From the Campaign Trail to the Statehouse: Engaging Governors on Advanced Energy

With this year’s gubernatorial elections around the corner, there is a critical opportunity to ensure both current and future governors recognize advanced energy technologies as readily available and deployable solutions to meet growing energy demands, and how the right state policies can help bring those solutions to market faster.

This opportunity is at the core of Advanced Energy United’s ongoing gubernatorial engagement work, which has been a central part of our organization’s mission for nearly a decade. Our team has met with gubernatorial candidates across the country, both during the primaries and throughout the general election season, to introduce them to the concepts outlined in our advocacy playbook and to demonstrate how policy solutions can harness the power of our companies to: 

• Build large-scale energy infrastructure faster  
• Deploy and leverage grid-edge solutions 
• Improve state and utility investments toward advanced energy solutions 

In our recent webinar, “Working with Current and Future Governors to Deliver Affordable Energy,” we explored the importance of this engagement, shared takeaways from our most recent engagements in New Jersey and Virginia during the 2025 election cycle, and discussed how affordability is reshaping energy conversations in the states for both governors and advanced energy businesses. 

The Importance of Early Engagement 

Gubernatorial campaigns provide an important window to educate candidates and their teams about the energy challenges they will inherit and, just as importantly, the solutions available to address them. Those early conversations can help inform an administration’s priorities before the first legislative session, executive order, or agency appointment. 

As United Managing Director Morgan Pinnell emphasized on our webinar, United saw the value of this approach firsthand during the 2025 election cycle in New Jersey and Virginia, where energy affordability, reliability, and the need for readily available solutions featured prominently in the gubernatorial campaigns. 

In New Jersey, United began engaging candidates early around the potential for virtual power plants (VPPs) to help address affordability and reliability. Through direct candidate engagement, policy education, and conversations with campaign teams, we worked to build familiarity with VPPs and the role they could play in getting more out of the state’s existing energy resources. That early engagement continued beyond Election Day. United’s Katie Mettle was appointed to be a part of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s energy transition team, and on her first day in office, the new administration took action, calling for the development of a statewide VPP program. 

Our work in Virginia similarly focused on helping candidates and their teams understand the energy challenges facing the Commonwealth and the advanced energy solutions available to address rising demand, affordability, and reliability. 

These experiences reinforced an important lesson: gubernatorial engagement does not begin or end with an election. United continues working with state leaders in both New Jersey and Virginia to help translate campaign priorities into durable policies that can deliver results for consumers and the grid.

Building on Our Work in the 2026 Election Cycle 

The 2026 election cycle presents a timely moment to build on our successes from 2025 as gubernatorial races take shape across the country. 

Notably, energy affordability is playing an even more prominent role in these conversations than in previous election cycles. Energy is one of the most complex and highly regulated sectors of the economy, yet candidates are hearing directly from constituents that household costs are rising and utility bills are becoming harder to manage. At the same time, states need solutions that can help ease cost pressures while maintaining grid reliability and supporting economic growth. 

Our role is to connect those concerns with practical solutions. 

United is supporting those conversations through direct meetings with candidates and campaign teams, policy memos, roundtables, and opportunities to connect campaigns with advanced energy companies and experts. We are pairing that engagement with polling and analysis that can give state leaders a clearer picture of the energy landscape and the priorities of the people they hope to represent. 

That research can also help ground conversations with candidates in what voters are experiencing and what they want from their next governor. For example, we recently commissioned a survey with national public opinion research firm Bold Decision that found a supermajority of likely California voters view clean energy as an affordable approach to meeting the state’s energy needs. The findings are catching the attention of decision-makers and gubernatorial candidates and send a clear message: Californians want the state to do more to lower energy bills, build clean energy, and modernize the grid. 

Together, these efforts do more than simply put advanced energy on a candidate’s agenda. They demonstrate how these technologies address the challenges the governor will be responsible for tackling from their first day in office, while providing a clearer understanding of the policy choices that can make those solutions easier to deploy. 

Our members are seeing the value of that approach. As Gabriela Olmedo of United Leader-level member EnergyHub shared during the webinar, United “opens the door so we, the membership, can deliver the message on the solutions” and “articulate how we drive better grid outcomes and lower bills.”

Providing State Roadmaps for Governors 

Identifying solutions is only the first step. Governors also need a path for putting them into practice.  

We recognize there is no national template for accomplishing this work. States have different market structures, energy resources, regulatory frameworks, economic needs, and political environments. With that in mind, our State Policy Roadmaps provide tailored recommendations for incoming and incumbent governors and other decision-makers in a dozen states, focused on addressing affordability, reliability, growing electricity demand, and economic development. 

While the recommendations reflect the unique needs of each state, they are grounded in three priorities in our playbook that guide United’s state advocacy work across the country: 

• Build It: Remove barriers to building and connecting the generation, storage, transmission, and other large-scale energy infrastructure that states need to meet growing demand. 

• Make It Flexible: Get more out of the grid and resources already deployed by expanding the use of grid-edge solutions such as virtual power plants, distributed energy resources, battery storage, advanced transmission technologies, and other technologies that enable grid flexibility. 

• Make It Affordable: Improve planning and investment decisions so states can meet their energy needs while protecting consumers from unnecessary costs. Together, these priorities provide a framework for state leaders to tackle today’s energy challenges while laying the groundwork for a more affordable, reliable, and flexible energy system. 

At United, we’ll continue working with current and future governors to connect the energy challenges they face with proven, readily available technologies, and the state policies needed to put them to work. 

Access our State Policy Roadmaps to see our recommendations for governors and state decision-makers across the country. 

Watch our “Working with Current and Future Governors to Deliver Affordable Energy” webinar to hear more about how United is engaging state leaders on energy affordability.