Local opinion: Arizona pipeline approval locks in fossil fuel future

Instead of bravely leading Arizona into a clean-energy future, on May 8, Governor Hobbs dragged the state back into a pollution-laden past when she put her stamp of approval on the Desert Southwest Pipeline, a methane gas conduit that will stretch more than 500 miles from the Permian Basin through three states — Texas, New Mexico and Arizona — and cost more than $5.6 billion.

This pipeline will ensure that our utilities will export more of our ratepayer revenues from Arizona, but much worse, will lock in gas use for decades, as it takes more than 40 years for utilities to recover natural gas-fueled power plant capital investments, on which they receive 9.5% interest/profit.

A recent account in Inside Climate News found that methane emissions from oil and gas production facilities in the basin from May 2024 to June 2025 were four times higher than the U.S. EPA’s official estimates. According to a Stanford University report, the annual cost of these emissions is $10 billion when accounting for the harm to the economy and human well-being caused by adding this much heat-trapping methane to Earth’s atmosphere.

The Environmental Defense Fund finds that U.S. natural gas pipelines are annually leaking between 1.2 million and 2.6 million tons of methane. These leaks also pose safety risks because of the possibility of fires or explosions, with resultant significant harm to people and property, as well as increased property insurance rates.

Methane is a climate super-pollutant. Because it is 83 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after its release, it is the second-leading driver of climate change. Its emissions also pose serious public health risks, increase health care insurance rates and negatively affect agricultural production, escalating food costs.

Massive hyperscale data centers are driving the demand for increased energy production. According to the Arizona Corporation Commission, Arizona ranks in the top five nationwide in data center capacity. These centers are not yet required to provide their own energy generation, but the utilities are rushing full speed ahead to build uneconomical, water-guzzling, polluting gas plants to accommodate them.

Yet, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers by 2030, as Bill McKibben predicts, and by 2050, electricity demand for cooling is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the U.S., China, India, Germany and Japan today.

Cooling is not optional — it’s medicine. During heatwaves, cool air is as critical to the human body as water or food. But that demand for cooling will drive up energy use; thus, as the RMI experts point out, AC energy use and emissions must be reduced through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, better refrigerant management and scaling next-generation innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.

All this is possible — new heat pumps are far more efficient at cooling air than old AC units, and white roofs and shade trees can help.

Utilizing lower-, fixed- and decreasing-cost utility and ratepayer-funded solar energy and battery storage systems (BESS) closer to demand points has been proven to be the most economical way to move forward, following the lead of so many other states not blessed with as much solar irradiation.

Many solar-BESS system components are manufactured in Arizona, so increasing their deployment, rather than exporting revenues out of state, would stimulate and increase our local economy and decrease electricity rates for consumers. Arizona not only could provide the entire state’s electricity needs with clean energy but also could export it to other states.

Investor-owned for-profit utilities like TEP are dinosaurs dragging their claws on providing clean energy so they can continue to ensure increasing profits guaranteed by regulatory capture of the ACC, citing a need for an “all-of-the-above approach” to ensure dispatchable reliability.

Greenlighting this outrageously expensive, vulnerable, polluting methane gas pipeline will export ratepayer revenues, increase ratepayer costs and ensure continuing future rate increases to support expensive and price-volatile fossil fuel use to produce energy when we have the nation's most abundant source of FREE solar energy.