Summary
Rising household electricity prices and disputes over how to power fast-growing data centers are pushing previously low-profile elections for utility regulators into national political fights, with Arizona and Alabama emerging as the latest battlegrounds.
The elections matter because regulators help set the rules for how utilities build power plants and power lines and how they recover the costs—ultimately shaping electricity affordability for millions of customers, especially as states face rising demand tied to artificial intelligence and other industrial expansion.
In Arizona, attention has concentrated on Tuesday’s race to determine control of Salt River Project, the large public utility serving the Phoenix area. The contest has drawn heightened turnout interest, with the utility saying that more than three times as many people requested early ballots as in 2022, and that ratepayers who must own land to vote have been targeted through yard signs, texts, fliers, and door-knocking.
AP reported that national groups have joined the Arizona race, including Turning Point Action, which says it wants to curb environmentalists’ influence over Salt River Project in that Tuesday election. The reporting said the involvement reflects a broader sweep of the same tensions that played a prominent role in last year’s utility-regulator elections in Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia.
Campaign messages have largely converged on the question of how Salt River Project should respond to electricity demand that the utility projects will require it to “double its power capacity within a decade.” The two slates vying for the board’s majority take sharply different approaches, with one backed by Turning Point Action and another supported by the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, while local progressive groups, energy interests, construction firms and data center developers are also engaged in the campaign.
Turning Point Action-backed supporters have urged a focus on stopping what they describe as “radical environmentalists,” while the opposing “clean energy” slate argues Salt River Project’s current board majority is too eager to rely on natural gas, raise rates, and embrace data centers, and that the board offers no incentives to install solar panels. A clean energy advocate on SRP’s board, Randy Miller, said the situation was “insane, especially now,” while one of the business-backed challengers, construction executive Jimmy Lindblom, argued that rapid shifts to solar would not be straightforward and warned of possible grid consequences.
Lindblom said, “If they want to just overnight switch us to solar, there’s a reliability issue, there’s a cost issue there, and we just can’t keep up,” adding, “We’d have blackouts.” Lindblom is part of the business-backed Arizonans for Responsible Growth slate, and the campaign has framed the board election as important to growth and power reliability in Arizona.
The nationalization of the election has also met resistance from some voters. Laura Kajfez, a 66-year-old Tempe retiree, said she found Turning Point’s involvement “very, very, very troublesome,” adding that “We don’t need that intervention in our local politics. We have enough problems as it is.”
Alabama’s contest has moved beyond individual seats to a larger fight over how utility regulation itself will be structured. In the heavily Republican state, anxiety about rising power bills is spilling into the statehouse and onto the campaign trail, fueling a push to reshape the Alabama Public Service Commission.
AP reported that state lawmakers voted this week to overhaul the commission, effectively shifting more authority to the governor. Supporters described the changes as a way to address affordability, and the legislation arrives ahead of the year’s elections, when some candidates are seeking to frame the races as referendums on electricity prices.
Former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, a Democratic candidate for Alabama governor, called the changes a “first-rate con job” on voters. Jones said Republicans in the Alabama Legislature sought to revamp the PSC because “after two wins in Georgia, they realize that maybe the people don’t like what’s going on with the PSC,” according to his comments posted on social media.
The legislation signed by Gov. Kay Ivey expands the three-member commission to seven elected members, with four new members initially appointed by the governor. AP said it also includes a retail base-rate restriction, forbidding utilities from raising retail base rates until 2029. Republican legislative leaders said the changes would be a significant step forward for consumer protection.
Ivey said the legislation was intended “to put a freeze on electric rates and to give the people of Alabama broader representation on the Public Service Commission,” and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger said in a joint statement that lawmakers “stood united to reform how utilities are regulated and demand an unprecedented amount of accountability for consumers across the state.”
With two of the current PSC seats up for election this year, Republican incumbents face primary challengers and Democratic opponents running on affordability messages. Democrats, in turn, have pointed to Georgia’s utility-regulator races as a model, with Tabitha Isner, vice chair of the Alabama Democratic Party, saying, “What happened in Georgia could happen in Alabama,” and that “the alarm bells are going off and so much money is being poured into maintaining the status quo.”