As Arizona voters go the polls, they have more control over their state’s power plants and climate policies than they might realize.
This year three of the five seats are up for grabs on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates electric utilities. The commission has authority over how electricity is generated, among other things, and what customers pay.
In recent years, it has taken steps toward rolling back a clean-energy mandate passed by a previous Republican-led board. It has also made it harder to build community solar in a state renowned for its sunniness, its critics say, and easier to build new fossil-fuel-burning power plants.
These boards exist in states nationwide, and while most are appointed, similarly contentious races playing out in states like Louisiana and Montana, where they’re debating the future of coal power, which is particularly dirty, and what role natural gas, another fossil fuel, should have.
“It’s a fourth branch of government that nobody knows about who’s in your pocket every day,” said Robert Burns, a Republican who served on Arizona’s commission for eight years.
Starting two decades ago, the Republican-controlled commission had encouraged a transition to renewable energy based on simple economics: Renewables were getting cheaper than fossil fuels. It initially required utilities it regulates to become 15-percent renewable by 2025 and later, during Mr. Burns’s tenure, he sought to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants by 2050.
That could have made Arizona even more of a clean-energy leader. Today, it ranks as the fifth largest solar generator in the United States.
But utilities have struggled to transition away from fossil fuels.
In 2014, the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Services and its parent company Pinnacle West Capital Corp., paid more than $10 million to help elect two former commissioners. In the years since, the commission has become friendlier to fossil fuels, according to critics who include former Republican members. One current member was a registered lobbyist for a natural gas company.
The commission has begun working to weaken state policies on renewable energy, its critics say.
“It’s almost a dereliction of duty for any public-utility commissioner to not be implementing and requiring renewable-energy usage,” said Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, a former Republican on the commission who switched parties in 2019 and is now a Democrat. “They don’t seem to understand economics.”
The changes in the makeup of Arizona’s utility board are an example of the long-running trend of interest groups turning their attention to regional or local elections, whether statehouse seats or local school boards, in pursuit of political goals.
In a statement, Nicole Garcia, a spokeswoman for the commission, said, “ The commission is very happy to report that the citizens of Arizona are receiving some of the most reliable and cost-effective energy in the country.” She said the commission doesn’t favor fossil fuels, and “recognizes the need for continued use of natural gas resources” in order “to maintain reliability as the transition to renewable energy, battery storage and potentially new technology occurs.”
While Arizona suffers from extreme heat and a dwindling water supply, partly worsened by climate change, the state has tapped into federal climate legislation to help fund changes to its grid that would make it cleaner. Arizona has received more than $11 billion in federal tax incentives and investments for electric-vehicle charging stations and battery production.
There is potentially up to $24 billion more in federal funding, much of it in solar energy, according to Jacob Corvidae of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank. “Arizona is a top 10 state in terms of pulling in Inflation Reduction Act dollars,” he said, “and it’s punching above its weight, but it’s not guaranteed to continue.”
Ms. Mayes, the attorney general, served as a Republican on the utility commission from 2003 through 2010. She said that members didn’t really talk about climate change, but that they wanted utilities to diversify their energy sources, reduce pollution and lower costs for ratepayers. She helped pass Arizona’s renewable-energy standard in 2008.
The current commission has begun evaluating whether to repeal that standard. Renewables currently make up about 16 percent of generated electricity in Arizona, more than half of that solar.
The current commission has also limited incentives on community solar, according to critics like Autumn Johnson of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. “It used to be that you could be a Republican and still value solar for resiliency or energy independence, or because you favored competition,” she said.
In response, Ryan Anderson, an adviser to a commission member, said, “Certain industry groups are upset that their proposals are now being appropriately scrutinized and they aren’t able to profit from the pockets of ratepayers like they perhaps once did.”
After the 2014 election in which around $10 million was spent by a utility and its parent company to help elect board members, Arizona Public Services said it would no longer do so. “The company has not engaged in commission elections in more than eight years and has publicly committed to not engage,” said Jill Hanks, speaking for the company.
This year, five of the six major-party candidates for the commission have agreed to run under Arizona’s clean-election finance law, which provides them with state funding if they swear off private funding and raise a certain amount of money through $5 donations from individuals. Under this system, political action committees can still spend on advertising, but they can’t communicate or coordinate with a candidate.
Still, Mr. Burns and other observers say utility rates are too high, and they aren’t persuaded that the commission is impartial.
In 2022, two new commissioners, Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers, were part of a joint election campaign directed by Mr. Thompson’s sister, Katharine Fredriksen, who had previously worked in fossil fuel industries, most recently as president for CONSOL Energy, a natural gas and coal-mining company in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Thompson also previously worked in the fossil fuel industry, at Southwest Gas, as a business-development manager and registered lobbyist for more than a decade. Ms. Fredriksen is now the policy adviser for Jim O’Connor, the chairman of the utility board.
The commission is currently supporting one of the state’s largest fossil fuel projects, new natural gas units for Arizona Public Services. “Natural gas is an essential reliability partner to the large quantities of solar and battery energy storage we continue to add to our system,” said Ms. Hanks of A.P.S.
The commission spokeswoman, Ms. Garcia, said, “The commission takes a balanced approach to ensure that we do not have rolling brownouts like nearby states and that utility rates remain just and reasonable.”
Joshua Polacheck, a retired foreign-service officer running for election to the commission as a Democrat, said decisions like approving these new units were “locking in the market for decades to come.”
Both Mr. Thompson and Mr. Myers will remain on the commission until they’re up for re-election in 2026. One Republican is seeking re-election, while two other commissioners (the sole Democrat, and Mr. O’Connor) aren’t seeing re-election.
The top Republican candidate is Rachel Walden, a school board member who sued the state’s largest school district over its support of transgender students. She, like her fellow Republican candidate Rene Lopez, have questioned the science of climate change. During an interview at a 2023 festival for Turning Point, a conservative nonprofit, she called climate change “a ruse” meant to prop up China.
The commission also faces a legal challenge. Three Republican members, plus Ms. Fredriksen and the commission’s executive director, Douglas Clark, are named in a discrimination lawsuit by Robin Mitchell, a Black lawyer who spent five years as general counsel for the commission. In the lawsuit, filed in May, she says she was demoted and replaced by Thomas Van Flein, the former chief of staff of a Republican Congressman, according to the suit. Ms. Mitchell alleges he was paid almost $30,000 more than her salary at the time of her alleged demotion.
Mr. Anderson said Mr. Thompson “denies all allegations made by the former employee baselessly leveled against him, and looks forward to legal proceedings that will exonerate his name.” The commission also denied the allegations in a statement, including that it “does not and will not discriminate based on race or any other category.”
Mr. Burns, the former chairman, said that he votes Republican and doesn’t believe in the science of climate change, but that he would have a hard time voting for his fellow party members on the commission, calling their choices misaligned with a free market. “The decisions that they’ve made, the actions they’ve taken, I really don’t believe is supportive of the ratepayer,” he said.
Meanwhile Arizona, the state with the highest number of heat-related deaths in the country, is getting hotter. Phoenix had 113 consecutive days this year where the temperature hit or surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s like a frog-boiling-in-water situation,” said Nick Arnold, Arizona’s state director for Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit focused on local elections. “You don’t realize how much worse it’s getting until it’s too late.”
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