New Mexico’s Compressed 30-Day Session: Challenges, Outcomes, and the Practical Path Forward

New Mexico’s 30-day session is built for budgets and urgency, not energy policy. That reality shaped everything this year. Some of the Governor’s most ambitious energy and climate priorities ran into the Senate’s limits, and most proposals didn’t advance far enough to produce anything beyond session. At the same time, this session still surfaced and sharpened the core issues that will define the next round of debates: grid reliability, rate impacts, and how the state will plan for growing electricity demands from large loads. Those conversations didn’t translate into legislative action this year, but they did clarify issues and set up the next set of policy fights.

If you zoom out, the session reveals the underlying tensions: New Mexico is facing real pressure to try to grow its economy, protect affordability, and respond to climate impacts that people can feel. Decision-makers agree that those pressures are real, but there was little alignment this session on how to address these issues together. The interim is where the real work must happen.

Missed opportunities and unfinished work for reliability and affordability  

The core of Advanced Energy United’s work this session focused on modernizing the grid and lowering costs for New Mexicans.

The New Mexico GRID Act (HB 311) would have established a framework for virtual power plants (VPPs), requiring electric utilities to develop VPP programs with transparent, open-access tariffs, clear compensation guardrails, and protections for consumer choice.

Tens of thousands of New Mexicans are already investing in distributed energy resources (DERs) such as home batteries, smart thermostats, rooftop solar, and EV chargers. These resources can be pooled together to reduce or shift electricity use, or supply additional power, when demand is high. HB 311 would have created a structure to do this, reducing strain on the system and helping to avoid building expensive new infrastructure.

Without a clear VPP framework, New Mexico risks relying more heavily on costly, outdated infrastructure, rather than leveraging the flexible resources already in New Mexico homes and businesses to support a more reliable and affordable grid.

Why this bill, and many others, stalled  

The session’s political and structural pressures help explain why many bills did not advance to the Governor’s desk.

The failure of SB 18, the Clear Horizons Act, underscored how quickly ambitious proposals can be reframed as “cost risks” in such a short session. SB 18 would have codified statewide emissions targets into law. It failed on the Senate floor, with seven Democrats joining Republicans to vote it down stating that it was an “impossible mandate” and a direct threat to New Mexico’s economy.

At the same time, New Mexico’s rapidly growing electricity demand, driven by data centers and other large electricity users, is creating urgency about where power will come from, how quickly it can be delivered, and who pays when new infrastructure gets built. SB 235, the Microgrid Oversight Act, highlighted how contentious “growth pays for growth” questions can get and why guardrails around large-load self-supply proposals matter. While we did not support SB 235 as drafted, the debate it triggered still surfaced a real underlying challenge for state lawmakers: managing large load growth without shifting costs or risks onto other customers.

The failure of these bills creates a new challenge for New Mexico lawmakers. The state must find practical solutions that protect energy reliability and affordability while avoiding long-term costs.

The work ahead 

New Mexico’s 30-day session highlighted both the opportunities and constraints of a compressed legislative calendar, but the challenges this legislative session faced are not going away.  

This next interim session is where things must get done. In the coming months, our focus will be on advancing practical solutions that leverage lower-cost consumer technologies to support the grid and reduce costs, as well as examining how homes and businesses can reduce peak demand and lower costs through smarter building electrification and load management strategies. HB 311 provides a good starting point for this work, even if it didn’t fully advance this session.  

New Mexicans deserve a grid strategy that’s built around cost control and reliability first, using flexibility and smarter planning to avoid overbuilding the most expensive options. We will continue working with policymakers, tighten our coalition, sharpen the proof points, and make sure the next run is built for the actual rules of the game in Santa Fe.