Governor Hobbs Signs Executive Order to Lower Arizona’s Energy Costs

On September 15, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs signed Executive Order 2025-13, Removing Barriers to Delivering Affordable Energy for Arizona, to streamline procedures and deliver lower energy costs for Arizonans. The Executive Order directs various Arizona state agencies to identify opportunities and strategies to streamline energy project deployment, helping to make the state more energy affordable, resilient, and robust.

As part of the Executive Order, the Arizona Governor's Office of Resiliency, the State Energy Office, will establish and lead the Arizona Energy Promise Task Force to develop a strategic policy framework to meet energy demand from data centers and other large customers while minimizing the impacts to ratepayers and Arizona's economic competitive advantage. The task force will also produce a plan to position Arizona to take advantage of emerging energy technologies like advanced nuclear and geothermal, including helping projects begin development as soon as possible to take advantage of tax credits. The taskforce will also develop a generation and transmission corridor strategy that identifies opportunities to cut red tape related to the use of state lands to streamline the development of generation and transmission projects. The Executive Order directs the Office of Resiliency to work with the Residential Utility Consumer Office and Department of Economic Security to develop a framework to deliver more accessible energy affordability programs and with the Office of Tribal Relations to convene Tribes to identify opportunities to bolster Tribal energy sovereignty and economic development. Finally, the Executive Order directs all state agencies to develop plans by 2027 to reduce their energy consumption by five percent.

U.S. State Energy Program (SEP) funds will be critical to this process: the Executive Order explicitly directs the Office of Resiliency to use SEP funds to support a full-time staff person at the Arizona State Land Department to complete work related to energy infrastructure projects. All reports generated by the Office of Resiliency are due to the Governor no later than March 1, 2026. The Governor anticipates that the work done through this Executive Order will spur energy development in the state while ensuring that the state retains its economic competitiveness and keeps utility rates for customers low. For more information, please contact Adrianna Amato with the Office of Resiliency at [email protected].