A municipally owned TEP could move faster and more boldly than Fortis ever would. While investor-owned utilities spend years calculating shareholder returns, a city-owned utility answers to voters who breathe Tucson’s air and pay Tucson’s electric bills. We could build a grid powered overwhelmingly by desert solar paired with battery storage – clean, reliable, and increasingly cheap. The technology is proven. The manufacturing capacity is here. What’s been missing is the will.
But the real opportunity goes beyond electricity. A municipally owned utility could build the most aggressive electric vehicle infrastructure in the Southwest. Picture a city-controlled TEP installing fast chargers across Tucson, offering special overnight rates for EV owners, and partnering with employers to electrify fleet vehicles. The same battery technology that can power our grid can power our transportation — but only if the utility answers to us, not to shareholders in Canada.
That gas price spike? It’s not an anomaly. It’s a warning. Global oil markets will always be vulnerable to geopolitical chaos, supply disruptions, and the simple fact of finite resources. Meanwhile, Tucson has something oil-dependent cities don’t: 350 days of sunshine a year and the battery technology to store it.
Other cities are watching. The Salt River Project, the municipal utility serving Phoenix, already operates more efficiently than investor-owned utilities while keeping rates lower. Sacramento’s municipal utility, SMUD, leads California in customer satisfaction and renewable energy deployment. Tucson could leapfrog them all.
The convergence is almost too perfect to believe: breakthrough battery manufacturing capacity, proven renewable technology, a climate crisis demanding action, and an electric utility currently owned by a company that answers to shareholders in Canada, not residents in Tucson. The pieces are all on the board.