> Republicans expanded their majority on the utility commission to 4-1 in 2022 and have taken steps since then to reverse clean energy mandates. Most recently, the panel voted 4-1 to sunset rules that required regulated utilities to set energy efficiency requirements and get 15 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2025.
> This story is also a good illustration of why local government matters. National races get most of the media attention, but your personal day-to-day is more affected by your local government.
Arizona is getting what it voted for. At the generation capacity amounts needed to replace fossil generation (a handful of GWs, 15k-20k acres of leased land assuming ~4.5k-5k acres per GW of solar capacity) [3], this is simply a lack of desire and will. Someone else in the thread mentioned peaker plants; utility scale batteries are cheaper than peakers in most (but not all) cases [4] [5].
Feelings on this topic are warranted, climate change and all that jazz (parts of India are hitting 52C/126F today). With that said, success is inevitable based on current trajectories, but very unpleasant there will be substantial unnecessary effort to get there. Humans gonna human, keep on grinding.
Exactly. It's one thing to have objections to some climate policy, it's another to explicitly try to block future projects. God forbid we actually learn something and change our behavior in the future.
> Republicans expanded their majority on the utility commission to 4-1 in 2022 and have taken steps since then to reverse clean energy mandates. Most recently, the panel voted 4-1 to sunset rules that required regulated utilities to set energy efficiency requirements and get 15 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2025.
> This story is also a good illustration of why local government matters. National races get most of the media attention, but your personal day-to-day is more affected by your local government.
Arizona is getting what it voted for. At the generation capacity amounts needed to replace fossil generation (a handful of GWs, 15k-20k acres of leased land assuming ~4.5k-5k acres per GW of solar capacity) [3], this is simply a lack of desire and will. Someone else in the thread mentioned peaker plants; utility scale batteries are cheaper than peakers in most (but not all) cases [4] [5].
[1] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2024/02/12...
[2] https://www.eenews.net/articles/can-arizona-revive-its-bipar...
[3] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-SW-AZPS?wind=false&s...
[4] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/12/battery-storage-syste...
[5] https://www.cesa.org/replacing-fossil-fueled-peaker-power-pl...