An affordable energy roadmap for California’s next governor

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OPINION — The end of the 2025-26 legislative session left many questions unanswered about how to lower electricity costs, mitigate wildfires and ensure financially healthy utilities. But it also produced meaningful progress on energy affordability. California’s next governor will need an ambitious vision to build on that progress and address the challenges that remain. 

Recent polling shows that a supermajority of likely California voters view clean energy, like renewables and storage, as an affordable way to meet the state’s energy needs. Likely voters also support state action to expand clean energy, from large-scale projects to smart home energy devices, and modernize the grid. 

The urgency is real. More than one in five California households are behind on their utility bills with 51% of Californians identifying it as a major source of anxiety. Prices are skyrocketing because of unaddressed root issues: outdated utility financing models, wildfire mitigation costs, rising energy demand, interconnection delays and supply chain constraints.

A new slate of leadership in Sacramento presents a crucial opportunity to restructure electricity policy around three principles: build it, make it flexible and make it affordable.

California’s electricity demand is growing, but it’s taking too long to build and connect new sources of power to the grid to keep up. Delays in connecting new projects raise costs for developers, which end up getting passed on to customers and make it harder to move electricity where it’s needed most. The next governor should cut red tape to speed up project development, and work with neighboring states to build more high-voltage transmission. Voters recognize the need: 80% support expanding and modernizing energy generation and transmission infrastructure.

Californians already have millions of smart thermostats, rooftop solar and batteries, and other technologies in their homes and businesses, and with gas prices above $6 a gallon, more Californians are also switching to EVs. These technologies make the grid flexible by reducing demand when electricity use is highest, allowing Californians to not only lower their individual utility bills, but lower costs for all energy users. 87% of voters want the state to make these technologies easier to buy and install because they understand a flexible grid can help lower energy costs, but only a fraction of these technologies are being used to support the grid today.

California has already shown what this can look like through the Demand Side Grid Support (DSGS) program, which has helped us avoid Flex Alerts and blackouts these past few summers. But this past session, Gov. Gavin Newsom blocked an effort to keep this grid-saving, customer-powered, clean reliability program funded through next year. The incoming governor must do better by restoring funding for DSGS and incorporating these technologies into the state’s energy reservoir. 

While the outcome of DSGS was disappointing, the Governor took an important step forward this year by putting in place a framework for customer-owned resources to compete in the state’s wholesale market by signing Senate Bill 913. The next governor needs to prioritize this more than two-year effort by aligning DSGS funding to coincide with the full implementation of this framework.

Building strategically and making the grid more flexible can help lower costs, but right now, utilities have competing interests between finding ways to lower costs and investing in outdated, in some cases unnecessary, infrastructure. The future governor can change that by scrutinizing utility spending, ensuring ratepayer investments benefit all customers, and reforming regulatory processes to focus on modernizing the grid, not just profiting off of it. There is no silver bullet for lowering electricity bills, and California will need to tackle this from multiple angles. 

Clean energy solutions are economic solutions; they create jobs, cut costs, strengthen communities and provide the foundation for statewide prosperity. 

Across the country, states across the ideological spectrum are expanding energy choice, investing in modern energy solutions that can be built faster, with less red tape and at lower cost. California has already shown it can make progress when it embraces new approaches.  The next governor should build on that momentum — not shy away from the opportunities to make better use of the resources Californians already have to make electricity more affordable and continue leading the nation on homegrown clean energy. 

Brandon Garcia is the California Director at Advanced Energy United.