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WHO Set to Debate Landmark Global Plan Aimed at Closing Health Gaps for Indigenous Peoples
(icmagazine.org)
Last Updated on January 25, 2026 Health and Indigenous rights advocates are converging on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Executive Board next week for a pivotal meeting to review the draft Global Plan of Action (GPA) for the Health of Indigenous Peoples, a landmark framework aimed at addressing entrenched disparities in health outcomes for Indigenous […]
From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.
2004
Amelia Schafer
ICT
At least one tribal member was arrested during widespread protests in Minneapolis following the shooting and killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by immigration agents on Jan. 24.
In a social media post Saturday night, 13 individuals listed as “violent agitators” were photographed in law enforcement custody, including Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribal citizen, William Lafromboise, 23.
Lafromboise was released just before midnight central time on Jan. 24.
Lafromboise was arrested by ICE agents during an Anti-Immigration Control Enforcement protest in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 sometime around 2 p.m Central Time, family members told ICT.
The post said that he and 12 others assaulted agents or obstructed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity. Lafromboise is wearing a gray Champions sweater in the photo.
“On January 24, our officers were swarmed and attacked by these violent agitators,” the post said.
They also accused the list of individuals for crimes against the agents including: throwing objects at agents, physically assaulting agents, ramming agents with vehicles, issuing death threats, obstruction of law enforcement, vandalization of government vehicles and brandishing homemade weapons.
As of Jan. 24, charges have yet to be filed against Lafromboise.
ICE did not respond to ICT’s requests about what charges Lafromboise is facing.
ICE agents can arrest United States citizens who are in violation of United States Code Section 111 Title 18, which pertains to interfering with law enforcement investigations or assaulting federal officers. Immigration agents are considered federal law enforcement under this legal code.
Assault on a federal law enforcement officer is a federal offense punishable by up to 20 years in prison under United States Code Section 111 Title 18. Penalties typically are determined by the severity of the assault.
Initially, community members were concerned that Lafromboise had been detained by ICE. The family immediately contacted Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Chairman Garret Renville.
Renville told ICT he had contacted the Department of Homeland Security and searched federal immigration databases prior to news that Lafromboise was arrested, rather than detained.
Reports indicate both ICE and FBI are making arrests. It’s not clear who is handling the arrests.
Unverified claims of the detainment of a Standing Rock Sioux Tribe citizen have also been brought to the attention of the Standing Rock Tribal Council.
This is a developing story.
The post Dakota citizen arrested by federal officers during Minneapolis protests Saturday appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.
2005
2007
2008
2009
26
‘A fraudulent scheme’: New Mexico sues Texas oil companies for walking away from leaking wells
(grist.org)
The state of New Mexico is accusing three Texas oil executives of orchestrating “a fraudulent scheme” to pocket revenue from hundreds of oil and gas wells in New Mexico and offload the cost of plugging and cleaning up the wells onto the state’s taxpayers. The suit, filed in late December by the New Mexico attorney general’s office, is the latest salvo in the state’s fight against oil and gas executives accused of foisting old wells onto the public.
The 72-page complaint alleges a yearslong pattern of fraud and self-dealing in which the oil executives — Everett Willard Gray II, Robert Stitzel, and Marquis Reed Gilmore Jr., all of Midland, Texas — repeatedly transferred wells among “a series of shell corporations, LLCs, and partnerships they created.” On multiple occasions, the men placed companies into bankruptcy protection, only to move their profitable wells to other companies they owned or managed outside the bankruptcy proceedings, the suit said.
New Mexico faces millions of dollars in costs to plug wells the companies shed through the bankruptcies. Unplugged oil and gas wells can emit climate-warming methane and carcinogenic gases and often leak briny, radioactive wastewater, as ProPublica and Capital & Main detailed in a 2024 investigation. The newsrooms uncovered Gray, Stitzel, and Gilmore’s early business dealings and use of bankruptcy proceedings.
“I will not stand by while bad actors take advantage of the system — avoiding responsibility, burdening the state with costly remediation, and recklessly endangering the health of New Mexicans,” Raúl Torrez, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement.
As part of ProPublica and Capital & Main’s 2024 investigation, the news organizations toured dozens of wells belonging to Remnant, the group of companies through which the men launched their enterprise. Some wells leaked such high volumes of methane that, if ignited, the air could explode; others emitted hydrogen sulfide at potentially lethal concentrations; and several were surrounded by oil and wastewater spills. At the time, the owner of an oil field services company that had worked on Remnant’s wells said that the men filed for bankruptcy protection without paying his company what it was owed.
The recent lawsuit is “meritless” and built on “baseless claims,” Gray said in a statement responding to questions from ProPublica and Capital & Main. “I have always acted ethically and never been involved in any activities to defraud the state of New Mexico. I strongly deny any wrongdoing in this matter,” he said.
New Era Energy & Digital, one of Gray’s companies named in the state’s complaint, ended up with 87 of the group’s best gas wells, and the company said in a press release that those “no longer align with the Company’s business model.” New Era is focused instead on building an AI data center powered by a yet-to-be-built nuclear power station, it said.
Stitzel and Gilmore didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The tactics alleged by the attorney general are commonly used in the industry to squeeze profits from old wells before companies go bankrupt. Oil and gas executives so frequently follow a similar pattern that environmentalists call it “the playbook.”
Read Next
A new frontier in the voluntary carbon market: Old, leaky oil wells
Oil companies and trade groups argue that most orphan wells are from an earlier era and that modern operators are helping address the problem by paying into various government-managed funds that pay for the plugging of some old wells.
The exact number of orphan wells awaiting cleanup nationwide is unknown, but the figure is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not higher. New Mexico faces as much as a $1.6 billion bill to plug such wells, according to a June 2025 Legislative Finance Committee report.
“As the oil boom is aging and a lot of the wells are becoming low-producing, the risk is increasing,” said Mandy Sackett, the lead New Mexico campaigner for environmental group Earthworks. The potential for taxpayers to be saddled with plugging oil companies’ orphan wells, she said, “poses such a massive financial risk.”
‘Out of the Dark Ages’
The problem of Remnant and other companies leaving wells as orphans is informing a broader reckoning among legislators and regulatory agencies about the inadequacy of New Mexico’s safeguards.
Oil companies are required to set aside funds, called bonds, that the state can call on to pay for well plugging and environmental cleanup. These bonds are meant to protect taxpayers from shouldering such costs in the event that a company goes bankrupt or walks away.
But like all oil-producing states, New Mexico’s bonds cover only a fraction of the true cost of cleanup. A 2024 ProPublica and Capital & Main analysis found that the 15 states that account for nearly all the nation’s oil and gas production held bonds that would cover less than 2 percent of the projected $151.3 billion cost to plug the wells in their states.
In New Mexico, a fresh attempt at bonding reform kicked off with hearings in October, as the state’s Oil Conservation Commission began updating bonding rules. The proposed amendments, which are backed by a coalition of environmental groups, would require companies to put forward a $150,000 bond for each inactive or low-producing well. Research has shown that these are disproportionately likely to become orphans and the state’s responsibility to plug.
The proposed regulations target companies with large collections of these risky wells and would require companies whose portfolios are made up of at least 15 percent inactive or low-producing wells to buy bonds for each of their wells. The proposals would also place other layers of regulatory scrutiny on sales of wells to poorly capitalized companies and limit the time that wells could remain idle before needing to be plugged.
Reporter Nick Bowlin tests an orphan well that had belonged to Remnant and Acacia for methane and hydrogen sulfide leaks near Artesia, New Mexico. Mark Olalde / ProPublica
Oil Conservation Division officials said in a statement that “the interested parties are currently engaged in settlement talks” for the bonding rulemaking. The agency declined to comment on the attorney general’s lawsuit.
New Mexico’s State Land Office, which oversees the state’s publicly owned land, recently initiated a similar process to increase the amount of money set aside in bonds to plug wells within its jurisdiction. The agency estimates that there are 15,000 unplugged oil and gas wells on land it manages.
Ari Biernoff, general counsel of the State Land Office, said that these reforms would bring bonding requirements “out of the Dark Ages” and closer to what the agency would need to fund cleanup should companies walk away.
“Any reasonable observer would conclude we have grossly inadequate bonding,” Biernoff said.
Industry groups have expressed dissatisfaction with the proposed rules.
The New Mexico Oil & Gas Association and Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico submitted counterproposals with significantly reduced bonding increases. The latter said in comments submitted to the state that its suggestion “will keep smaller operators from going out of business.”
“We do not believe it’s in New Mexico’s best interest for the State Land Office to kill a lot of smaller, state-based, good operators to leave only a handful of supermajors,” Jim Winchester, executive director of the Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, wrote to the agency.
Remnants of the oil industry
Beginning in 2015, Gray, Stitzel, and Gilmore aggregated several hundred wells in southeastern New Mexico under the Remnant companies, subsequently racking up regulatory violations, including having too many inactive, unplugged wells. The state’s Oil Conservation Division gave Remnant a deadline of July 2019 to plug some of its wells. Fifteen days before the deadline, the men placed the company into bankruptcy protection.
Remnant’s dissolution kicked off a complex and disputed series of transactions among the three men. According to the attorney general’s complaint, Stitzel and Gilmore created several companies under the name Acacia and purchased most of Remnant’s wells from themselves. Gray, meanwhile, created Solis Partners — a wholly owned subsidiary of Gray’s New Era — and ended up with 87 of the group’s most lucrative gas-producing wells. The bill of sale that landed the wells with Gray’s company was for $10, and Gray signed on behalf of Remnant a change-of-operator application that sent wells to Solis Partners.
Read Next
States want to clean up leaky oil wells. Well-intentioned laws are getting in the way.
Then, in December 2024, a major oil company that the state had asked to plug some of Acacia’s wells sued Acacia to force it to clean up its own mess. Two weeks later, Acacia filed to liquidate through bankruptcy.
Of Remnant’s and Acacia’s wells, 172 ended up as the responsibility of the State Land Office, according to the agency. Eleven of those have been plugged, all but one by other oil companies that hold leases with the agency and stepped up to do the work. Based on the state’s estimated per-well cleanup cost, the remaining wells could cost a total of more than $25 million to plug.
The agency was able to claim a single bond from Remnant worth $20,000.
“This is a very vivid demonstration of why we need an upgrade to the bonding rule,” said Biernoff, the State Land Office general counsel.
The most lucrative wells from Gray, Stitzel, and Gilmore’s foray into New Mexico’s oil and gas industry belong to Solis Partners. But even that company appears at risk of leaving them as orphans, as it has about 120 inactive wells on state trust land, according to the State Land Office. Its parent company, New Era, which is pitching plans for a 3,500-acre AI data center campus in southeastern New Mexico, said it is selling the wells.
“Having enriched themselves with the profits from Solis Partners’ and Acacia’s oil and gas production, the Individual Defendants are once again seeking to walk away from the plugging and remediation costs,” the attorney general’s complaint alleged.
Charlie Barrett is an ecologist with environmental group Oilfield Witness who has chronicled pollution at Remnant’s and Acacia’s wells for years. “They’re old, they’re just falling apart,” he said. They are also, he said, emblematic of the small oil and gas operators that represent the final stage of the industry leaving its wells as orphans.
“I wish I could say that it’s unique,” Barrett said, “but it isn’t.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A fraudulent scheme’: New Mexico sues Texas oil companies for walking away from leaking wells on Jan 25, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
2010
2011
This story was originally published by KFF Health News.
Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez
KFF Health News
Just hours after Rhonda Swaney left a prenatal appointment for her first pregnancy, she felt severe pain in her stomach and started vomiting.
Then 25 years old and six months pregnant, she drove herself to the emergency room in Ronan, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, where an ambulance transferred her to a larger hospital 60 miles away in Missoula. Once she arrived, the staff couldn’t detect her baby’s heartbeat. Swaney began to bleed heavily. She delivered a stillborn baby and was hospitalized for several days. At one point, doctors told her to call her family. They didn’t expect her to survive.
“It certainly changed my life — the experience — but my life has not been a bad life,” she told KFF Health News.
Though her experiences were nearly 50 years ago, Swaney, a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said Native Americans continue to receive inadequate maternal care. The data appears to support that belief.
In 2024, the most recent year for which data for the population is available, Native American and Alaska Native people had the highest pregnancy-related mortality ratio among major demographic groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In response to this disparity, Native organizations, the CDC, and some states are working to boost tribal participation in state maternal mortality review committees to better track and address pregnancy-related deaths in their communities. Native organizations are also considering ways tribes could create their own committees.
State maternal mortality review committees investigate deaths that occur during pregnancy or within a year after pregnancy, analyze data, and issue policy recommendations to lower death rates.
According to 2021 CDC data, compiled from 46 maternal mortality review committees, 87 percent of maternal deaths in the U.S. were deemed preventable. Committees reported thatmost, if not all, deaths among Native American and Alaska Native people were considered preventable.
State committees have received federal money through the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which President Donald Trump signed in 2018.
But the money is scheduled to dry up on Jan. 31, when the short-term spending bill that ended the government shutdown expires.
Funding for the committees is included in the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026. That bill must be approved by the House, Senate, and president to take effect.
Native American leaders said including members of their communities in maternal mortality review committee activities is an important step in addressing mortality disparities.
In 2023, tribal leaders and federal officials met to discuss four models: a mortality review committee for each tribe, a committee for each of the 12 Indian Health Service administrative regions, a national committee to review all Native American maternal deaths, and the addition of Native American subcommittees to state committees.
Whatever the model, tribal sovereignty, experience, and traditional knowledge are important factors, said Kim Moore-Salas, a co-chair of the Arizona Maternal Mortality Review Committee. She’s also the chairperson of the panel’s American Indian/Alaska Native mortality review subcommittee and a member of the Navajo Nation.
“Our matriarchs, our moms, are what carries a nation forward,” she said.
Mental health conditions and infection were the leading underlying causes of pregnancy-related death among Native American and Alaska Native women as of 2021, according to the CDC report analyzing data from 46 states.
The CDC found an estimated 68 percent of pregnancy-related deaths among Native American and Alaska Native people happened within a week of delivery to a year postpartum. The majority of those happened between 43 days and a year after birth.
The federal government has a responsibility under signed treaties to provide health care to the 575 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. through the Indian Health Service. Tribal members can receive limited services at no cost, but the agency is underfunded and understaffed.
A study published in 2024 that analyzed data from 2016 to 2020 found that approximately 75 percent of Native American and Alaska Native pregnant people didn’t have access to care through the Indian Health Service around the time of giving birth, meaning many likely sought care elsewhere. More than 90 percent of Native American and Alaska Native births occur outside of IHS facilities, according to the agency. For those who did deliver at IHS facilities, a 2020 report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General found that 56 percent of labor and delivery patients received care that did not follow national clinical guidelines.
The 2024 study’s authors also found that members of the population were less likely to have stable insurance coverage and more likely to have a lapse in coverage during the period close to birth than non-Hispanic white people.
Cindy Gamble, who is Tlingit and a tribal community health consultant for the American Indian Health Commission in Washington, has been a member of the state’s maternal mortality review panel for about eight years. In the time she’s been on the state panel, she said, its composition has broadened to include more people of color and community members.
The panel also began to include suicide, overdose, and homicide deaths in its data analysis and added racism and discrimination to the risk factors considered during its case review process.
Solutions need to be tailored to the tribe’s identity and needs, Gamble said.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all,” Gamble said, “because of all the beliefs and different cultures and languages that different tribes have.”
Gamble’s tenure on the state committee is distinctive. Few states have tribal representation on maternal mortality review committees, according to the National Indian Health Board, a nonprofit organization that advocates for tribal health.
The National Council of Urban Indian Health is also working to increase the participation of Urban Indian health organizations, which provide care for Native American people who live outside of reservations, in state maternal mortality review processes. As of 2025, the council had connected Urban Indian health organizations to state review committees in California, Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.
Native leaders such as Moore-Salas find the current efforts encouraging.
“It shows that state and tribes can work together,” she said.
In March 2024, Moore-Salas became the first Native American co-chair of Arizona’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee. In 2025 she and other Native American members of the committee developed guidelines for the American Indian/Alaska Native subcommittee and reviewed the group’s first cases.
The subcommittee is exploring ways to make the data collection and analysis process more culturally relevant to their population, Moore-Salas said.
But it takes time for policy changes to create widespread change in the health of a population, Gamble said. Despite efforts around the country, other factors may hinder the pace of progress. For example, maternity care deserts are growing nationally, caused by rapid hospital and labor and delivery unit closures. Health experts have raised concerns that upcoming cuts to Medicaid will hasten these closures.
Despite her experience and the ongoing crisis among Native American and Alaska Native people, Swaney hopes for change.
She had a second complicated pregnancy soon after her stillbirth. She went into labor about three months early, and the doctors said her son wouldn’t live to the next morning. But he did, and he was transferred about 525 miles away from Missoula to the nearest advanced neonatal unit, in Salt Lake City.
Her son, Kelly Camel, is now 48. He has severe cerebral palsy and profound deafness. He lives alone but has caregivers to help with cooking and other tasks, said Swaney, 73.
He “has a good sense of humor. He’s kind to other people. We couldn’t ask for a more complete child.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
The post Native Americans are dying from pregnancy. They want a voice to stop the trend. appeared first on ICT.
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2013
2014
Chandra Colvin
MPR News
Originally published on MPR News.
Heather Friedli leads Team Kwe — the all-female Indigenous snow carving team. Kwe means “woman” in the Ojibwe language.
She said the three-person team is the only one of its kind in North America.
“One of the significances, too, of being a Kwe woman, is that women are the keepers of the water. And so, by sculpting with snow, we are protecting snow water as part of what we are doing, and we approach it as a spiritual practice,” Friedli said. The team did their first snow sculpture five years ago.
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board named the public art installation, “Carved in Snow: Stories of Land and Legacy.” The project highlights Indigenous history, seasonal storytelling and youth mentorship.
The art installation includes four snow sculptures across riverfront parks near downtown Minneapolis. Each sculpture will represent one of the four seasons.
During the second week of January, Team Kwe worked on the project’s first sculpture at Mill Ruins Park. The sculpture depicts a merganser, a waterfowl, with flames emerging from its torso.
Friedli said the sculpture’s imagery is adapted from stories in the Ojibwe culture about the transition from winter to spring.
“The birds were singing their sacred song of springtime to fight back biboon, which is winter,” she said.
Juliana Welter carves snow on second sculpture at Father Hennepin Bluff Park in Minneapolis. The sculpture will feature imagery of a fox and its kit surrounded by floral, representing spring on Wednesday.Chandra Colvin | MPR News
Teammate and Friedli’s sister, Juliana Welter, said she hopes people can find new perspectives in the installation.
“People have their own version of how the spring comes, but to maybe see the story we’re putting on here with the merganser — the fire in his belly, singing the song of spring — like, maybe they’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s a new way for me to see it,’” Welter said.
Meryt Watkins-Wright is a stand-in member on the team this year. It’s her first time snow carving, an activity she said made her both nervous and excited.
“It’s definitely a learning experience,” Watkins-Wright said.
She added that, as someone who is mixed Afro-Indigenous, participating on Team Kwe and designing the sculptures has allowed her to connect with her Indigenous heritage through storytelling.
“This is Indigenous land, and I think that it has been overlooked, taken away. It’s really important to — in the middle of the park in downtown — have it be like the centerpiece. I think it’s very meaningful,” she said.
Team Kwe began working on the project just days before the shooting of 37-year-old Renee Macklin Good. They took a brief pause in their work to be with community, but continued crafting sculpture the next day.
“We knew that it’s important as artists to continue the work, because what we’re doing is important to bring joy and vitality to the downtown area, and we want to make sure that people can find solace in what we do,” Friedli said.
This week, Team Kwe has been working at Father Hennepin Bluff Park on the second sculpture of the public installation. The sculpture will feature imagery of a fox with its kit surrounded by floral designs, representing spring.
She shared that the events over the last week “have weighed heavy on our souls.”
“Many, many people have come up to us just saying, ‘Thank you so much for being out here and creating this work when everything is so chaotic and feels so upsetting right now in the Twin Cities,’ and people really are feeling that this artwork is important to bring them joy right now, and so we’re happy to do that,” Friedli said.
Friedli encourages community members to stop by the parks to see Team Kwe’s progress on each sculpture.
The team plans to finish the second sculpture at Father Hennepin Bluff Park on Friday.
Other parks included in the art installation include Nicollet Island Park and Graco Park. The project concludes the first week of February.
Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via*Report for America**, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.*
The post Snow sculptures share Indigenous stories at Minneapolis parks this winter appeared first on ICT.
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2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Stewart Huntington
ICT
MINNEAPOLIS — Hours after immigration officers fatally shot another protester, officials warned a growing crowd of demonstrators to disperse or face the consequences as tensions continued to build in the Twin Cities.
An announcement over a loudspeaker midday Saturday told the thousands of protesters in the frigid temperatures that they were now considered to be unlawfully gathered and were ordered to leave the scene.
The announcement came after federal immigration agents shot and killed a man Saturday amid ongoing protests over the Trump administration’s purported crackdown on immigration.
An unidentified protester holds a Minnesota state flag as federal immigration officers deploy tear gas on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026, in Minneapolis. Credit: AP Photo/Abbie Parr
The shooting happened a day after thousands of demonstrators crowded the city’s streets, calling for federal law enforcement to leave. On Saturday, thousands of people gathered in the area where the man was shot near a popular doughnut shop.
The crowds stretched for block after block, calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to leave the state. Law enforcement at the scene also included BFI and state troopers.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in a social media post that he had been in contact with the White House after the shooting and had urged President Donald Trump to end what the Department of Homeland Security has called its largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.
“Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now,” Walz said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Details surrounding the fatal shooting Saturday weren’t immediately clear, but Walz said the man was shot amid the Trump administration’s crackdown,
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the AP in a text messages that the person had a firearm with two magazines and that the situation was “evolving.” DHS distributed a photo of a handgun they said was on the person who was shot.
Minneapolis officials said they have not been able to confirm the circumstances of the shooting.
The shooting happened amid widespread daily protests in the Twin Cities since the Jan. 7 shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good, who was killed when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired into her vehicle.
After the shooting Saturday, an angry crowd gathered and screamed profanities at federal officers, calling them “cowards” and telling them to go home. One officer responded mockingly as he walked away, telling them, “Boo hoo.” Agents elsewhere shoved a yelling protester into a car.
This article contains material from The Associated Press.
The post Tensions escalate in Minneapolis as ICE fatally shoots another protester appeared first on ICT.
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2021
2022
2023
2025
In the back of Black Seed Bagels in northern Brooklyn is a giant catering kitchen filled with industrial-size condiments and freezers full of dough. A tall, silver electric oven, named the Baconator, stands in a far corner, cooking thousands of pounds of meat every week to accompany Black Seed’s hand-rolled, wood-fired bagels.
The Baconator is connected to a battery the size of a carry-on suitcase, which is plugged into the wall. While the morning rush is underway, the 2.8-kilowatt-hour battery can directly power the commercial oven to reduce the company’s reliance on the electric grid, Noah Bernamoff, Black Seed’s co-owner, explained recently at the company’s Bushwick shop. Two more batteries are paired with energy-intensive refrigerators in the front.
Businesses like Black Seed often pay hefty demand charges on their utility bills that reflect the maximum amount of power they use during a month — costs that can represent as much as half their total bill, on average. By shifting to battery power during key times, Black Seed aims to lower its peak grid needs and reduce monthly fees from the utility Con Edison in the process.
Black Seed is part of a battery pilot program run by David Energy, a New York–based retail energy provider. The startup supplied the batteries for free last August and, using its software platform, controls exactly when the three appliances draw on backup power. Vivek Bhagwat, David Energy’s head of engineering, said he expects that tapping batteries for the refrigerators — which are always humming — will be especially helpful during the hottest months, when the shop’s air conditioners run around the clock.
“We’re pretty optimistic about our ability to curtail energy in the summer, when it really matters most, through this machine,” he said while standing beside a doorless fridge holding water, juice, and soda.
Noah Bernamoff at Black Seed’s Bushwick shop, which serves as the Brooklyn company’s headquarters. Maria Gallucci / Canary Media
For Black Seed, even modest benefits from batteries could make a difference if multiplied across the company’s 10 locations in New York City, Bernamoff said. By way of example, he noted that saving $80 at every shop every month could add up to almost $10,000 a year in avoided utility costs.
“We’re in the game of nickels and dimes,” he said of the bagel business. “So we’re always happy to save the money.”
James McGinniss, David Energy’s CEO, thinks this “do-it-yourself battery” strategy has some serious potential to help small businesses combat rising electricity costs, both in New York City and beyond. Along with Black Seed’s Bushwick shop, his company has installed batteries at fast-food restaurants, a day spa, and a dog grooming store, where the battery is cushioning the power draw of a fur-drying machine. As of mid-January, David Energy has signed deals with customers to put plug-in batteries in about 50 locations, adding up to more than 500 kilowatt-hours of energy storage capacity.
The startup’s plug-in battery pilot is building on the growing interest in DIY energy technologies worldwide. McGinniss cited the example of balcony solar systems that can plug into standard household electrical outlets, which are big in Germany but aren’t yet allowed under most current electrical codes in the U.S. — although state lawmakers in New York and elsewhere are pushing legislation to change that.
Backup batteries, however, are ready for market. Portable batteries from companies like Jackery and EcoFlow are increasingly affordable and popular options for households that are looking for backup power during blackouts but can’t, or don’t want to, install fossil fuel–burning generators. A handful of startups like Pila Energy have plug-in batteries meant to operate around the clock to reduce utility bills as well as to keep refrigerators and other critical appliances running through power outages.
Outside Black Seed’s shop in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Stephanie Primavera / Canary Media
As a retail energy provider, David Energy competes with large utilities and other energy retailers to provide customers with cheaper electricity plans. It does so primarily by purchasing electricity from wholesale markets and then reselling it to businesses and households. But the battery pilot is part of the company’s broader long-term goal to “run the grid 24/7 on clean energy,” McGinniss said.
As solar and batteries have become “the cheapest electron we can create,” giving customers access to those technologies has become a business priority for David Energy as well — “because people like cheap energy,” he said. Plug-in batteries, in particular, enable the company to “rapidly scale our storage under management, even in the existing regulatory construct,” according to McGinniss.
That last point underscores the challenges that New York City businesses face in installing the type of wired-in and utility-interconnected battery backup systems that are more common in other parts of the country. For years, concerns about fire risks have led the New York City Fire Department to subject stationary lithium-ion battery installations to strict fire-safety regulations that have made them impractical for most building owners.
Last fall, the New York City Buildings Department issued new rules that industry experts say could make these projects more cost-effective. But that still leaves building owners and battery installers with the task of navigating complex and time-consuming utility interconnection processes — steps that simple plug-in batteries can avoid.
Can free plug-in batteries pay their way?
Still, how can a retail energy provider recoup the cost of supplying batteries to customers for free? McGinniss didn’t disclose the current financials for David Energy’s no-cost battery program. But he did say that the devices offer money-saving opportunities for customers and money-making ones for his business that can expand over time.
For customers, the fundamental proposition is the opportunity to reduce a big, hard-to-manage portion of their monthly utility bills — the demand charges. Unlike the per-kilowatt-hour “volumetric” charges that most households pay, these particular fees are assessed based on the maximum amount of power a business draws from the grid during any 15-minute period within a month. The structure is designed to incentivize customers to reduce peak electricity use, which drives much of the cost for utilities of building and maintaining grid infrastructure.
For New York City businesses, these demand charges can add up to between 15 percent and 50 percentof a typical commercial customer’s monthly bill, McGinniss explained. Using stored battery power for big appliances that tend to need a lot of energy during those times can significantly reduce those peaks, he said, as shown in this sample graph from Black Seed’s Bushwick location on September 17, 2025.
The results can vary greatly from customer to customer, though McGinniss estimated that every kilowatt shaved from that peak could cut about $50 from a monthly bill. That’s a good way for David Energy to entice and retain customers, he said. But the startup can also use the same stored battery power to earn revenues for itself.
One option is participating in so-called demand-response programs, which pay customers to reduce power use during, for instance, hot summer evenings when demand for electricity is putting power plants and grid infrastructure under stress. In New York City, David Energy can participate in programs run by Con Edison and by state grid operator NYISO, McGinniss said.
Retail electricity providers like David Energy can make (or lose) money depending on how cleverly they manage their ever-changing mix of purchases on wholesale energy markets against their commitments to provide their customers with retail power at competitive prices.
In Texas, the country’s most open and competitive electricity market, energy retailers are building gigawatt-scale “virtual power plant” platforms, offering customers free smart thermostats, rooftop solar-and-battery systems, and stand-alone backup batteries. In exchange, these programs ask customers for permission to use those systems to pursue arbitrage opportunities — essentially hedging their wholesale energy-market positions by using batteries to store power when it’s cheaper and avoid pulling it from the grid when it’s more expensive. David Energy is pursuing similar opportunities in Texas as well as in its primary markets in New York and elsewhere in the Northeast.
The economics of this customer-facing arbitrage expand as the scale of deployments grows, McGinniss said. “As you add these things up, it’s a portfolio effect,” he said. “There’s a lot more value to unlock down the road.”
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To be clear, relying on systems installed at customers’ homes and businesses puts a lot of risk on the companies fronting the money to install them. These companies need to have technology to communicate with and control the devices to ensure they’re storing and shifting power at times when that’s valuable. And they need contracts that fairly share the savings and revenues with their customers — and build in options for when customers might want to switch to a different energy retailer that comes along with a more attractive offer.
On that last front, portable batteries are a lot less risky than systems that need to be wired into building electrical panels and interconnected under utility rules, McGinniss noted. “If they don’t like the service, we can come pick it up. That’s a remarkable fact about these batteries that changes how you think about financing.”
Even so, Bernamoff at Black Seed Bagels said he’s excited by the longer-term possibility of installing large-scale batteries in the Bushwick store’s basement — particularly as city and state policymakers in New York push to electrify buildings. Today, Black Seed primarily uses fossil-gas appliances and heating systems in its stores. If the company is required to switch to electrified versions, then adding batteries could help it manage its higher electricity bills and limit strain on the local grid, he said.
“The industrial battery side of it all could be really interesting,” Bernamoff said while seated at a café table, beneath a poster advertising the store’s scallion-kimchi cream cheese.
“To the extent that we’d be able to reduce peak power at the service level, instead of piece by piece, now we’re really talking,” he added. “Because then every outlet, every light bulb is being better managed and reduced.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Brooklyn bagel shop is saving money with plug-in batteries on Jan 24, 2026.
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