The blue wave has officially reached the Arizona down ballot. Though two Democratic wins in the Arizona Corporation Commissioner race might not drum up the same national coverage as, say, flipping a Senate seat in South Carolina, the election of Clara Pratte and Jonathon Hill to the five-seat commission could have major energy implications in a state that already saw renewables champions take over the state’s largest utility earlier this year. (With close margins in slow-to-count Arizona, the ACC race wasn’t officially called until Thursday evening, when both Republicans conceded.)
Arizona is one of 10 states that elects its utility commissioners, with the ACC regulating private water, gas, and electric companies in the state. That includes overseeing Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power, where bills have increased 52% and 10%, respectively, over the past five years, per Heatmap’s data. (The publicly owned Salt River Project, which serves much of the Phoenix area, operates largely without ACC oversight.)
The ACC has been wholly in Republican hands since 2024; during that time, the body repealed Arizona’s Electric Efficiency Standards, which had incentivized utilities to pursue energy efficiency programs, as well as the state’s Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff, which supported the build-out of solar and wind power. “They were a rubber stamp for all our utilities and refused to even consider anything in support of protecting our climate,” Arizona State Representative Brian Garcia, who was reelected on Tuesday, said during a press call with Lead Locally this week. “At one instant, one of the commissioners told someone who got sick from the heat — who turned off their power and their AC — ‘Well, that’s on them.’ And I think our state and our communities have had enough of that.”
Though the ACC remains under Republican control despite the two Democratic additions, it puts full control within a one-seat striking distance for progressives when the other three seats are up in 2028 — a much easier fight to win, and potentially a huge one, given that the party hasn’t controlled the ACC since 1997.
Of particular concern in 2026, though, was the development of data centers. Ralph Heap, a Republican in the race who made the League of Conservation Voters’ 12-person “worst of the worst” list out of all 6,342 seats up for grabs nationwide on Tuesday, previously told the Arizona Capitol Times he supports the data center build-out in the name of American AI dominance. Incumbent Republican Kevin Thompson, meanwhile, has argued that the commission “has done its job of shielding ratepayers from costs associated with servicing data centers and other large load users.”
Voters evidently disagreed, backing Hill and Pratte, who say they support a data center moratorium. “The Corporation Commission might not be able to implement a pause, but I think they can certainly be a clearinghouse for information,” Hill told Yellow Sheet Report, an Arizona political tipsheet, acknowledging the relatively limited role the ACC actually has in regulating data centers beyond demanding transparency of utilities’ energy service agreements.
There are other concerns, too. Climate organizers zeroed in on the ACC race because of its influence over the solar buildout in the nation’s sunniest state, where nevertheless six of the state’s 15 counties have a restrictive ordinance against the resource, Heatmap Pro data shows. Commissioner-elect Pratte, a member of the Navajo Nation and the first Indigenous person elected to statewide office in Arizona, is also the co-founder of Navajo Power, a clean-energy company that helps tribal nations develop solar energy and storage projects.
Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power also both have pending rate increase requests under review by the ACC; a 14% rate increase for residential customers and a 45% or more increase for data centers in the case of APS, and a 10% increase for residential customers in the case of TEP. (The APS’ rate case will likely be decided in December, before Pratte and Hill take their seats.)
Additionally, State Senator Lauren Kuby has introduced a bill to change the name of the ACC to the Arizona Public Utility Commission, a move intended to highlight to voters “its significance to their daily lives,” as she told the Arizona Capitol Times earlier this year. Sure enough, John Qua, the campaign director at Lead Locally, and Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, previously told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin that part of the trouble with supporting progressive candidates in the ACC race was communicating to Arizona voters that, like the race for governor, it is a partisan election.
But given how things turned out Tuesday nationwide — a referendum on cost-of-living and, perhaps, data centers — it seems they needn’t have worried. Arizonans worked out exactly who to blame.
