Windmills in Harlowton, Montana. David Becker/ZUMA

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some of the votes Americans cast on Tuesday that may have mattered most for the climate were quite a bit down-ballot from the presidential ticket: A handful of states held elections for the commissions that regulate utilities, and thereby exercise direct control over what sort of energy mix will fuel the coming years’ expected growth in electricity demand. In three closely watched races around the country—the utility commissions in Arizona, Montana, and Louisiana—Republican candidates either won or are in the lead. While they generally pitched themselves to voters as market-friendly, favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, clean energy advocates interviewed by Grist cast these candidates as deferential to the power companies they aspired to regulate.

Arizona is, in a word, sunny. Its geography makes it “the famously obvious place to build solar,” said Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to get clean energy advocates elected. But its utilities have built just a sliver of the potential solar energy that there is room for in the state—and the Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities, is partly to blame for that. That commission’s most recent goal for renewable energy, set in 2007, was an unambitious 15 percent to be reached by 2025. “Their goals are worse than where Texas currently is and where Iowa currently is on clean energy,” Spears said. What’s more, the current slate of commissioners is in the process of considering whether to ditch that goal altogether.

Louisiana’s Public Service Commission........

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