Inside Arizona's Solar Policy Battleground: A Conversation With AriSEIA Executive Director Autumn Johnson

The Next Installment in Our Brighter Future Interview Series

Arizona has emerged as one of the country's most closely watched solar markets, not only for its rapid growth but for the intensity of the policy battles shaping its future. From contested rate cases and Corporation Commission rulemakings to legislative and local ordinance disputes, the state has become a proving ground for how solar, storage, and grid policy get decided.

At the center of much of that work is the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association (AriSEIA), a statewide nonprofit trade association founded in 1991 and a state affiliate of the national Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). AriSEIA is unusual among trade groups in that it works simultaneously through regulatory and legislative channels, advocating at every level of government, from the Arizona Corporation Commission to the state legislature to city councils and county boards. It also represents the industry at every scale, from residential rooftop installers to companies operating virtual power plants nationally to large commercial and industrial developers to utility scale projects.

“We're unique in that we do all scales of renewables, everything from a local rooftop installer to companies doing VPPs [Virtual Power Plants] nationally to C&I developers, and we're one of the few organizations doing both regulatory and legislative work simultaneously, at every level of government in the state,” says AriSEIA Executive Director Autumn Johnson.

Solaris Energy has been an AriSEIA member for several years, supporting its events, conferences, and policy working groups while developing distributed generation for commercial & industrial applications, community solar, and utility-scale projects across Arizona. As Solaris continues to grow its footprint in the state, we spoke with Autumn for the second installment of our Brighter Future Interview Series (read the first interview with CALSSA's Brad Heavner here). Autumn covers where Arizona's solar market stands today, the regulatory and legislative contests shaping its trajectory, the relationships between data centers and solar, and why industry voices like Solaris's matter to make progress in the years ahead.

What is AriSEIA currently focused on?

Right now, we're very active in the Arizona Public Service (APS) and Tucson Electric Power (TEP) rate cases; we're an intervenor in both. We also just won a big appeal in APS's last rate case: the Arizona Court of Appeals invalidated the grid access charge imposed on residential solar customers for the past couple of years. We have a separate appeal pending in the Sulfur Springs rate case on a net-metering issue specific to commercial and industrial (C&I) customers and solar developers.

We're also engaged in a couple of rulemakings at the Corporation Commission, one on line siting and one on the practices and procedures of the Commission itself. We're watching two proposed repeals closely: the energy-efficiency rule and the Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST). On the legislative side, we just wrapped the session, where we focused on pushing automated permitting and virtual inspection for residential rooftop solar and updated consumer protections for rooftop solar that also cleaned up outdated statutory language. We also fought off a wave of bills this session, including attempts to classify renewables as a nuisance, a proposed moratorium on renewables on state lands, tax increases targeting solar at every scale, and a bill that would have required 85% of utility generation to come from fossil fuel resources. And during budget negotiations, we worked to ensure a Republican effort to repeal longstanding solar tax credits, ones actually passed by Republicans years ago, didn't make it into the final budget.

We also have a robust consumer protection program and are actively engaged in multiple local ordinances.

How is Arizona progressing its solar development, especially as we move post-Investment Tax Credit (ITC)?

The national Solar Energy Industries Association maintains a quarterly solar census, and Arizona typically ranks third or fourth in the country for total installed solar capacity, much of which is driven by utility-scale development. We also get data from a company called Ohm Analytics every month or two that tracks actual installations based on permits pulled, for both residential and C&I. Those numbers are down dramatically right now.

Whether that trend continues is hard to say because so many factors are at play.

Renewables have become tangled up in culture-war politics in a way that doesn't really make sense to me. Everybody needs electricity, regardless of their personal beliefs.

It's critical infrastructure, not a values-based decision. Beyond that, there are trade policies, turbine delays, natural gas pipeline capacity constraints, and shifting timelines for various tax credits. In 2026, we will probably get a real read on the ITC's impact, and I don't think we know yet what the Treasury guidance around the Production Tax Credit (PTC) phase-down will mean in practice.

On top of that, there are real headwinds specific to Arizona: utilities looking to end net metering for C&I customers, continued cuts to the residential export rate, and utilities trying to impose fees specifically on solar customers. All of that affects the economics, and economics drive adoption. On the other hand, utilities keep raising their base rates, which makes solar more attractive by comparison.

At the end of the day, I think people still want to install solar. It makes sense to them to have more control over their generation, to think about where their power comes from, and to have some resiliency with a battery. But how quickly that adoption happens will continue to be shaped by all of these policy inputs. And we haven't even touched on inflation and interest rates, which directly affect the financing side of these projects.

What is your and AriSEIA’s current sentiment around data centers and solar?

I think we have a complex relationship with this topic, and my take here is nuanced. There's an argument that data centers are good for renewables: Some data center companies are actively installing renewable generation, and some have clean energy goals that are driving real adoption. There's also an argument on the other side that data center load growth is a real factor behind the wave of new gas plants being proposed right now and part of the push to keep coal plants online. I think there's probably truth to both. What I do know is that more demand leads to more generation, and that's an opportunity for our members to supply some of it.

What I find genuinely interesting is the innovation happening around "bring your own power." That's actually an active topic in the APS rate case right now, with real conversations about front-of-the-meter arrangements and sleeving agreements. There's also a broader conversation happening around virtual power plants that I think is worth having, and virtual net metering: the ability for large sites with multiple buildings and multiple meters, but common ownership, to combine solar generation across those meters onto one bill.

At the same time, I think data centers are running into the same NIMBY resistance that renewables have dealt with for years. There's an inherent hypocrisy in wanting the services but not the infrastructure that makes them possible, and I think that same dynamic shows up in the opposition to renewables, too. It raises a fair policy question: Is it good public policy to block an entire land use just because it's unpopular at the moment?

What are your goals as the current Executive Director for the future of the organization?

This is an election year, so we try not to get too far ahead of ourselves about what's possible next year versus what's possible right now.

That said, looking at where things stand today: There was a significant election for the Salt River Project board this year, and there's now a clean-energy majority. The board president himself develops renewable projects on his own land. That's a meaningful shift in the landscape we're working in.

Litigation is becoming an increasingly important tool for us in fighting bad decisions from the Arizona Corporation Commission. The governor's office and attorney general have been active allies over the last four years; the attorney general's office has intervened in cases and pushed back on rules they viewed as harmful.

At the local level, it's a harder fight, because so much of the NIMBY opposition isn't policy-oriented; it's just opposition. So we've been doing more economic impact studies on the benefits of renewables, and leaning on arguments around private property rights, advocating that city councils, counties, and boards of supervisors retain discretion to evaluate individual projects on their merits, rather than tying their own hands with blanket moratoriums.

And when it comes to batteries, a big part of our focus is just making sure the right people are at the table: the technical experts who understand battery safety, siting, and how the industry is evolving, so that policy decisions are grounded in that expertise rather than made without it.

How do organizations like Solaris fit into your vision for the future of solar in Arizona?

First, our members, including Solaris, are critical because they fund the organization through membership dues and event sponsorships.

Second, we rely on our members for technical feedback. When we need input on ordinances, legislation, rate cases, or rulemaking dockets, I'll send out an action alert, and our C&I members in particular have given us a lot of help on interconnection issues. I need our members to tell me when a demand charge is too high, for example, or when we should be pushing for volumetric charges instead, or when something in a rate case proposal doesn't make sense.

Members also show up when we need direct participation: action alerts asking people to call in, submit a letter, or get involved in a campaign. Elections matter, too. We've done lobby days where we need members there talking to their elected officials directly, explaining how policy affects their business, how many people they employ, and what kind of revenue or tax base their projects bring to a community. We need people showing up to ask ACC commissioners about their policy priorities. And sometimes it's about donating or getting engaged in campaigns directly.

Ultimately, it's about credibility. It's super important to have industry people at the table, because they can go deeper on the technical policy work than I can.

Keep reading: Check out the first Brighter Futures Interview with CALSSA's Brad Heavner.