On November 5, voters in a handful of states will cast their ballots not just for their next president and state and local lawmakers, but also for the members of an obscure body with outsized influence on the country’s energy mix.
It’s called a public utilities commission. Every state has one, usually composed of three to five officials who regulate the private companies that deliver water, power, gas, and other services to residents and businesses. Their job is to secure reliable energy at affordable rates, which means these power players also preside over how quickly utilities adopt clean energy and adapt to extreme weather, and how much companies can raise customers’ rates to do so. In most of the U.S., utility commissioners are appointed by the governor or legislature. But 10 states leave filling these roles up to the electorate.
Utility commissions are famous for being ignored by the public — until there’s a rate increase. But if the U.S. is to have any chance of cutting emissions in line with its global commitments, ensuring fossil fuel communities aren’t left behind, or improving our resilience to increasing heat waves, fires, and floods, these gatekeepers have to be paid more attention — and held accountable.
Charles Hua, the founder of a new nonprofit called Powerlines that aims to raise awareness about the importance of these regulators, told me his group has found that over the last decade, about one in 10 voters in states with utility commission elections skipped that part of the ballot. “In many of these elections where the margins are only a couple percent, the one in 10 that sit out are deciding the election,” he said.
Apathy or ignorance about utility commissions isn’t unique to states where commissioners are elected, but it’s not helped by the fact that many of these states are deeply red, and the races aren’t much of a competition. This year, although seats are opening up in eight states, many of them are unlikely to see a change from the status quo.
In Alabama and Nebraska, three current commissioners are running for re-election unopposed. There’s a clear frontrunner among the three candidates vying for one open seat in Oklahoma: a former Republican state lawmaker named Brian Bingman, who is endorsed by the governor and has raised nearly $450,000, much of which was donated by energy PACs and oil and gas company executives, according to state filings. He’s up against a lesser-known Libertarian candidate who, as of the last reporting period, had raised less than $2,000, and a 90-year-old Democrat who has raised zero dollars and already run for and lost commission races three times.
Whoever is elected to open seats in North and South Dakota will have a say in approving the permits for a contentious carbon dioxide pipeline — a project that has drawn opposition from both sides of the aisle and could have raised the stakes for the elections — but environmental advocates in those states told me they expected incumbent candidates to win.
But there are three races that are being closely watched by climate and clean energy advocates. In Louisiana, a swing voter on the commission is stepping down, throwing into question recent momentum against business-as-usual operations in the gas-heavy state. In Arizona and Montana, the current commissions have been skeptical of, if not outright hostile to supporting the development of the two states’ big untapped solar and wind resources. In each state, however, momentum is building behind candidates who could change that paradigm.
“If you can unlock Montana's renewable energy potential, you can help the western part of the country decarbonize,” Anne Hedges, the director of policy and legislative affairs at the Montana Environmental Information Center told me. “This is a really important race.”
Here’s what’s at stake.
Arizona
During the two years since the last election for the Arizona Corporation Commission, the confusing name of the body in Arizona that regulates utilities, its four-to-one Republican majority has been on a tear dismantling what little clean energy policy there was in the state. In February, the group voted to scrap the state’s meager Renewable Energy Standard, which was enacted in 2006 and required utilities to get 15% of their energy from renewables by 2025, as well as energy efficiency standards. According to Autumn Johnson, executive director of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association, the commission has been more resistant to renewable energy than the utilities. She told me that in a recent proceeding to plan for the closure of the Four Corners coal plant in 2031, the commission tried to prevent the state’s biggest utility from considering renewables paired with batteries as part of the replacement mix.
Solar development has been obstructed at every level. The commission quashed efforts to create a market for community solar, small-scale photovoltaic installations that offer low-income customers and renters access to low-cost clean energy. It adopted a community solar policy that “had so many poison pills in it that it made it impossible for a market to actually form,” said Johnson. “We should for sure have a community solar market. I think it's kind of crazy we wouldn't do that in the sunniest state in the country.” It also gummed up the economics of rooftop solar by decreasing the amount homeowners get paid for exporting solar to the grid and burdening them with fixed fees. Johnson said the market is down 40%, and that “a whole bunch of companies are going bankrupt” because of the commission’s policies.
Whoever lands on the commission come January will have a big opportunity to change course. The renewable energy and efficiency standards have not yet been fully repealed, and will see another vote early next year. Johnson said the new commission will vote on rules for virtual power plants, which could help get more distributed solar and batteries on the grid. As in many states, Arizona utilities are anticipating large load growth in the coming years and proposing a lot of new natural gas power plant development to meet it — but the commission has a chance to get them to consider alternatives.
The race is competitive, with three Democrats, two Green party candidates, and three Republicans, including one incumbent, running to fill three seats. During a
recent debate, the main split between the two major political parties was over support for renewables. Five of them took public funding for their campaigns through the state’s Clean Elections fund, so they're nearly all working with the same amount of capital, which means there is little to help signal who's likely to come out on top. The AFL-CIO has endorsed the three Democrats in the race, but Arizona has one of the lowest union densities in the country. The state Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, has endorsed the Republicans running, and one of them, Rachel Waldman, has been endorsed by three current commissioners.
Voters can choose three candidates, and the three with the most votes will be elected.
Montana
Montana also has three seats opening up on its five-member Public Service Commission, but the elections there are divided by district, and all eyes are on one of the races in particular. Elena Evans, a geologist who works as the environmental health manager for Missoula County, is running as an Independent to unseat Jennifer Fielder, a Republican incumbent running for her second term. Evans has raised nearly $100,000 since she registered to run in April, while Fielder has raised less than $10,000 since January.
The headline issue in the race is affordability. Last year, the commission approved a 28% rate increase for Northwestern Energy, the biggest utility in the state. Molly Bell, political director for Montana Conservation Voters, told me regulators have been “asleep at the wheel.” She said the commission has been “rubber stamping rate increases, not asking questions about [our utilities’] resource plans, and really not holding our energy companies accountable to making plans for the future.”
Environmental advocates are also worried about Northwestern’s recent decision to acquire a larger stake in the Colstrip power plant, a coal-fired facility built in the 1970s and 80s. Northwestern called the plant “a dependable bridge to a cleaner energy future,” but it will require nearly $200 million in retrofits to comply with new federal air pollution regulations, a cost that Northwestern is now
trying to recoup from ratepayers with a new 26% rate increase.
Hedges, of the Montana Energy Information Center, told me the rate increases aren’t just hurting customers — major manufacturers like REC Silicon are leaving the state due to rising energy costs. She wants the commission to force Northwestern to invest in building out the transmission system so that more wind energy can get onto the grid. “We have a ton of wind energy, we have developers who are just clamoring to access that, but they can't because we don't have the transmission system,” she said. “Northwestern has no desire to build out that transmission system because that means competition for them. That’s why our rates are so high.”
Elena Evans isn’t campaigning on a platform of cutting down on fossil fuels or expanding renewables; she’s mainly telling voters she wants to bring costs down and increase transparency. But in interviews, she’s talked about the importance of ensuring utilities are prepared for climate impacts, criticized the sitting commission for being anti-technology, and expressed an interest in solutions such as
reconductoring transmission lines to increase their capacity and installing batteries to make the grid more resilient against outages.
The commission is currently fully Republican, and switching out just one of those seats will not bring change overnight. But Stephanie Chase, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, said that having even one person to ask different questions and bring new information to the public record can be meaningful. “Even if they don't have the votes, they still have a platform and ability to raise issues, which I think is really important in states where climate hasn't been at the forefront.”
Louisiana
Louisiana’s recent history proves the value of dissenting voices, even if they don’t have decisive influence. The state’s historically utility-friendly commission saw a big shakeup two years ago when Davante Lewis, a young progressive candidate,
dethroned a Democratic incumbent who had held his district’s seat for nearly two decades. Close to 80% of Louisiana’s electricity comes from natural gas, and Lewis campaigned on transitioning the state to renewables, in addition to hardening the grid against storms and lowering fees for customers. He has already made a few small inroads on clean energy, such as advancing an energy efficiency program that had been held up in negotiations with the utilities for more than a decade. The commission also recently approved the biggest expansion of renewable energy in state history.
But Lewis is one of two Democrats on the commission, and has been helped by a swing voter — a moderate Republican named Craig Greene — who’s stepping down this year.
Three candidates are vying for Greene’s spot, but one — State Senator Jean Paul Coussan — has a clear fundraising advantage. The big question around the election seems to be less about who will win, and more about what Coussan would do on the commission. In interviews with local media outlets, he has said he wants to ensure the state can keep pace with demand growth while keeping rates down. He’s expressed openness about renewables but also emphasized the importance of the state’s “abundant supply of natural gas.”
The clean energy advocates I spoke to weren’t sure what to make of him. “You just can’t tell based on what Coussan’s saying now,” Daniel Tait, who researches Southern utilities for the Energy and Policy Institute, a consumer watchdog, told me. He said that of the two Republicans running, Coussan seemed more willing to talk about clean energy and find common ground. But it’s unclear how he will compare to the outgoing commissioner.
Hua, of PowerLines, emphasized that whatever happens, it will have ripple effects through the region. “What Louisiana does is an indicator, in some ways, of what the rest of the Southeast can do,” he told me. “And the Southeast is a particularly important region because that's where we're seeing all this load growth, this gas build out, energy burden and environmental injustice challenges. What the Southeast does will make or break what the U.S. does in terms of the clean energy transition.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this article misstated the percentage of voters who skip utility commission elections. It also misidentified the party of the incumbent whom Davante Lewis defeated. Both mistakes have been fixed. We regret the errors.
An endangered American condor.David McNew/Getty Images