Advanced Energy Holds the Line at the Arizona Legislature
Arizona’s 2026 session closed the same way previous Arizona sessions have ended in recent years: a slow budget slog, rumors that a “deal is close,” and a final late-session scramble where everyone waits anxiously to see what gets jammed into the final vehicles.
But here’s the bottom line: most of the anti-advanced energy bills this session didn’t make it through, and that matters. Preventing a loss isn’t glamorous, and nobody holds a ceremony for a bill that didn’t pass. But it matters because all of those negative bills, added together, could have been death by a thousand cuts for advanced energy projects. They would have created more points in the process where projects could be vetoed. Added uncertainty. Created higher financing costs and longer timelines. And all of those challenges would make the projects that do continue slower and more expensive, which would eventually show up on customer bills.
This year’s session generated plenty of noise, and not a lot of actual changes. Lawmakers introduced well over a thousand bills, but only a small fraction are expected to be signed into law, continuing the historically low conversion rates we’ve seen since 2023 under a divided government. Lots of bills simply ran out of runway, but they weren’t defeated by accident. It took advocacy, pressure, and attention to the places where “dead” bills can come back.
Legislative defense, executed well
Going in, we anticipated that we would be spending a lot of our time on defense. Not because we don’t have proactive policies we’d like to move (we do), but because the political environment in the state is challenging and the legislature keeps producing bills that would make it slower, riskier, and more expensive to build or use advanced energy. Frankly, we’d prefer it if Arizona energy policy were more boring: predictable rules, clear timelines, competitive markets, and fewer ways to slow-walk projects.
Most of the bills we had to defend against fell into a few clear lanes. There were siting and transmission bills that expanded subjective criteria like “character,” broadened the scope of review, or tried to make permit approvals hinge on contract timing instead of system need and public interest. There were also government choke-point bills that didn’t ban wind or solar outright but did look to create procedural hurdles like unanimity requirements or de facto district vetoes. A third lane went after state trust land, either by tightening sub-lease rules and creating new transaction friction, or by politicizing land planning tools like solar suitability mapping. And finally, a subset of bills aimed straight at project economics through tax and valuation changes, or by tilting the playing field toward certain ownership models or exclusive contracting.
These bills were the backbone of an agenda that was designed to frustrate advanced energy development, but they didn’t become law, largely because the bills either never got a hearing in the Senate or they ran out of runway in the chaos of the final days of session.
How did we do it? We stayed in direct contact with sponsoring legislators and key committee members, engaging them when they were open to it and pushing for concessions where it made sense, while still treating most of the package as veto-worthy if it advanced.
We also ran an upstream committee strategy. That meant targeted engagement with the chair of the Senate Natural Resources, Energy and Water Committee and one persistent, concrete ask: do not give this package oxygen. Stopping bad bills from getting hearings is often more important than winning a debate after a bill has already built momentum.
At the same time, we coordinated closely with the Governor’s office so decision makers in the administration understood early on what these bills would do in practice and could be prepared to veto if needed. We also coordinated tightly with both in-state and national partners, where that alignment was strategically useful. As the session continued, that coordination expanded to a broader coalition push to hold the line against a potential repeal of the state’s clean energy tax credits in the budget negotiations.
Finally, we stayed disciplined throughout the entire session. Even when bills looked dead, we treated them as capable of coming back through amendments, budget language, or late vehicles, and we kept the pressure on until sine die.
What was at stake: a panoply of anti-advanced energy legislation
Siting and permitting restrictions: HB 2267 would have treated wind and solar projects within four miles of residences as a public nuisance, creating a practical siting ban plus an automatic litigation trigger. HB 2330 would have added “character of the area” into line siting review, an undefined standard that invites disputes and makes outcomes less predictable. HB 2340 and HB 2341 would have expanded and distorted the siting process. One would have broadened transmission siting review by tying it to connected generation, turning line siting cases into two fights instead of one. The other would have tried to make siting hinge on whether a project had signed long‑term offtakers, despite the reality that contracts often come after permitting and interconnection certainty. And HB 2457 would have created a special fast lane for certain co-located projects by weakening the Certificate of Environmental Compatibility pathway, inviting backlash and litigation later.
New veto points: HB 2337 and HB 2338 would have raised voting thresholds and added procedural traps for county approvals, effectively creating new local veto points for wind and solar, especially in rural Arizona. HB 2912 would have hard‑wired IRP and procurement rules into statute, added procedural choke points, and biased resource evaluation through a mandated Ratepayer Impact Measure framework.
State lands: HB 2268 would have tightened state trust land subleases and approvals, adding friction and rigidity to state‑land development structures and transactions. HB 2975 would have targeted the State Land Department’s solar suitability mapping, replacing a data-driven planning tool with politics and delay.
Project financing and costs: HB 2134 would have paired sweeping procurement restrictions with an Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) “prohibited technologies” list that would have disrupted inverter, storage, meter, and controls supply chains. Lastly, HB 2918 would have rewritten how renewable energy and storage equipment is valued for property taxes, a technical change with real consequences for project economics and investment certainty.
The bottom line
Arizona’s energy economy–and in fact, the entire state’s economy–depends on predictable rules and timely pathways to build energy infrastructure. This session was a reminder that the biggest threats rarely come as a single headline bill; they come as a pile of smaller changes that all add up to make projects slower and more expensive.
The good news is that this year’s agenda didn’t become law because we showed up and stayed engaged until the very end. Advanced Energy United worked to track all potential bill vehicles, pressed to keep bad bills off committee agendas, and leveraged hard-earned relationships in the legislature, in the Governor’s office, and with coalition partners to make sure veto threats stayed intact. We engaged deeply on the ground both during session and outside of session, protecting the policy conditions that let Arizona keep attracting investment and building infrastructure reliably, affordably, and at the pace the state’s growing economy requires.