Democrats Win Unified Control of Five State Governments, Likely a Sixth, and a Georgia Regulator Majority

Decisions on solar plants, batteries and climate targets now rest with state administrations. Democrats took both legislative chambers together with the governor’s seat in several states at once, and bills that sat untouched for years can be put to a vote again: barring municipalities from imposing blanket prohibitions on renewable projects, setting connection rules for grid-scale batteries, and shielding state decarbonisation goals from political reversal.

Unified control went to the party in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nevada, with Arizona very likely to join that group, Canary Media reports. The new governing arrangements take effect in January. Pennsylvania has not seen such an arrangement in more than three decades, and bills returning to its agenda would let residents subscribe to nearby solar arrays, open a path for grid battery storage and curb the authority of municipalities to ban new installations outright. In Michigan the outcome locks in the state’s 2040 target of 100% clean energy, which opponents tried to repeal earlier this year.

Direct oversight of energy companies shifted as well. Voters in Georgia elected Shelia Edwards to the Public Service Commission and returned Peter Hubbard to it, producing a 3:2 Democratic edge. The Solar Energy Industries Association spent money promoting those candidates, and Georgia became the only state where the energy regulator is chosen at the ballot box and has now passed into Democratic hands. In Texas, Democrat Jon Rosenthal won a seat on the Railroad Commission, the regulator for oil and gas production in Texas.

Voters settled local energy rules separately. In Eugene, Oregon, residents backed a new levy on corporations to finance a climate-project fund, while Michigan approved a ban on circumventing existing campaign-finance rules through contributions to political action committees. In Colorado, preliminary returns show the failure of an attempt to write a right to natural gas into the state constitution, and in California early counts point to rejection of a measure that would have accelerated environmental review for certain infrastructure.