Volts

Best of July 2026

2026-08-02 · 12:03 UTC ·Volts ·10 min read

Brief

Best of July 2026 (aired Aug 2, 2026) is a Volts highlight reel in which host David Roberts stitches together excerpts from July interviews. The opening segment with Charlie Fisher and Ning Mossberger Tang unpacks the archaic SRP (Salt River Project) election system: two technical boards (water and power), a 14‑member district board plus elected president and vice president, and an acreage‑based franchise that restricts voting to landowners. Fisher and Tang emphasized the mismatch between scale and engagement—SRP serves water and power to over 2 million people, about 750,000 are technically eligible to vote, yet only 6,972 voted in 2022—and described their ground‑level campaign approach (qualitative/quantitative research on eligible voters and a one‑acre cutoff to identify persuadable, residential voters). The reel then moves to Minnesota regulators Sidney Lieb and Pete Wyckoff, who focused on utility data and planning: advanced meters and AMI are widely deployed but underutilized; utilities often ignore locational AMI signals (e.g., existing EV chargers) in load forecasts; regulators should require transparent, reproducible load forecasting and power‑flow modeling so interveners can contest assumptions. They warned that legislative grid‑utilization mandates (the example cited was a 70% utilization target) will founder without open data and engineering review, and they critiqued the current prudence test as too permissive—advocating comparative evaluation of alternatives. A brief mention closes on a forthcoming segment about land value taxes with Greg Miller and Kitty Klitsky.

Why it matters

David Roberts (host) released the 'Best of July 2026' highlight episode on August 2, 2026, compiling snippets from Volts podcasts and noting the newsletter/podcasts are 100% audience funded.

Key details

  • Charlie Fisher and Ning Mossberger Tang explained the Salt River Project (SRP) governance: SRP has two technical governing boards (water and power), a 14‑member district governing board, plus an elected president and vice president; the president, VP and 10 of the 14 board members are elected via an acreage‑based voting system limited to eligible landowners.
  • Fisher/Tang gave turnout and scale figures: ~750,000 people are eligible to vote in SRP elections, SRP serves water and power to over 2 million central Arizona residents, but only 6,972 people voted in the 2022 SRP election; SRP elections occur in April of even‑numbered years with half the board up every other cycle.
  • Their campaign strategy: intensive qualitative/quantitative research on eligible landowners and a voter targeting rule setting an 'acreage cap' of 1 acre or less (residential owners considered more persuadable vs. >10 acres where owners view property as investment).
  • Minnesota regulators Sidney Lieb and Pete Wyckoff argued utilities underuse AMI/smart‑meter data and opaque load forecasts: they urged transparent, reproducible forecasting (allowing interveners to challenge forecasts), power‑flow modeling tied to AMI to identify DER/electrification patterns, warned legislators about one‑size‑fits‑all grid utilization targets (e.g., 70%), and criticized the current prudence test as a low 'beat nothing' bar rather than comparative evaluation.
Source evidence

title: Best of July 2026
author: Volts
contenttype: podcast
publication: Volts
published: 2026-08-02T12:03:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/209169921/a1e7e2e683598c33c02b4406de126b79.mp3

word_count: 2277

Hello, everyone. This is Volts for August 2, 2026. The best of July in one place. I'm your host, David Roberts. Hey, everybody. We are trying a little something new this month at Volts. I put out one to two podcasts a week, and each one of them is pretty long. And while I'd love to think that all of you listen to each and every one of them with tender, loving care, I know that in reality, it can be overwhelming, and you probably skip an episode here or there. So what follows is a kind of highlight reel for the month. Snippets from each episode for you to scan through to get a taste of what you may have missed. If any one of them grabs you, you can always go back and listen to the full episode. It's right there in the feed. This is a bit of an experiment, so I'd love to hear from you if it is useful. As always, I deeply appreciate all of you who pay for subscriptions, this newsletter and podcasts, 100% audience funded. Your support is the only way I can do this work, and I am endlessly grateful. All right, here we go. We begin in Arizona. Charlie Fisher and Ning Mossberger Tang on winning utility elections that nobody is watching. So explain a little bit because I literally had trouble believing this when I was reading about it. It is flummoxing. I mentioned it in the intro, but just explain a little bit about how the SRP election works. It sounds like it is transported from a different earlier era of history. It's wild to me that it still exists. So explain how these board members are elected and who gets to vote. Yes. So you are right. That is, it is from a different era. This is a system was initially established really like pre-statehood. So SRP is really is unique because it was essentially created by a group of landowners, farmers, ranchers in the really early 20th century. And they essentially came together, formed an association and put their land up as collateral to convince the federal government to build Roosevelt Dam, which was our first sort of big dam here in central Arizona. And so that was sort of the beginning of the system. And the fact that we still elect these folks on a system based in the early 1900s is clearly a problem. But the way that it works is there are 14 governing board members and not to get two in the weeds, but there's actually two separate governing boards because SRP is technically two separate entities, water and power. But for this discussion, we'll just talk about the power side. So the SRP district governing board is 14 members. And on top of those two 14 members, there's an elected president and vice president. The president, vice president and 10 of the 14 board members are elected on an acreage based voting system, which, like you mentioned at the top, means only eligible landowners even have the opportunity to vote. So you have to own land in SRP service territory and there's whole swaths of ineligible voting lands in SRP service territory. So just figuring out whether or not you're eligible is a challenge in and of itself. But they are elected on four year terms where half of the body is up every other year. The elections are held in April of even numbered years when absolutely no one is thinking about elections. Yes. I mean, the whole thing seems designed to absolutely minimize turnout, basically. Like you don't even know if you're eligible to vote. You don't know when the election is like it must. These must have traditionally been tiny, tiny turnout elections. Yes, absolutely. I mean, just to give you a sense, there's there are around 750,000 people who are eligible to vote in in SRP elections. Just looking back to 2022, and this is when some grassroots climate and clean energy activists had started running and frankly picking up seats. 6,972 people voted in 2022 out of 750,000 eligible for an entity that delivers water and power for over 2 million people in central Arizona. So we knew that was the first problem that we needed to solve is we really needed to raise awareness, increase turnout. Let's talk then about how you do that. I mean, this is not a normal election. It's not a normal voter base. I mean, a lot of the voter base doesn't even know whether it's the voter base or not. How what it was your strategy for targeting voters? I mean, you can't just like put ads on TV and stuff like that. This is seems like a case where you really do kind of have to go find people one. By one like what was the what was the strategy for increasing turnout yeah this was one of the honestly one of the most difficult questions for us our team our coalition to answer because it is like you said, so obscure. So, we did a huge amount of research into all of the eligible voters and essentially did both qualitative and quantitative research to get as much data as we could on these folks. Like, what is their voting history and other elections? So, so we could really get a sense of who these folks are and what makes them tick and what motivates them. The other challenge was: at what acreage, at what amount of land does your property not just become your home and the place that you live, and your single largest asset, but just one, you know, it becomes more of a business and a financial relationship. And that very much changes the incentives of how you want to vote for SRP board members. Yes, this is a big question I have. I mean, my gut says the more acreage you have, the more likely you are to vote for conservative candidates. But is that true? Does that hold? So I can't say for sure, but I did. That was our theory as well. That if you have 10 or more acres, and frankly, we set our threshold at one acre or less for a number of reasons. But yeah, if you've got more than 10 acres, you view your property as an, you know, it's an investment, it is a financial, it's a wealth-building tool rather than a place that you live. And so that was our first, and there was no, you know, hard science behind it, but we ended up deciding that, you, you know if have an acre or less than an acre, there's a high probability that your home is where you live and that you will be persuaded, right, and deeply affected by rising utility prices. And so we looked at the districts that were going to be voting, the district board seats that we're going to be voting in April, honed in on those ones, set our acreage sort of cap ceiling at one, and then we talked to folks that we knew were good voters in other elections and likely just were completely unaware that they even had the opportunity to vote in SRP. Next up, Minnesota regulators Sidney Lieb and Pete Wyckoff on where your utility bill actually goes. This is something that is shocking, I think, to listeners who are not familiar with this stuff. We spent a lot of money, this is not just true in Minnesota, but all over the country. We spent a lot of money putting these advanced smart meters on homes and businesses all over the place, and we're not using the data they're producing in any meaningful way. And then a lot of times, the utilities won't even tell you what that data is. It's insane. Like we have the intelligence capacity out there. We're not using it. It's wild. It's ridiculous. I mean, the way I describe it when I'm talking to people is: I could be plugging in two electric vehicles in my garage, and the utility would still assume that I was going to get another one in the next five years based on whatever electrification load forecast they have because they're not choosing to look at the data and go, oh, this person's already plugging into EVs. They're definitely not going to increase the load at this location. And they have that data, and we've all paid for that data, and it is not that complicated to use it properly. So, better forecasting and also allowing that forecasting to not happen behind a black box. The load forecasting needs to be able to have all kinds of interveners come into the process, come into the regulatory space and say, we think your forecast is off by 10%, or we think, you know, we think you're going to get that much load, but we think it's going to take 15 years, not 10. And if we do that, we can delay these investments. Right. That's the big one. I also think, getting again back to the software side of things, the utility needs to do power flow modeling of their system. They need to understand where the constraints are. They need to, again, be bringing in better data from AMI to understand where they have a lot of DERs, where they have a lot of electrification happening, and how they can make all those things work together to better utilize the system. And then, lastly, there's a lot of folks talking about grid utilization and really excited about that. I feel really strongly that those folks are going to run into a brick wall when they try to implement what's happening at the legislature. I think folks think that they're going to give the utility a 70% utilization target on their system, and then the utility is going to come back and say, we looked at this. The system can't be reliable at a 70% utilization factor. Trust us. Trust us. We're not going to talk to you about it. We're not going to let you talk to our engineers. Our engineers say it can't be done. And that whole thing needs to happen a lot more transparently. And that needs to happen everywhere in the country where they're trying to do grid utilization. I think that's our big theme here, or one of our big themes is. Show us the data, show us how we as regulators can reproduce what you're claiming. Right. The other thing that we haven't really talked about is moving beyond this prudence test. So basically, if they want to spend something in a distribution system, they come in and say, we put a new transformer here. Here's the receipts. We got it from a reputable supplier. It works. And the system is better than if we'd done nothing. So the analog there is most people think the FDA tests to see whether a drug works well. No, they just test to see if a drug works better than nothing. So that's the prudence test. Can you beat a placebo of doing nothing? That's a pretty low bar, especially in this context. But what we really want, and back to the medical analog, and it's only since Obamacare that the government's been looking at this at all, is saying, hey, there's actually five things we could do for that medical condition. Which of them works better than the others? And that's what we're asking, not just did the thing you do actually happen? Show us the receipts and show us you got it, you know, not from some shady guy at the corner, but from a reputable supplier, right? But also, was it the best thing you could have done if there were really five things you could have done? Right, right, right. One of the questions I've had about all this is, it just seems to me, not to, you know, I'm not in the habit of expressing sympathy for utilities, but in this case, like, it just seems like forecasting distribution demand, distribution system demands, has gotten wildly more difficult and complicated really rapidly. Like, there's all these new technologies coming on board in distribution systems as we're talking about. And then there's like, data centers, we really have no, I mean, you are now having to guess how fast our EV is going to spread, how many people are going to be charging at home versus here or there? How many people are going to get solar panels? How many data centers are they going to build in this area? How, you know, there's just like, it just seems like the whole thing's gotten a lot more difficult, which I guess goes to your point that like, we need to make it more transparent how they're doing this. But it is kind of like, a much more complicated thing these days. It's much more complicated, but you know, we have AI now. And we have, we have, you know, advanced computers and we have these smart meters. And yes, it is much harder. It is a much more complicated thing. But we also have many more tools that if we decide to deploy and use them for getting on top of that complexity. Then Greg Miller and Kitty Klitsky on land value taxes and why the tax code has it backwards. And that's the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more, become a paid subscriber at volts.wtf. Thank you.