A Democrat led voting for three seats on the five-member Arizona Corporation Commission, trailed by two Republicans for the second and third spots on the panel that decides utility rates across the state.
If the results hold, which is still unclear, Democrats would gain a seat but would still fail to wrest majority control of the commission from Republicans who have dominated the panel since the mid-1990s.
With thousands of early and provisional ballots still to be counted statewide late Wednesday, Democrat Anna Tovar, mayor of Tolleson, led the polling over Tucson Republican Lea Marquez Peterson.
Marquez Peterson, who sought election after being appointed to fill a vacancy on the commission last year, was ahead of Scottsdale Republican Jim OβConnor, a retired businessman.
Democrat Bill Mundell, an attorney and former commission member, trailed OβConnor, followed closely by Republican Eric Sloan. Democrat Shea Stanfield was polling sixth behind Sloan.
The three newly elected commissioners will serve four-year terms and join Republicans Justin Olson and Democrat Sandra Kennedy on the ACC, which besides electric, gas and water utilities regulates corporations and pipeline and railroad safety in the state.
The new Corporation Commission will dictate the pace and scope of Arizonaβs move away from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy, as the first to implement a new set of rules intended to move Arizona away from fossil-fuel power generation to a cleaner energy future.
The three Democrats, who ran as βThe Solar Team,β have advocated for higher standards for renewable energy such as solar and wind.
The Republican candidates generally have opposed any mandates for renewable energy, though Marquez Peterson supported tentative new rules requiring utilities to move to carbon-free energy sources by 2050.
Last week, the current commission gave tentative approval to new rules requiring state-regulated utilities, including Tucson Electric Power Co. and Arizona Public Service Co., to get 100% of their power from carbon-free sources including nuclear power by 2050 β with interim carbon-emissions reductions of 50% by 2032 and 75% by 2040 β and to generate at least 50% of their power from renewable sources by 2035.
The new rules, expected to be finalized in the coming weeks, also would set new, more ambitious standards for energy-efficiency measures and energy storage and create a new process for resource planning and acquisition.
The new standards β which count power from APSβs Palo Verde nuclear plant as a carbon-free βclean energyβ source β replace the stateβs current renewable-energy standard, which requires utilities to get 15% of their power from renewables like solar and wind by 2025.
Once finalized, the rules will bring Arizona more in line with other states that have beefed up their clean-energy mandates since Arizona adopted its initial rules in 2006.
The new commission will also inherit pending requests for new rates filed by TEP, APS and Southwest Gas and continue to wrestle with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ratepayers, as well as potentially revisiting a move to a competitive retail electric market.
