the $50 billion student mobility market – the largest segment of the mass mobility industry – Zum CMX is transforming a daily source of anxiety and disruption into a reliable, transparent, and efficient mobility experience for students and families. Today, more than 4,500 schools rely on Zum CMX. Recognized globally for its innovative approach and operational execution, Zum has been named to Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies, CNBC Disruptor 50 and Changemakers, the World Economic Forum, and the Financial Times’ Fastest Growing Companies lists. Zum is backed by leading investors including Sequoia Capital, GIC, SoftBank, and TPG. Zum, Zum CMX, and associated logos are trademarks of Zum Services, Inc. All rights reserved. Learn more at www.ridezum.com.

The post Women Presidents Organization and J.P. Morgan Name Zum to List of 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies appeared first on School Transportation News.

Student transportation leaders often encounter unique situations that require creative solutions to meet student needs. An island off the coast of Virginia’s Eastern Shore required a solution that looks very different from the classic yellow school bus.

Accomack County Public Schools serves about 5,000 students who attend 11 kindergarten through 12th grade. Three of these schools are located on islands off the coast of the state.

“Tangier Island is located off the western coast of Accomack County in the Chesapeake Bay, and unlike our other island, Chincoteague, Tangier is only accessible by boat or airplane,” explained Danielle Clark, the district’s public information officer.

The small island of Tangier only has a population of 436, and Clark shared that residents rely on ATVs, bicycles, golf carts and few cars for transportation. When a student with disabilities needed transportation to school, the district’s transportation department purchased a dedicated golf cart to ensure safe and reliable transportation.

“The driver, Mr. Kim Parks, is affectionately referred to as Mr. Kim or Sox by the students and staff,” said Clark. “He is the all-around handyman of the school and takes great pride in his role of helping students, staff and the community as a whole.”

Chris Reeder, transportation supervisor at Accomack, said his department is responsible for providing and maintaining the golf cart used on Tangier. He continued that when the batteries needed to be replaced, staff had to transport the new batteries by boat to the island.

“We also have to meet the boat for any trips the students go on there,” said Reeder. “They arrive over here on the boat, and we take them by bus to various locations of field trips.”

This is just one story of a unique geographical or needs-based scenarios that requires creative solutions from student transportation departments. In North Carolina, the state’s Department of Transportation posted a video of a school bus being transported to and from Knotts Island to provide transportation for students in Currituck County.

A similar situation exists in South Carolina where students are ferried from Sandy Island to the mainland where they board a school bus. Boats can also be more commonplace when transporting students in Alaska, British Columbia and other locations surrounded by large bodies of water.

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Related: (STN Podcast E284) Always Something to Learn: Special Needs Takeaways from TSD 2025
Related: Districts Use Alternative Transportation to Support McKinney-Vento Homeless Students
Related: School District Directors Share Strategies for Transporting Students with Disabilities

The post Virginia School District Uses Unique Transportation Solutions to Meet Island Needs appeared first on School Transportation News.

 In what appears to be a new operational pattern, U.S. Central Command has disabled two more Iran-bound tankers in the Gulf of Oman using Navy fighter...

When Katy Dicks’s two children were both in childcare programs, she and her partner would dread sitting down each month to have the hard conversations about which bills would go on their multiple credit cards, the highest with a 20% interest rate, and which they could pay outright. “It’s a constant budgeting game,” Dicks said, although she and her family watch every penny and keep their finances as tight as possible. 

According to Act For Early Years, the global childcare campaign, the major expense that weighed on Katy and her partner each month is what also plagues 70% of American parents: the high cost of childcare. According to Care.com, Katy, 45, and her domestic partner, who live in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, are like parents across the nation for whom care has become an “all-consuming strain.” The same source found that mothers report “significantly higher levels of overwhelm, guilt, and identity loss” than fathers, pressuring many to leave the workforce. In fact, of the 455,000 women who left the workforce in 2025, roughly 42% pointed to caregiving costs as the No. 1 reason. In the past 40 years, cost has been the primary reason for the steepest decline in mothers of young children participating in the workforce. 

Katy, whose children are now ages 7 and 11, works primarily as a Pharmacy Project Coordinator, but she is also a realtor, and a co-owner of a logistics business with her partner. Katy considers herself “blessed” because she found wonderful, regulated childcare nearby for both of her children, and she “felt good with the care my children received.” However, between the full-time home-based care and the preschool for both children, it cost her and her partner between $20,000-$30,000 per year over six years for a total of $167,000. Average annual costs for childcare in Wisconsin range between $13,000 and $18,000. Even working her three jobs, she and her partner still owe $45,000 in credit card debt because of their childcare costs. According to a new study, a two-child family would need to earn $400,000 to make childcare affordable, defined as 7% of income by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, an unreachable sum for most families including Katy and her partner.

The reason for the high cost of childcare in the U.S. is primarily due to the fact that early childhood education is not considered a public good. Therefore, with little to no public investment in childcare for everyone, early educators are often entirely reliant upon parents’ private tuition payments to operate their programs. Despite high tuition rates, Wisconsin providers earn, on average, $13.55 per hour, compared to the average hourly wage of $28.44 for Wisconsin workers, with family childcare providers earning $7.46 per hour. 

This changed during the COVID-19 pandemic when the federal government recognized childcare as essential and distributed funds to states to stabilize the childcare workforce. In Wisconsin, $20 million per month was distributed to approximately 5,000 licensed providers, assisting in the retention of 72,000 professionals, and supporting care for over 417,000 children throughout the state through a program called Child Care Counts. While recent research shows that this program was highly effective, the majority of Republican legislators rejected continued funding for the program. Additionally, even though the 2025-2027 budget for the first time included state funds for childcare, that funding ends in June 2026, leaving providers once again on their own to figure out how to continue, or in many cases simply to close their programs. 

Katy also experienced complications during pregnancy and her maternity leave. During her first pregnancy she developed pre-eclampsia and had to be hospitalized and induced. After just three months of maternity leave at partial pay, she said, “It was the hardest day of my life to go back to work. What I needed was 12 months to heal and bond with my baby.” Nonetheless, she felt fortunate that she had childcare in place, had kept her job, and therefore had health insurance to pay all of her medical bills. 

When Katy returned to work, she went to her infant’s child care program every day to breastfeed her baby on her lunch break, to bond with her baby and also because she wasn’t able to pump enough milk to last through the day. When she tried pumping at work, she felt like her male supervisor was always “breathing down my neck,” and pumping twice a day felt like she was “pushing it.” Not long after, her supervisor gave her a performance improvement plan (PIP) for taking time out to pump breast milk.

With her second child, in a new position, Katy developed pre-eclampsia again, and had to be induced, but at this employer, she felt the pressure to quit working more intensely. After she repeatedly brought up the topic of maternity leave with her male supervisor, the company finally agreed to give her three months of unpaid leave. She made a plea for partial pay during her leave, only to be informed by her supervisor that the company would indeed adopt a partially paid maternity leave, but not until after her maternity leave was over. He also told her that she was the first employee he had who was pregnant and required maternity leave. 

The U.S. is the only wealthy nation on Earth that lacks federally mandated, paid maternity leave, even though about three-quarters of mothers are employed. As of January 2026, only 14 states and the District of Columbia had a mandated, paid maternity leave of eight to 12 weeks. Wisconsin does not have mandated, paid maternity leave. 

Katy’s  experiences ultimately drove her to take a leadership position in the Mother Forward chapter in Wisconsin to push for better policies so that mothers are set up for success.

It’s different in Denmark

When Manal Stulgaitis, an American, moved to Denmark to work for the United Nations, she had no idea how the early childhood education system worked. She visited the country  ahead of her family before the move to check out childcare programs. One morning, when she was out for a jog, she stumbled across an enchanting scene. Peering through a tall fence surrounding a huge residential house, she saw children in snowsuits playing on climbing equipment built into the trees and sitting under a structure whittling sticks around a fire. Teachers stood nearby, observing and supporting the children in their explorations. Manal decided to visit the place right away. She found the administrator and teachers welcoming and they quickly determined that they had space, so she was able to enroll her 3-year-old without delay. The center was part of the public early childhood education system, and she remembers it cost approximately $400 per month, and “was absolutely zero stress.” Meanwhile, her 6-year-old attended public school. 

Manal, 51, whose children are now 10 and 13 years old, like all parents in Denmark, was  entitled to a guaranteed childcare slot regardless of income or geographic location. Indeed, Danish law mandates this and ensures that parents pay no more than 25% of the cost of childcare, unless a family’s income is below a certain threshold, in which case it is free. 

As for maternity leave, although it did not apply to Manal since her children were older, the standard in Denmark is a paid shared parental leave that begins four weeks before a mother gives birth and continues for 24 weeks post birth. Another parent can share up to 10 weeks of the leave, and there is additional flexibility depending on the circumstances for a total of 52 weeks. Recent research shows that Denmark’s childcare and paid parental leave policies combined erase 80% of what’s called “the motherhood penalty” for working mothers, allowing them to pursue their careers and passions. This is certainly the case for Manal, who said, “I don’t think there are words to describe how it impacts you individually or how it impacts our family. To have the essentials like healthcare and childcare and education taken care of by the state – both financially and in terms of the regulatory aspects — gives every single Danish person a huge measure of confidence. We were so lucky to experience that system, which serves children and their parents so well.” 

Policymakers in the U.S. have chosen a hands-off approach to childcare and maternity leave. This has had the effect of normalizing the suffering new mothers and parents experience, pressures mothers to leave the workforce, stalls their careers, and loads parents with debt. Denmark, on the other hand, has chosen to promote equality for mothers by mandating and investing in both paid parental leave and childcare. For Manal, the impact of having her daughter welcomed and supported in a high-quality early childhood education system was “a lifesaver.” She could be a  mother and have a high-powered career that demanded long days and frequent travel. Total confidence in her child’s program meant that she or her husband could “drop the kids off in the morning and not have a second thought about their safety or their wellbeing.” Having a high-quality system freed both her and her husband to focus fully on their work, without all the stress parents in the U.S. feel over their children’s well-being and the toll having a baby takes on their household  finances. Childcare advocates in the U.S. say policymakers here could choose policies that set mothers up for success, rather than test their grit, tolerance for debt, and willingness to endure the pain of worrying whether their children are getting good care. 

Across the country, citizens demanding universal child care in their own  communities are joining the thousands of mothers, child care providers, and advocates gathering on Monday, May 11, 2026 for the 5th annual Day Without Child Care.

Support for this reporting came from the Better Life Lab at New America.

The Atwood Music Hall in Madison was packed Wednesday afternoon, as community members said goodbye to Stuart Dymzarov, the founding principal of Malcolm Shabazz City High School and, for many, many people, a beloved mentor and friend.

Colleagues and former students at Shabazz, the alternative school launched in 1971 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, remembered Stuart’s fierce advocacy for his vision of an open-minded, flexible school. “Education by any means necessary,” was his riff on the famous slogan of the school’s namesake, Malcolm X.

Hearing the eulogies for Stuart, a big bear of a man with a wild beard, radical politics and a radiant warmth, brought back the optimism and high spirits of a generation of Madisonians who protested the war in Vietnam, rejected careerist striving and established their own little cooperative communities in the idealistic belief that they were on the cusp of changing the world for the better. 

One of those starry-eyed idealists was my mother, Dorothy Conniff, who lived in a collective household with Stuart and a dozen other young radicals on Spaight Street on Madison’s East Side. She was in her 20s then and I was just a toddler. “We supported each other’s projects and ideals and had intense discussions about how to change the world,” my mom wrote in the online guest book for Stuart’s memorial. I remember a single check she kept in a scrapbook from the joint household account of those days, with 14 names in the upper lefthand corner — a testament to the trust and cooperation in that happy group. 

Like a lot of young people in the heady 1960s and 1970s in Madison, my mom, Stuart and their whole cohort felt progress over injustice and violence was underway and the world would soon be a brighter place.  “We were optimistic because the antiwar movement had forced Lyndon Johnson out of office,” my mom told me. A lot of former Madison radicals were in the white-haired crowd at the memorial service, including former Mayor Paul Soglin, former Alderman Billy Feitlinger and Jeff Feinblatt, one of the Shabazz teachers who, inspired by Stuart, nurtured and inspired a new generation of young people.

I remember Stuart as a big, benign presence in striped overalls, hoisting the kids in the Spaight Street household on his shoulders and rumbling around the house. Later he became a devoted father to his own three children with his wife of 50 years, Marsha (the two combined their last names, Dym and Zarov) and a beloved uncle, grandfather and father figure to hundreds of Shabazz students. 

Stuart’s nephew Miles Zarov gave a touching tribute to the uncle who used to pick him up along with his sister after school and take them wherever they wanted to go, buying them treats and letting them fritter away his money on plastic trinkets with an easy-going smile.

Stuart’s brother Harvey described how Stuart would spend endless hours hanging out and having conversations with people, and when Harvey quizzed him on what they had said and what he had learned, he shrugged it off. “I like experiencing people,” he told Harvey. That acceptance and enjoyment of people with no particular goal in mind was classic Stuart.

Stuart was always willing to give people rides, day and night, including, according to one of his younger relatives, on a memorable night when he called Stuart from a biker bar where he was having a drug-induced attack of paranoia. Stuart drove across town in the middle of the night, appeared in the doorway of the bar, a looming presence in a khaki jacket and driving cap, wrapped his younger relative in a hug and took him home.

The feeling of safety and love he gave people is the strongest, lasting impression Stuart left.

He was a fighter — against the “fascist” politics he despised in the U.S. government, even before the current era, and on behalf of people he felt were not given a fair shake. His friends remember his ferociousness on the basketball court, his relentlessness in political arguments, and his tireless, aggressive advocacy at school board meetings and the superintendent’s office on behalf of the staff and students at Shabazz.

But mostly, Stuart made people feel cared for, appreciated, heard. It seems to me that quality is exactly what we need right now, to counter the epic cruelty, hatred and greed that is engulfing our nation and the world.

The sunny optimism of the 1960s counterculture seems far away today. But Stuart’s legacy lives on, not just at the still-thriving alternative high school he founded (where the family encourages people to make a donation to the scholarship program in his name), but also in the light he brought into the world by really seeing other people, accepting and loving them. Experiencing that quality in Stuart in small ways, one on one, is what made such a difference for people. More than any grand political program or analysis, it is a powerful antidote to despair. 

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The publisher of the Cap Times said Thursday that the news organization’s management will voluntarily recognize the eight-member newsroom staff’s union. 

The employees formally announced their union campaign in a meeting with Publisher Paul Fanlund and other Cap Times managers a week ago. They have affiliated with the NewsGuild-CWA, which also represents employees at Wisconsin Watch and at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

“The Capital Times Co. has decided to voluntarily recognize the labor union being formed by Capital Times reporters and we hope to work towards an amicable outcome,” Fanlund said in a statement Thursday. “In the meantime, we will continue the excellent reporting and opinion journalism that the community has come to depend upon.”

The Capital Times newspaper was founded in 1917 by William T. Evjue and throughout its history has been known in Madison as a staunch voice for liberal and progressive values, including its support for labor unions.

Since 2008, what was once a daily evening newspaper has published online with a weekly print tabloid edition. While retaining its original name as a business entity, the newspaper adopted its longstanding nickname among readers as its moniker.

In making their case for a union, the employees primarily focused on the paper’s progressive heritage as well as their interest in greater involvement in its operation.

“I’m proud of all the work we put into forming a union,” said Erin Gretzinger, the K-12 reporter at the Cap Times. “Management’s decision to voluntarily recognize us aligns with the Cap Times’ longstanding values, and it is reflective of our value to the newsroom and the broader Madison community. I look forward to the next steps in this process and working collaboratively to ensure a strong future for our newsroom.”

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s trade agenda faced another major setback Thursday when the U.S. Court of International Trade handed a win to two small businesses and the state of Washington after they challenged the president’s 10% global tariffs, imposed after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his previous emergency tariff regime.

In a 2-1 decision, the court granted a permanent injunction to a Florida-based toy manufacturer and a New York-based spice importer that sued the Trump administration in March, alleging the new tariffs would harm their businesses.

The court also granted relief to Washington state, which was among nearly two dozen states that sued over the tariffs. 

Tariff ‘bazooka’

Jay Foreman, CEO of toy company Basic Fun!, said he was “extremely excited” upon learning the decision.

“It takes a lot of guts and chutzpah for small companies like us and Burlap and Barrel to put ourselves out on the line to fight what we feel is injustice and unfair,” he said during a virtual press conference, referring to the other company named in the lawsuit, an online spice retailer.

“Certainly, there’s a place for tariffs on strategic products that make sense to protect in this country …  but in cases across the board, to approach this situation with a bazooka instead of a fine-tooth comb makes no sense, and it hurts companies like ours, hurts companies like Burlap and Barrel, hurts the consumer,” Foreman said Thursday evening. 

Basic Fun! is behind popular toys, including Tonka Trucks and Care Bears.

Foreman said he expects imports that were subject to the tariffs to arrive as soon as tomorrow.

“I’m already emailing my customs broker to make sure they’re on it,” he said.

The ruling only applies to the plaintiffs Basic Fun! and the online spice retailer Burlap and Barrel, and does not give universal relief to all businesses that must pay the blanket 10% tax on imports. 

Jeffrey Schwab, who argued the case on behalf of the clients for the Liberty Justice Center, said the nonprofit advocacy law firm has been “wrestling” with what the decision means for other businesses that are paying the import tax.

“It’s not entirely clear, and probably will depend on what happens now if the government appeals. If the government seeks a stay that could have an effect. Certainly, I think companies will probably want to file (legal challenges), being concerned about making sure that the tariffs stop for them, and possibly ensuring that they get a refund too,” Schwab said.

Win for Washington state

The ruling also applies to Washington state as an importer subject to the tariffs, according to the ruling. 

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown called the ruling “a win for both affordability and the rule of law.”

“It’s American consumers and businesses that have ultimately paid for the president’s illegal tariff campaign,” he said in a statement. “The court’s order will encourage more parties to challenge this illegal executive overreach.”

The judges ruled other states that sued did not have standing because they were “non-importers.” Among them were Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Trump ordered the fresh round of tariffs on Feb. 20, the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 6-3 opinion, that his initial global tariffs under the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act, or IEEPA, exceeded his presidential authority.

Following the Supreme Court loss, Trump’s alternative tariffs, imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, went into effect on Feb. 24.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now in the legally mandated process of refunding businesses and importers who paid a collective $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs. 

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

A new report forecasts that changes to Medicaid enacted in 2025 will cut $7 billion from the program in Wisconsin alone over the next 10 years, according to the advocacy group Protect Our Care.

Calculations last year from KFF, a nonprofit, nonpartisan healthcare policy and news organization, indicate that at least 57,000 more people in Wisconsin will become uninsured by 2034.

“Wisconsinites and people everywhere have either lost coverage or they’re living with the ongoing fear of not knowing whether or not they’ll have health coverage in the next month,” said state Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) in a media call conducted Thursday by Protect Our Care.

The organization has issued a new report on the impact on Medicaid across the country from the 2025 tax cut and spending bill that passed with only Republican votes and was signed by President Donald Trump July 4. The legislation’s tax cuts primarily went to the wealthiest Americans, said Protect Our Care’s Joe Zepecki.

“Every single state in the United States is going to see these cuts and it’s going to have all kinds of consequences,” said U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee), who also took part in the call Thursday.

The legislation included new requirements for some Medicaid recipients to prove they are working or are exempt from a work requirement. It also included requirements that those recipients submit paperwork showing they qualify for Medicaid twice a year instead of once a year.

Those requirements will take effect in 2027. The work-reporting requirements, however, have been broadly criticized by healthcare experts.

“We have also consistently seen in our research and everybody’s research that work requirement policies often do not meaningfully increase employment or access to inclusive, competitive employment,” said Kylie McLean, a social work professor, researcher and advocate for people with disabilities.

“Instead, they create paperwork barriers that cause eligible people to lose coverage, not because they are ineligible because but because the system becomes too difficult for them to navigate,” McLean said.

McLean said she has heard from people with disabilities and their families who are concerned that they could lose access to Medicaid for healthcare and personal care in their homes and communities.

“For decades, disability advocates like myself have fought to move away from unnecessary institutionalization and toward community living and inclusion,” she said. “Medicaid is what made that possible.”

Waivers states receive from the federal government cover those home and community based services — referred to as HCBS for short. But while federal law requires Medicaid coverage for people in institutions, it’s optional for home and community-based care, McLean said.

“That means when states face budget pressure or major Medicaid cuts, community services, HCBS services are among the first at risk,” McLean said.

Another call participant, Dr. Chris Ford, said he has seen the consequences on the job as an emergency room specialist in Milwaukee.

“When access to primary care disappears, when those clinics close, and when people lose that insurance, the emergency department becomes a safety net for an entire — albeit collapsing — system,” Ford said. “We are already seeing the warning signs happening now.”

Ford said he’s seen longer wait times in the emergency room, more patients who, lacking insurance, are “delaying care until they’re critically ill.”

“These cuts disproportionately hurt the very people  who already face the greatest barriers to care to begin with,” Ford said. “This is not something that is a potential. This is something that is happening already.”

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All three members of the Public Service Commission criticized the lack of transparency from Meta and Alliant Energy during a meeting Thursday in which the body approved a contract for the social media giant to obtain power for its planned data center in Beaver Dam. 

Meta is in the process of spending more than $1 billion to construct a hyperscale data center campus that, when completed, would use six to eight times more power than the city of Beaver Dam’s current energy load. 

Like similar massive data center projects across the state, Meta’s Beaver Dam project has drawn opposition from local residents. For months, the project was shrouded in secrecy with Meta operating under the name Degas LLC. Opponents have complained about the lack of openness, the massive use of energy and the impact the construction and operation of the center could have on the community. 

PSC Chair Summer Strand said in her opening remarks she didn’t understand “why it needed to be this difficult” to achieve a transparent process. 

“To me, transparency is not a cliche, feel good, bare minimum, check the box concept,” Strand said. “If there’s one takeaway from our discussion and decisions today I want it to be clear that, whether you’re a large load customer coming into Wisconsin for the first time, or regulated entity familiar with our process, transparency — and by that I mean actual and real transparency — is the foundational expectation and a necessity.”

Commissioner Kristy Nieto said in her opening remarks Thursday morning that the case is one of the “most consequential” decisions the PSC has seen. 

“It bears repeating, existing Wisconsin customers should not pay a single cent to subsidize the service of data centers, not now and not decades from now,” Nieto said. “This means these very large customers must bear the full cost of the infrastructure required to serve them — generation, transmission and distribution — and that those costs must be fully and transparently assigned.” 

The three members of the commission lamented the redactions that had initially been made to the documents submitted in the case — which were later removed after objections from outside parties including members of the public, Clean Wisconsin and the Citizens Utility Board. 

The commissioners also decided that moving forward, hyperscale data centers constructed within Alliant’s territory must pay for and receive energy through a standardized tariff, rather than a one-off contract negotiated without public scrutiny. Late last month, the PSC made a similar ruling for large customers in WE Energies territory. 

Under the PSC order, Alliant will have to develop a tariff that applies for any data centers using more than 100 megawatts of energy. The Meta campus is expected to use 220 megawatts. 

“This is not going to be the last data center contract we see from this utility, and I will say Alliant needs standard guidelines and rules for its data center customers,” Nieto said. “A clear public tariff would create consistent, transparent rates and rules for future data centers, instead of handling each one through separate, confidential negotiations.”

While Alliant was ordered to develop a tariff rate for large customers, the PSC on Thursday approved the contract negotiated between Meta and Alliant with some modifications meant to insulate regular customers from bearing the costs of Meta’s energy use and any related infrastructure upgrades by Alliant. Nieto said denying the agreement while the tariff rate is developed would have allowed Meta to operate for up to a year without any guardrails, an outcome she said didn’t think would benefit anyone.

Brett Korte, a staff attorney with Clean Wisconsin, said the PSC putting a halt to the development of a case-by-case patchwork of data center energy deals in Alliant’s territory — which covers parts of more than a dozen Wisconsin counties — will protect Wisconsinites.

“Tariffs create a consistent, transparent framework that helps protect the public interest,” Korte said in a statement. “Without them, Wisconsin risks a patchwork system where costs and responsibilities are unclear and potentially shifted onto other utility customers.”

After the meeting, consumer advocacy and environmental groups were complimentary of the PSC’s actions.

“Today, the Public Service Commission highlighted the importance of transparency and oversight: accountability is a must, and it cannot be bypassed,” Britnie Remer, organizing director of climate advocacy group 350 Wisconsin. “The Commission also recognized that protecting Wisconsinites from subsidizing billion-dollar data centers needs to be front and center when it comes to these massive projects. With more data center proposals inevitable, requiring tariff filings in the future will ensure large energy customers pay for their costs, not our families and small businesses.”

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Republican Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Oak Creek) announced she will not run for reelection this year, creating another open seat in an Assembly district that will be decisive in determining partisan control of the chamber in 2027.

Rodriguez, 48, has represented the 21st Assembly District since 2013 when she was first elected in a special election. She noted in her announcement that her son was 3 years old when she first ran. During her time in office she has served on the powerful Joint Finance Committee, helping shape the state’s two-year budget as well as being an outspoken advocate for school choice.

“Throughout my time in office, I have tried to keep family first. But the truth is, it is difficult to do this job well without it affecting the people who care about you most. My family has given me patience, encouragement, and support through long days, busy weeks, and many moments when this work required more of me than they deserved to lose,” Rodriguez said in a Thursday statement. “After a great deal of reflection and many conversations with my family, I have decided that I will not seek reelection this fall.

Her district changed with the new maps adopted in 2024. It sits in Milwaukee County and includes Oak Creek and a portion of the city of Milwaukee around the Mitchell International Airport, and has a slight Democratic lean, according to the Marquette Law School analysis. 

Even under the new maps, Rodriguez won her most recent term in 2024 with 51.3% of the vote against her Democratic challenger. 

Her departure means that Republicans will lose the advantages that come with incumbency in a key district that will determine control of the state Assembly. Republican lawmakers currently hold 54 seats in the Assembly to Democrats’ 45 seats, meaning Democrats need to hold all their seats and win five additional seats in November to win the majority. 

Morgan Hess, the executive director for the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee, said in a statement that “Rodriguez, like others in the Republican Assembly caucus, sees the writing on the wall.” 

“Rather than serve in the minority, they are calling it quits. Democrats have the momentum to win the majority this fall and today’s announcement brings us one step closer,” Hess said. 

Democrat Dan Bukiewicz, the mayor of Oak Creek, announced his campaign for the seat in January.

Hess said he is a “proven leader in this community and will make an excellent state representative.”

Rodriguez’s announcement adds to the wave of Republicans, including nine Assembly members and six Senate members, deciding not to seek election this fall, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Rep. Dean Kaufert (R-Neenah) who was the first Assembly Republican in one of eight key seats to decide against running. 

Donovan running

Rep. Bob Donovan (R-Greenfield) announced that he will run for a third term to represent Assembly District 61, which covers Greendale and Hales Corner in Milwaukee County. The district has a slight  Republican lean, according to the Marquette Law School analysis, but is one of eight districts that Democrats are targeting to flip. 

Donovan, 69, was first elected in 2022. He joins a handful of other Republican lawmakers from swing districts  seeking another term, including Rep. Patrick Snyder (R-Weston), Rep. Shannon Zimmerman (R-River Falls), Rep. Todd Novak (R-Dodgeville) and Rep. Benjamin Franklin (R- De Pere). 

Democrat Ben Brist, a U.S. Army veteran announced he would run for the seat in March. His candidacy could mean Donovan would face someone other than Democrat LuAnn Bird, who he defeated in his first two runs for the Assembly. 

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Devin Remiker said in a statement that Republicans are “abandoning ship.” 

“To those like Bob Donovan and Shannon Zimmerman who have decided to run again, you have 23 days to retire or you will be fired by the voters in November. Your leaders and colleagues know what is coming and it is not the cavalry; it is only defeat,” Remiker said.

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Three weeks after two right-wing groups demanded the repeal of a professional licensing board’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ clients of social workers and other therapists, Gov. Tony Evers sent a sharply worded reply.

In a Tuesday letter to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Family Action, Evers declared, “my administration has no intention of repealing Wisconsin’s conversion therapy ban.”

Evers asserted that the April 14 demand letter from the two groups was based on “a significant misreading” of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that threw parts of a Colorado ban on conversion therapy into question. 

Evers wrote that it was “disappointing” that the organizations support “a long-disavowed and outdated practice” that extensive research has shown to be ineffective and responsible for harms including depression, suicide, substance misuse, posttraumatic stress and anxiety.

“On the other hand, this should come as no surprise,” Evers wrote. “After all, bullying LGBTQ kids and Wisconsinites seems to be an important goal for Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Family Action.”

Purported to dissuade people from same-sex attractions and from gender dysphoria — which the American Psychiatric Association has defined as  “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity” — conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, has been widely discredited.

Conversion therapy is not limited to talk therapy. “Aversive techniques used in reparative therapies have included electric shock, physical violence, administration of emetics, and personal degradation and humiliation,” the American Academy of Nursing wrote in a 2015 statement opposing the practice.

The Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board published an updated professional code in April 2024 that declared “any intervention or method” used or promoted to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity to be “unprofessional conduct” that could subject a practitioner to professional discipline.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a March 31 ruling, sent a lawsuit challenging a Colorado law against conversion therapy back to lower federal courts. The ruling instructed the lower courts to apply “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds to the Colorado law because it seeks to “regulate speech based on viewpoint.”

In their demand letter, WILL and Wisconsin Family Action called on the Evers administration to repeal the ban in the Wisconsin therapists’ code. The letter declared that it was similar to the Colorado law and claimed that “the Supreme Court held that Colorado’s substantively identical statute was unconstitutional.”

Evers wrote that the demand “relies on a significant misreading of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision” and had “erroneously” characterized its findings. 

“First, the Court intentionally — and specifically — stopped short of striking down any applications of Colorado’s law,” Evers wrote. The high court instead remanded the case to the lower court to apply a “more searching scrutiny” to the law, he added. “Repeal before that occurs would be premature.”

Evers also wrote that the ruling “expressly held that heightened scrutiny applies only to certain applications of Colorado’s law, not the entire provision. Specifically, the case concerned only Colorado’s conversion therapy prohibition as it applied to talk therapy — not to other treatment, such as physical or medication interventions.”

Quoting the Court’s ruling, Evers wrote that the Colorado plaintiff, therapist Kaley Chiles, stated that “the statute has many valid applications. Indeed, [she] did not take issue with Colorado’s effort to ban what she herself calls ‘long-abandoned, aversive’ physical interventions. Instead, Ms. Chiles objected to Colorado’s law only as it applies to her talk therapy, therapy that involves no physical interventions or medications, only the spoken word.”

Wisconsin’s professional rule also covers more than talk therapy, Evers wrote, and the therapy, counseling and social work board “will maintain the rule and continue to enforce its valid applications, in order to protect Wisconsinites from harmful and offensive practices by Board licensees.”

WILL’s initial response Thursday to a request for comment was a two-word email message from WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek: “Lawsuit incoming.”

In a follow up statement, Furdek said that Evers was “resorting to personal, baseless attacks on WILL and its mission.” Contrary to the distinctions Evers made about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the statement reiterated WILL’s characterization that the Court found Colorado’s “substantively identical law amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”

Making no reference to other conversion therapy tactics, the statement concluded: “Government shouldn’t be deciding which viewpoints are ‘acceptable’ for Christian counselors to express when providing talk therapy to the individuals who voluntarily seek out faith-based counseling.”

In his letter, Evers wrote that because the Colorado case remains active in lower federal courts, the Department of Safety and Professional Services will attach a note to the conversion therapy rule stating that “certain instances of the unprofessional conduct” it refers to “are the subject of ongoing litigation.”

Wisconsin’s conversion therapy ban was enacted after several previous attempts were blocked by the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. A Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in July 2025 found that state laws the committee’s Republican majority used to review and suspend administrative rules were unconstitutional and encroached on the examining board’s legal authority.

Marc Herstand, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin chapter, praised Evers’ letter Thursday. The association was among the groups that urged the counseling board to add conversion therapy to practices considered unprofessional conduct. 

Wisconsin state law “clearly gives professions the authority to establish their own Conduct Code as the social work profession, along with the marriage and family therapy and professional counseling professions,  have done in classifying Conversion Therapy as unprofessional conduct,” Herstand said in an email message. 

“I applaud Governor Evers for his recognition of the severe harm that Conversion Therapy inflicts on LGBTQ children and his commitment to retain the ban on Conversion Therapy [in the professional code] to the maximum extent possible.”

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Tribal governing board members of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in northwest Wisconsin voted to make May 5 the Tribal Day of Awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women and relatives (MMIW/R) and authorized the creation of the Bad River MMIW/R Task Force on April 22.

All 11 federally recognized Wisconsin tribes participate in the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s MMIW/R Task Force, but Bad River is creating its own tribal task force. On Tuesday, more than 50 members of the Bad River community participated in an annual MMIW/R Awareness walk. They followed a route inside the reservation marked by posters and red dresses (one of the visual symbols of the MMIW/R movement) displayed on hangers hung from garden stakes.

The annual Bad River MMIW/R walk is one of several across North America to raise awareness of the violence, especially murder and disappearance, affecting indigenous people.

Bad River Chair Liz Arbuckle and several members of the task force participated in the Tuesday walk and discussed the newly formed task force.

“When I became chair, this was something I wanted to prioritize,” said Arbuckle. “Violence against our people, particularly women, is catastrophic. It’s a crisis, and we know every tribal community has been affected by it, both on rez and off rez, and so this is a good way for us to educate people about the issue.”

She said the task force has three main goals:

• Education, outreach, and prevention.
• Creating response teams and response plans.
• Preparing for the possibility that the Canadian energy company Enbridge will bring a large workforce for the Line 5 pipeline reroute to the area, creating what has been termed “man camps,” a concentration of male pipeline workers in rural areas, especially tribal areas.

Bad River and environmental groups are challenging the 41-mile Line 5 reroute around the reservation in court, but Arbuckle said the tribe must prepare as if the project will proceed.

“We’ve seen in other communities when there are large groups of men in camps, especially outside of Native reservations, the statistics show that it can be a really dangerous place, because some of these guys have a lot of money and these girls get caught up in that, or people get caught up in that and bad things can happen,” she said, “So we want to make sure we educate people about that and prepare them to make good decisions for themselves.”

A 2021 Guardian article, “Sexual violence along pipeline route follows Indigenous women,” reported that crisis centers noted more than 40 reports of workers on Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement in northern Minnesota were alleged to have harassed and assaulted women and girls. 

In that same article, Michael Barnes, an Enbridge spokesperson, said the corporation has “zero tolerance for illegal behavior by anyone associated with our company or its projects,” and the article also noted the corporation fired two workers charged with sexual/human trafficking.

Another, larger objective of the task force, said Arbuckle, is to create dialogue among local, state and federal agencies to share information and work cooperatively across jurisdiction lines, which is often difficult  when tribal lands are involved.

The task force includes members of social services, legal, public health and law enforcement agencies.

“I thought this is a great group that has different skills and different programs to come after it from different angles,” said Arbuckle.

If there is a crisis or emergency, such as a disappearance, all the preparation and forethought from the task force, said Arbuckle,  will have at least put the tribe in a better position to respond.

“We shouldn’t just start from scratch if someone goes missing,” she said. “We should have a plan. We should know the people. We should have a good relationship with the police or the sheriff.”

Theresa Morris, a community health manager, is a member of the task force, whose goal is to educate members about man camps and encourage members to travel in pairs and to let others know their whereabouts and plans.

Gina Jensen, a health worker who represents the tribe’s police commission, noted one of her motivations for being on the task force is that the murder rate for indigenous women is 10 times the national average.

Aurora Conley, one of the tribal governing board members who voted to approve the task force, said its creation signals the tribe is paying attention and is committed to being proactive and prepared, including networking and working with other tribes, communities and the state.

“I thought it was a beautiful thing, definitely,” Coley said of the task force’s creation, “and to let our community members know that those that have gone missing or murdered in the past have not been forgotten.”

Conley said as a parent of two Indigenous children she feels an obligation to make them aware that they are at higher risk.

“I have a small daughter, and it’s a different sense of awareness that we have to create … it better prepares our children and our communities,” she said.

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The day after the U.S. Supreme Court crippled the federal Voting Rights Act, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson addressed a virtual gathering for the group’s members and supporters where he ranked the landmark decision alongside the court’s most infamous cases.

Dred Scott excluded Black people from American citizenship ahead of the Civil War. Plessy blessed policies of racial segregation in 1896. And now there was Callais. 

The opinion will “probably go down in the history book as one of three of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of this nation,” Johnson said.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais on April 29 cleared states to split apart, for political gain, congressional districts where a majority of residents belong to minority groups. The court’s conservative majority said Louisiana lawmakers acted unconstitutionally when they intentionally created the state’s second majority-Black district, which the justices found unnecessary.

A week after its release, the decision is roiling politics across the South as states move at a rapid pace to recast the political landscape that has taken progressives by surprise. 

Republicans, triumphant over their victory at the court, are rushing fresh gerrymanders through Southern statehouses in time for the November midterm elections in an effort to strengthen their party’s control over the region’s U.S. House delegations. They’re acting at lightning speed, over loud protests, and have nullified votes by suspending ongoing elections.

Democrats, especially Black residents, are furious with both the court and GOP politicians, who they believe are poised to wipe away decades of Black political progress in the region. The new maps that seek to oust Black members of Congress and prevent the election of Democrats in the future recall a Jim Crow past of literacy tests and poll taxes, they say.

“We refuse to let you kill us by killing our vote,” Eliza Jane Franklin, a resident of rural Barbour County, Alabama, told a state House hearing Tuesday.

Decision kicked off legislative efforts

The Alabama Legislature is moving to authorize a special primary election using a congressional map currently blocked in federal court, if a district court or, ultimately, the Supreme Court allows the state to move forward. At least one of the state’s two Black members of the U.S. House would be vulnerable.

In Louisiana, the governor has suspended the state’s primary elections for the U.S. House, setting aside some 42,000 votes that were already cast. Republican lawmakers will begin advancing a new gerrymander in a matter of days, aiming to force out at least one of the state’s two Black House members.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new map into law Monday that aims to hand his party up to four additional U.S. House seats. State lawmakers approved the map hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. The map has already drawn multiple legal challenges.

The South Carolina Legislature is weighing whether to redraw maps. And Tennessee lawmakers want to gerrymander a Memphis district currently held by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents the state’s only majority-Black district. 

“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be color-blind,” Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday unveiling a plan to divide the Memphis area among three congressional seats.

More states, in the South and elsewhere, are expected to pursue new maps over the next two years. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp ruled out a special session this year, for example, but supports redistricting before the 2028 election. 

The current moment represents an extraordinary time in America, said Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group. But she also called it a reversion “back to America.”

Many thought the presence of Black, Hispanic and Asian American elected officials somehow meant racial discrimination no longer existed, she said.

“And unfortunately, that is a misread of American history,” Caruthers said. “And perhaps it is a retelling of American history for those who want to gloss over America’s very sordid past, especially when it comes to voting rights.”

Midterms impact

The scramble by a handful of Southern states to redraw districts comes as Republicans grasp for any scintilla of advantage ahead of the midterm elections in November. 

A U.S. House under Democratic control would spell the end of much of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, produce a wave of investigations into his administration and potentially lead to a vote to impeach him in the House, though the Senate would almost certainly acquit him.

“This is all about Donald Trump wanting to avoid hard questions and oversight hearings about his actions,” Cohen said at a news conference in Memphis.

Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied Southern politics, said Republicans are attempting to “staunch the bleeding” ahead of unfavorable midterm elections.

“The desperation of this Republican Party, it’s off the charts,” McKee said.

Redistricting push supercharged

Prior to Callais, Trump had already urged Republicans to redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage — a process that typically occurs once a decade after the census. 

Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas enacted more GOP-friendly maps, while Democrats struck back in California and Virginia. In Utah, Republicans want to block a court-ordered map that’s more favorable to Democrats.

Republican primary voters have given their approval to that approach. On Tuesday, five Trump-endorsed state legislative candidates in Indiana defeated GOP incumbents who had defied the president to block a gerrymander in the state last year.

But until now the Voting Rights Act limited how far that gerrymandering push could extend.

For decades, Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act helped protect majority-minority districts from gerrymandering and ensured voters could elect Black candidates to Congress in Southern states following the end of state laws that blocked Black citizens from voting. The Callais opinion guts Section 2 by curtailing the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps.

Republicans have praised the decision and many have been clear that they believe the opinion opens up a path to securing additional GOP seats. Trump has endorsed disregarding primary elections that have already been held so that states can pass new maps — which he predicts can net Republicans an additional 20 seats this fall.

“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”

Calls for GOP seats

Over the past week, some Republicans have cast majority-minority districts previously protected by the Voting Rights Act as racist because they were drawn with attention paid to the racial makeup of the map. U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, wrote on X that there are “no more excuses for keeping racist maps,” for example, and called for their immediate removal.

Other GOP leaders have centered their case for quick action on political power. Like Trump, they have explicitly invoked control of the U.S. House as a reason to gerrymander. While Republicans have the House, their margin of control is razor thin: 217 to 212, with one independent and five vacancies. Even a modest Democratic wave in November will likely sweep away GOP control.

Alabama Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger Jr. and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said in a joint statement that the state’s lawmakers have a responsibility to offer Alabama a “fighting chance” to elect seven Republican U.S. representatives. Two of the state’s seven districts are held by Democrats.

“Control of the U.S. House of Representatives could come down to just a handful of seats, and when the dust settles, the people of Alabama will know that their Legislature stood firm, acted decisively, and did everything within its power to fight for fair representation,” Gudger and Ledbetter said.

Alabama Republicans want to use a map passed by lawmakers in 2023 that federal courts blocked from taking effect. Alabama’s current map was drawn by a court-appointed special master.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, asked a federal district court Tuesday for an order that would let the state move forward with the gerrymander.

In Louisiana, Republicans obtained special permission from the Supreme Court to quickly move forward on a new gerrymander after the justices struck down its current map in the Callais decision.

Absentee voting was already underway in Louisiana before Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended congressional primary elections set for May 16. Votes already cast for U.S. House candidates won’t count, Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation, has said.

Louisiana state lawmakers are set to begin work on a new map this month that will likely break apart a New Orleans district held by U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat who has fought with the governor.

“The Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent of the decision to quickly finalize Callais.

Court challenges

Still, Democrats and other opponents of the gerrymandering effort across the South are turning to the courts. Lawsuits have also been filed challenging the suspension of Louisiana’s congressional primaries and Florida’s new map also faces court challenges.

A petition filed in Louisiana state court by Elias Law Group, a major Democrat-aligned voting rights litigation firm, alleges the governor’s decision to halt the congressional primary is unlawful and unprecedented. Only the state legislature has the power to set the state’s election schedule, the petition argues.

“Governors do not get to cancel elections by executive fiat, least of all elections that are already underway, with ballots in voters’ hands and votes already cast,” Lali Madduri, a partner at Elias Law Group, said in a statement.

Regardless of how the legal challenges play out, Democrats say the Callais decision and the ongoing fallout from the decision underscore the need for massive voter turnout in the November election. A large Democratic turnout that results in a significant Democratic majority in the U.S. House would serve as a rebuke to Trump’s gerrymandering campaign, they say.

Blue state gerrymanders

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s sole congressional Democrat, said during the NAACP virtual meeting that a Democratic House could pass voting rights legislation. 

“I would hope we could do that because I really think that’s our only hope legislatively,” Clyburn said.

Democrats have long called for the passage of a bill to restore preclearance, a major element of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court paused in 2013, which required states and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes. 

But the measure would face a certain filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Even if Democrats broke a filibuster, Trump would likely veto it. 

In effect, Democrats’ most realistic opportunity to enact major voting rights legislation relies on regaining control of the White House and Congress and ending the filibuster — a set of conditions that’s out of reach until at least 2029.

In the meantime, more Democrats are calling for aggressive gerrymandering of blue states as a way to punch back. U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Joseph Morelle, both New York Democrats, on Monday announced an initiative to encourage their state to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2028 election.

Gerrymandering New York would be an intensive effort, likely requiring voters to repeal or suspend anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state constitution. But voters in California and Virginia have previously endorsed Democratic gerrymanders.

“This is just the beginning,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Across the nation, we will sue, we will redraw and we will win.”

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Stellantis has figured out a new way to squeeze value out of its Leapmotor partnership, and Opel is the brand getting the keys. The German automaker has confirmed plans for a new electric compact SUV built on underpinnings from the Chinese EV maker, validating reports that surfaced earlier this year.

The yet-unnamed crossover is targeted for a 2028 launch, with development running under two years from start to showroom. Styling work is being handled by Opel’s design team in Russelsheim and will lean on the brand’s current visual language. The first teaser shows a sporty SUV with large wheels, tight overhangs, and the now-familiar Opel Vizor face with integrated LED lighting.

More: Opel’s New Corsa GSE Beats Peugeot’s GTI Using Peugeot’s Own Powertrain

According to Opel CEO Florian Huettl, the new SUV will be “developed by international teams located in Germany and China”. It will use “core components of the latest Leapmotor electric architecture and battery technology”, with Opel’s input being limited to design, chassis engineering, lightning and seating technology.

Production of the upcoming EV will take place at the Figueruelas plant in Zaragoza, Spain, starting in 2028. The same facilities are the home of production for the Opel Corsa, Peugeot e-208, Lancia Ypsilon, and Leapmotor B10.

Another Opel SUV?

The new offering will expand Opel’s SUV lineup next to the Mokka, Frontera, and Grandland, targeting the highly competitive C-SUV segment in Europe.

While Stellantis didn’t get into details about its specifications, the new Opel will most likely be based on the Leapmotor B10. The electric SUV measures 4,515 mm (177.8 inches) long, slotting right in between the Frontera and the Grandland in terms of footprint.

More: Stellantis’ Cheapest New EV Is Chinese, Made In Europe, And $15K Under Its Own Peugeot

The Leapmotor B10 is fitted with a single electric motor producing 215 hp (160 kW / 218 PS) and offers two battery sizes of 56.2 kWh and 67.1 kWh, offering a range of up to 434 km (270 miles). It will also be available with a range-extender powertrain offering a total range of up to 900 km (559 miles).

Leapmotor B10

Stellantis has stated that the Leapmotor B10 has been “rigorously tested” at the Balocco proving ground in Italy, meaning there could be differences to the setup of the EU-spec version compared to the model sold in China.

More: Stellantis To Sell Europeans A $10K Chinese SUV For Nearly Triple, And Still Undercut VW

More importantly, the Leapmotor B10 is priced from €29,900 ($35,100) in markets like Germany, France, and Spain, undercutting the rival Skoda Elroq by €4,000 ($4,700). While it is too early to talk about pricing for the Opel version, the company promises it will be an “accessible” electric vehicle, adding that the use of Leapmotor-sourced components would “significantly enhance affordability for European customers”.

The Ugly Truth

Stellantis has recently announced plans of cutting 650 engineering jobs at Opel’s historic headquarters in Russelsheim, reducing the remaining technical staff to around 1,000 people.

The site employed over 7,700 engineers back in 2017, undertaking important R&D projects for the PSA Group. Now, it has narrowed down its scope to areas like AI, software, ADAS, battery tech, and digital lighting systems. While unrelated, with the job cuts, the Leapmotor deal allows Stellantis to significantly reduce R&D expenses and the time needed to bring a new product to the market.

More: Opel And Alfa Romeo’s Next EVs May Be Built Around Chinese Tech, Not German Or Italian

Crucially, the upcoming electric SUV won’t be the only Leapmotor-based product from a Stellantis brand. According to the company “the new vehicle is intended to serve as a blueprint for efficient global collaboration” meaning it could pave the way for other similar projects in the future.

The Story Of The Joint Venture

Stellantis acquired a 21% stake in Leapmotor in October 2023, becoming the largest shareholder of the Chinese brand. The LPMI (Leapmotor International) joint venture is 51% owned by Stellantis, which has the exclusive rights of selling and producing Leapmotor products outside China.

The European rollout has been quite successful, with Leapmotor delivering 40,000 units in 2025 and kicking off 2026 with a first quarter of 24,751 registrations. Besides the Old Continent, the LPMI joint venture has expanded its activities to South America, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa.

Skoda is gearing up to introduce the all-new Epiq on May 19 and they’re rushing to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. As a result, spy photographers recently caught two prototypes undergoing last minute testing on the Nürburgring.

They were intrigued by the one seen below as they believed it could be a Sportline or RS variant, because it has steering wheel-mounted paddle shifters. However, these are common on Skoda EVs as they’re used for regenerative braking. That being said, we wouldn’t necessarily rule out a Sportline version as we can see a sporty steering wheel with a dimpled rim.

More: Skoda’s Smallest EV Has One Big-Car Surprise

The interior image doesn’t reveal much else, but it gives us our first proper glimpse at the crossover’s 13-inch infotainment system. It will be joined by a 5.3-inch digital instrument cluster, slender air vents, and a wireless smartphone charger. Buyers will also find ambient lighting, sustainable materials, and a cargo compartment that can hold up to 47.5 cubic feet (1,344 liters) of gear.

SH Proshots

The front fascia and rear bumper are disguised, making it hard to determine if this is indeed a sporty variant. However, testers might have given us a subtle hint in the form of front fender vent stickers. Of course, we probably shouldn’t read too much into that.

Regardless of what the prototype is hiding, Skoda has already announced three different variants known as the Epiq 35, 45, and 55. The first combines a 38.5 kWh battery pack with a front-mounted motor producing 114 hp (85 kW / 116 PS) and 197 lb-ft (267 Nm) of torque. This enables the crossover to run from 0-62 mph (0-100 km/h) in 11 seconds and have a range of 196 miles (315 km).

SH Proshots

The mid-level model pares the aforementioned battery with a beefier 133 hp (99 kW / 135 PS) motor. This lowers the 0-62 mph (100 km/h) time to 9.8 seconds without having an impact on range.

The range-topper sports a larger 55 kWh battery as well as a motor developing 208 hp (155 kW / 211 PS) and 214 lb-ft (290 Nm) of torque. This is the most interesting of the group as it accelerates from 0-62 mph (100 km/h) in 7.4 seconds and has a range of up to 267 miles.

While we’re skeptical this is a performance variant, it’s not hard to imagine one on the horizon as Volkswagen has already confirmed plans for an ID. Polo GTI with 223 hp (166 kW / 226 PS) in 2027.

SH Proshots

Less than a year after introducing the FX Super One minivan, Faraday Future is hitting pause. The floundering automaker blamed the move on the vehicle’s 400V architecture, which they deemed uncompetitive.

As for what the future holds, the company isn’t exactly sure. However, they want to pivot to either an 800V architecture or a range-extended powertrain. They said the change would provide “users with stronger product competitiveness and greater value.”

More: Faraday Turned A Chinese Minivan Into A Rolling Mansion With A Talking Grille

The firm added an 800V architecture would deliver “longer range, faster charging speeds, and superior powertrain efficiency.” Likewise, they praised range-extended vehicles for being “well-suited to extreme-cold winter regions such as the U.S. East Coast.”

A number of EVs have made the transition from 400V to 800V architectures recently including the Mercedes EQS, Polestar 3, and Volvo EX90. However, these are established automakers, while Faraday Future is a penny stock that claims to be an “embodied AI ecosystem company.”

While the FX Super One project is now paused, the company hopes to begin mass production of the updated model in the future. However, this appears to be “subject to securing financing from strategic or medium-to-long-term investors.”

Despite needing funding and not knowing which way they’re going to go, Faraday laid out two delivery timelines. The updated 800V FX Super One would reportedly be faster to arrive as the company expects its “first phase of delivery within 6 to 9 months, second phase of delivery within 12 to 15 months, and third phase of delivery within 21 to 24 months.”

The company didn’t elaborate on these different phases, but said going the range-extended route would take longer as the first phase of delivery would be within 9 to 12 months, while the second would be within 21 to 24 months. The third phase would then come within 24 to 28 months, according to their projections – which have been far off in the past.

Despite sounding like a major failure, Faraday Future tried to spin it as a positive as they said the move enables them to concentrate on their new robotics business during its “critical ramp-up period.” The company added they shipped a total of 68 robots through the end of April.

Jaguar’s reboot is about to get a lot more real. After months of teasers, heated debate, and one of the most polarizing relaunches in recent memory, the British brand is reportedly preparing to reveal the actual production name of the EV currently known as the Jaguar Type 00. The wait has been long, and it’s not over anytime soon, as production hasn’t started, but a lot is riding on this nameplate.

Known internally as the X900, the concept and production mules have been all over the planet. It’s a long, low-slung four-door electric grand tourer that is supposed to reset the bar for what a Jaguar is. Now, according to a report from Autocar India, we’ll find out what Jaguar will call it on May 12. Then, in September, the brand will reveal the production-spec version, and if all goes according to plan, deliveries will start sometime in 2027.

More: Jaguar’s 1,000-HP Answer To Bentley Looks Nothing Like The Jaguar You Knew

Underneath the long hood and fastback roofline sits Jaguar’s new dedicated EV platform, dubbed JEA, short for Jaguar Electric Architecture. The company says the car will use a tri-motor setup with one motor up front and two at the rear, producing over 1,000 hp (746 kW) and roughly 959 lb-ft (1,300 Nm) of torque in the launch edition. That would immediately make it the most powerful Jaguar road car ever built.

Jaguar is also targeting around 700 km (435 miles) of WLTP range from a battery pack measuring about 120 kWh. The automaker claims the car can recover approximately 321 km (200 miles) of range in just 15 minutes of fast charging.

Despite the outlandish concept styling, spy shots suggest the production car stays remarkably faithful to the original design previewed by the concept. It keeps the exaggerated proportions, long front end, slab-sided surfacing, and sleek roofline, though the production version swaps the concept’s two-door layout for a more practical four-door GT configuration. Jaguar needs a win here. Hopefully, it has an appropriately grand name for this new grand tourer.