Local opinion: ACC needs to learn from 2025 elections

Recent election results in multiple states all had a common theme: candidates running on lowering high electric bills caused by the massive buildout of data centers won their races, those who sided with Big Tech and ignored the affordability crisis lost.

It’s a lesson the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) should take note of as they consider the Energy Service Agreement (ESA) for Tucson Electric Power (TEP) to provide nearly 300MW of power to Amazon’s widely opposed Project Blue data center.

High energy bills were a key issue in the governors’ races in both New Jersey and Virginia, and in Georgia, where two Democrats trounced incumbent Republicans for the Georgia Public Service Commission, their equivalent of our ACC which regulates electric utilities.

Georgia’s PSC has approved six rate increases for corporate utility Georgia Power in the last two years and the region has become a hotspot for data centers, sending electricity demand and bills skyrocketing. Like Georgia’s PSC, the ACC is elected by the people. But based on their decisions, the ACC seems to mostly serve for-profit utilities and big corporations.

The ACC has rubber-stamped TEP rate hike requests that have raised rates as fast in the past four years as they had in the decade from 2010 to 2020. And the same day that three of our Pima County Board of Supervisors sold us out by selling the land for Project Blue, TEP filed for another 14% rate hike.

Recently on the Buckmaster Show, the only ACC member from Tucson, Lea Márquez Peterson, said it is her job to balance the interests of the people and big power users. Why should a multibillion-dollar corporation like Amazon and the people of Tucson get equal consideration? Jeff Bezos isn’t struggling to keep his mansions cool, but it’s getting harder and harder for working class people to afford TEP bills in the summer here when air conditioning is necessary to survive.

Beale Infrastructure, the developers of Project Blue, recently announced that the data center will get 100% renewable energy and they will pay the cost. But why should we trust a Beale press release?

Beale lied to the people of Pima County when they said they would not pursue Project Blue if the City of Tucson did not annex the land. There is nothing in the ESA that protects TEP customers from rate hikes. There is nothing in the ESA that guarantees Project Blue will be matched with 100% renewable energy. All we have is Beale’s word and we know how much that is worth.

We need the ACC to stand with the people of Tucson, not Big Tech and for-profit utilities that extract wealth from our communities and are making Tucson unlivable. The No Desert Data Center Coalition plans to attend the next ACC meeting and let them know that if they don’t, they’ll lose their jobs just like the Georgia PSC members.

It’s a lesson Democratic supervisors Matt Heinz and Rex Scott also need to learn as they continue to trust Beale and TEP press releases, and not the hundreds of community members who have attended meetings asking them not to close the land sale.

Tucson’s powerful resistance to Amazon’s Project has made national news and inspired communities all across the country not to accept harmful data centers as inevitable. But our fight is not over yet. If you don’t want your TEP bills to skyrocket to pay for Amazon’s energy, join us at the ACC meeting on Wednesday, November 19 at 9 a.m. in Phoenix.