The 'Darth Vader' of Electric Utilities
A Matter of Degrees
Dr. Leah Stokes, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson
4.8 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2023
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Electric utilities are falling short on climate action. To explain why, we're bringing back our season one finale. This episode features former utilities regulator Kris Mayes, who recently won a nail-biting election to become the second woman and first openly LGBTQ attorney general of Arizona. Go, Kris!
Since season one, Leah has been busy investigating utilities' past and present role spreading climate denial, doubt, and delay. You can read the paper she co-wrote on the topic last fall, and discover the dirty truth about your electric utility and their climate plans in the report she released with Sierra Club. Spoiler alert, Arizona Public Service is one of the top offenders. We can't wait to share the whole sordid tale with you one more time…
In 2013, a series of attack ads blitzed television sets across Arizona. They warned of a dire threat to senior citizens. Who was the villain? Solar energy.
These ads came from front groups funded by Arizona Public Service, the state's largest utility. It was part of a years-long fight against rooftop solar that turned ugly.
"I mean, for Star Wars fans, APS became the Darth Vader of electric utilities in America. I mean, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a utility that behaved as badly as APS did in the last decade," explains former regulator Kris Mayes.
But APS isn't alone. It's a prime example of how monopoly utilities abuse their power to influence regulatory decisions and slow clean-energy progress.
What happens if your electric utility starts doing things you don't agree with? What if they start attacking solar and proposing to build more and more fossil gas plants? What if they actively resist clean energy progress?
Well, you don't get a choice. You have to buy electricity, and you have to buy it from them. As a customer you're funding that.
In this episode, we'll detail how it happened in Arizona – and how public pressure forced APS to come clean.
Featured in this episode: Ryan Randazzo, Kris Mayes, David Pomerantz.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today we're sharing an episode that originally aired on our very first season. |
| 0:06.5 | It's all about how electric utilities abuse their monopoly power to attack renewable energy, |
| 0:11.8 | influence regulations, and slow down climate action. |
| 0:15.2 | And, you know, it's kind of a topic I'm obsessed with. |
| 0:17.7 | I think I kind of wrote a book about it. |
| 0:19.9 | I'm pretty sure you did. This particular |
| 0:24.3 | story of the many that Leah is obsessed with, this one is set in Arizona. And it follows the state's |
| 0:32.1 | biggest electric utility, Arizona Public Service, in a really rather ugly fight against rooftop solar. |
| 0:40.3 | In this episode, we talked with lawyer and former corporate commissioner Chris Mays. |
| 0:45.3 | Chris used to serve as one of five elected officials in charge of overseeing utilities in Arizona. |
| 0:51.3 | As a commissioner, she helped write Arizona's renewable energy standard, |
| 0:55.6 | which was a really big climate win at that time. When we interviewed her about Arizona Public |
| 1:00.5 | Service, she called them the Darth Vader of electric utilities. Dun, dun, da. I'm sure there's |
| 1:08.6 | like a more Star Warsy noise to make in that moment. But I don't know, if you're the Darth Vader of electric utilities, I think that's basically as bad as it gets. And we loved that burn so much that it became the title of the episode. So we're bringing back a classic because it really could not be more timely now. In the 22 |
| 1:30.4 | midterm elections just this last fall, Chris Mays ran for Attorney General of the state of |
| 1:35.9 | Arizona. And I got to say, I watched this race very closely. You know, I supported Chris. I gave |
| 1:41.3 | money. I told other people to support her. I was super excited. And then when |
| 1:45.8 | the election happened, it was a total nail biter. I was like refreshing the page, constantly trying |
| 1:51.1 | to figure out who won. It went up and down and sideways. And it actually went into a recount in |
| 1:56.7 | December of 2022. And finally, she won. She won by just 280 votes. It was one of the tightest |
| 2:05.0 | races in Arizona history. See what we're saying in the What Can I Do series? Voting is a piece of |
| 2:12.3 | the puzzle. 280 votes. That's quite amazing at a statewide level. And I think Chris's victory really goes to show how powerful just a handful of votes can be, especially when we're talking about the local and state levels. |
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