PowerLines’ Charles Hua weighs in on key gubernatorial and public utility commission races across the country.
When Charles Hua served as a senior policy advisor in the Department of Energy in 2023, he had an epiphany: some of the biggest hurdles to deploying powerful grid technologies are not technological, they’re regulatory.
It was a realization that led him to dig into the world of energy regulation and the role of public utility commissions in grid modernization efforts. From there, he founded PowerLines — a national education nonprofit that advocates for an energy system that better serves American consumers. This was back in 2024, just as load growth started driving up utility rates.
This week on With Great Power, Charles Hua talks about the midterm elections, specifically the 36 gubernatorial races and nine states that are electing PUC commissioners. He and Brad talk about PowerLines’ election dashboard which monitors the impact these races could have on energy policy in their respective states and how these races are playing out in today's politically-charged landscape.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O'Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley:
When Charles Hua speaks at industry events, he likes to run a little test.
Charles Hua:
I've often gone to conferences, even energy industry conferences, and asked the room, "Raise your hand if you can name your home state's public utilities commissioner."
Brad Langley:
He never sees many hands go up, but Charles knows that the people who make up these commissions across the US play a key role in shaping electricity markets and utility regulation. They also oversee which technologies ultimately get adopted.
Charles Hua:
We call them the Supreme Court Justices of Energy because there's 200, they oversee $200 billion, and that's a billion dollars of commissioners.
Brad Langley:
And at the top of that ladder, the chief justices, so to speak, are the folks appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC. Even President Trump knows how important these people are. This is him addressing the commissioners attending the Ratepayer Protection Pledge this past spring.
President Trump:
You are the most powerful people in the country, so we want to be very nice to you. Please get us approvals. Please get us those approvals.
Brad Langley:
But, and maybe not too surprisingly, it was not the world of energy regulation that initially sparked Charles' interest in energy. It was actually a school assignment way back in the second grade.
Charles Hua:
Our teacher was just really charismatic and infectious. One of the projects that he asked us all to work on was to write a newspaper article about a topic that was of interest to us for whatever reason. And I ended up writing mine on energy.
Brad Langley:
17 years later, Charles joined the Department of Energy as a senior policy advisor. There, he helped create the pathways to commercial liftoff report on grid technologies.
Charles Hua:
Things like dynamic line rating and power flow controls and reconductoring efforts. And one of the big themes that came out of that work, from my point of view, was just how important the utility regulatory system was to the success or failure of some of these technologies being deployed.
Brad Langley:
So in 2024, Charles launched Power Lines, a national education nonprofit that advocates for an energy system that better serves all American consumers.
Charles Hua:
We do a lot of work with a wide variety of different stakeholders, including policymakers, regulators, and the industry to navigate this period of transition for the grid.
Brad Langley:
And since Power Lines has launched, rates in many places have risen. There's a ton of backlash over data centers and public utility commissions have emerged from obscurity. For Charles, this is actually an opportunity to elevate PUCs and the broader energy system in the national conversation. As he told the New York Times last year, electricity is the new price of eggs.
Charles Hua:
People are talking about their utility bills with their friends or neighbors or family members in a way that they haven't been before. I do think this is the most significant period, not just since the 1990s with electricity market restructuring, not just since the 1930s with rural electrification and major federal legislation that reshaped the way that utility companies would be regulated, but really since the start of all of this.
Brad Langley:
This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer-centric. Today, my guest is Charles Hua, founder and executive director of Power Lines. Charles says we're in a moment of real change in how consumers think about the role energy plays in their daily lives.
Charles Hua:
We are now entering a new politics of electricity where those two words in and of themselves don't really belong together. Electricity is something that's best left to the engineers and grid operators who are doing that work. And I think to some extent that would be ideal, but the reality is that politics do play an important role in our grid because even the very question of who should get access to electricity when we first invented and commercialized it is an inherently political, perhaps small political, but a political question nonetheless.
Brad Langley:
Power Lines has a reference tool on their website that shows all of the midterm gubernatorial and POC races across the US, along with information on the candidates and their platforms. So we talked through some of those races, how they could impact energy policy in their respective states, and how it's all playing out in today's politically charged landscape. But first, I asked Charles to say more about the job of a public utility commissioner.
Charles Hua:
A lot of these folks, they didn't sign up to be in the public eye, but that's where they found themselves. Now a public utility commissioner has to think about cost allocation for data centers or large load tariff design or load forecasting, greater decentralization of resource adoption with distributed energy resources or rate design around time of use rates and things like that. The job has just gotten so much more complicated, but the resources and staffing and amounts of talent at the commissions, it's remained relatively stable over the last decade or so.
Brad Langley:
Walk us through the dynamics here. Utility commissions regulate the utilities, but who appoints the commissioners?
Charles Hua:
Well, in most states it's the governors. In some cases, the public directly elects them. And then large customers, they negotiate deals with utilities for different rates and we have different rate classes. Okay, so they play a role. And then the governors and the state legislators, they often shape the policy environment. Just to throw a couple data points out there, utility companies last year in 2025 set a record for rate increase requests. They requested $31 billion in rate increases, and that's double the previous record, which was in 2024, which was $15 billion. And that was more than the previous record. And if you looked at a chart of this, it would really show this hockey stick trajectory where that issue just has gotten exponentially worse and worse and worse over the last couple of years in particular, and it's now rapidly outpacing inflation. When utility bills are a visible marker of that pain and pressure that consumers are feeling, they're going to focus more on that.
So that's one statistic. The other statistic that I would point you to that's really interesting is that over the next five years, utility companies have expressed to their shareholders on these earnings calls that they plan to spend $1.4 trillion on capital expenditures. So for context, 1.4 trillion, if you took the Hoover Dam and the cost of building the Hoover Dam and you inflation adjusted that to 2026 dollars, you would need to spend 2,000 Hoover Dams worth of money over the next five years to reach $1.4 trillion and to rack up that tab. And so that's the pressure that public utility commissions are now facing and whether or not they're realizing that both of those are forward-looking leading indicators for where the electricity price and energy affordability trends are likely to head, but that's the stakes that PUCs currently have to contend with.
Brad Langley:
I believe six states have both gubernatorial and utility commission races on the ballot in November. Let's focus on two of those, Georgia and Arizona. Why are these two so important?
Charles Hua:
Well, it's interesting. Georgia and Arizona are two of the most competitive battleground races politically, and perhaps this is somewhat of a correlation and not a causation, but some of the most interesting states right now for energy are also some of the most interesting states for politics. And a lot of these purple states, if you will, are seeing significant growth in demand for electricity from data centers, Georgia and Arizona both, but also looking at states like Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin, they're all seeing significant data center development for a variety of different reasons, but that makes it interesting where folks on both parties are now expressing what their viewpoints are around things like energy affordability and data centers. And Brad, you mentioned that we have a tool and resource. It does kind of break down what folks on the campaign trail have said. Just to give you an example, there's a gubernatorial candidate who has said that they are pledging to make electricity free, at least the generation tab part of your bill, but making electricity generation free for people who live within a certain radius of data centers.
Now, that's something where that policy isn't designed in a lab necessarily, it's in part designed in the campaign trail. And again, that's a new phenomenon, but it speaks to the fact that there are these broader anxieties that even in everyday conversations, if somebody's giving a political stump speech, the fact that they're talking about this means that they're hearing about this. And the fact that they're hearing about this means that other voters and consumers are talking about this. And that suggests that there is this angst around it. And so part of why we wanted to make this resource available to the public is to be able to point people towards, okay, here's what people have said. Now, saying something as a pledge is one thing, but actually executing and establishing policy outcomes is a different thing. And that's something we're heading into 2027 when there are so many new administrations.
I think there's potentially up to 25 states that will have new governors in office next year.That's half the country could experience turnover in terms of the senior executive leadership of that state. And I think that's why in this moment there is so much scrutiny around what governors say and do because there's a recognition that they do have a lot of influence and power over how our electric grid takes shape over the next few years.
Brad Langley:
I think you may have been referencing Ohio with that example where Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor on a platform that goes beyond having data centers pay for their own power. Tell me your thoughts on that. Do you think that's feasible? I mean, would the hyperscalers even go for something like that?
Charles Hua:
So taking a step back though, the way that I see it is over the last few years, a lot of customers and consumers have seen and noticed their utility bills go up and up and up, and they're asking themselves, why is that? And nobody really provided a clear, compelling, and simple, importantly simple answer to that question. And I think at the same time, we were seeing more and more demand for electricity come in the form of data centers. And this is going back to the Econ 101 textbook where there's this correlation where everybody was saying, "Well, it must be the data centers that's showing up next door." And I think the reality is a lot more complicated, but part of the challenge has been nobody, not a politician, not a utility CEO, not an elected official who in a really simple to understand way has answered the question in consumer's minds, "Here's why our utility bills are going up." The real reasons, frankly, are really boring.
It's an aging grid, costs a lot of money to replace and repair that infrastructure, extreme weather events like wildfires out west or storms in Texas and New England or hurricanes in the Southeast and volatile fuel costs. And now in the last year or two years in, the Mid-Atlantic with the PJM capacity auction prices, there has been a role there to play as well. But the real reasons why bills have been going up long before data centers emerged onto the scene were frankly pretty boring. And I think it's hard to govern in a policy environment where people aren't interested in solutions on that per se, in part because folks haven't clearly articulated that that's the meat of the problem that we need to solve. And so I do think we're going to see more and more of these political statements from people on both parties that sound good, and that may be good policy as well, but also may not necessarily address the heart of the matter, which again, it's boring, but it's an aging grid, it's extreme weather events, and it's volatile fuel prices.
And part of my concern is that if we don't devote enough airspace to really being serious about addressing those challenges, you could do everything right on data centers or other issues and fundamentally not be in a good position. And so that's just something that I would point out. On the data center piece though, I think there has been more made around what is the fair share that any type of customer, but also data centers can pay. And I think the way that I look at that is you have so much money that you need to spend on the grid and mentioned 1.4 trillion is what utilities say they need to spend on the grid. And you have a customer who has the highest willingness to pay and some of the biggest balance sheets of any companies in human history, and we've got to be able to solve that problem and square that circle.
You have a customer that's willing to pay, you've got a grid that's desperately in need of investment. We just need to figure out how to make that work. And if we can't, then I do worry that we'll have failed to really take advantage of this moment to really make sure that those puzzle pieces which can be aligned are actually aligned.
Brad Langley:
So have you seen messaging or tactics evolve in PUC races as the affordability crisis has intensified or are people taking distinct or interesting approaches as a result of the affordability crisis?
Charles Hua:
I think one, candidates and elected officials and policymakers are talking about these issues, period. And that in and of itself is pretty noteworthy and remarkable because again, most gubernatorial candidates, this would not have cracked probably the top 10 or 20 bullets on their agenda or wishlist or priority list. And now it's ratcheted up arguably top three in most of these states, if not even further up that list. Now, public utility commissioners is a little different, but they directly regulate utilities and that's their job, but people still don't really know that they can vote for their public utilities commissions. Now, last year was interesting in Georgia where that was the only statewide election on the ballot where folks started to pay attention, "Oh, I didn't know that I could vote for public utility commissioners. I didn't know that my utility bills were on the ballot." But that's something where, again, it's not like everybody on the street now knows that that exists, but there are more and more people that are aware of that.
And I think candidates on both parties and in both types of races have caught onto that fact and started talking more about, "Here's my plan to lower utility bills." Now, some might say utility bills, the best they can ever do is stay flat. You can't lower them. And I actually don't think that's true. I think there are ways that you can lower utility bills by squeezing more juice out of our current system, by getting more out of our grid, by increasing the efficiency of our electric system. And that can help in the near term provide some immediate relief to consumers and help them see lower utility bills, at least downward pressure on their utility bills while we make it easier to build new infrastructure that can help also provide longer term solutions to this issue as well. But that's something that I think can only really happen if we even have the policy ambition of trying to lower utility bills in the first place.
And that's something that more and more candidates have been talking about. And frankly, it will be interesting to see how those candidates, once they take office, given that they have ran on a commitment to lower utility bills, it's solutions time.
Brad Langley:
And how do you see this all playing out in terms of the energy transition or moving from clean energy away from conventional sources? Five, seven years ago, that was the topic du jour. Now it feels like it has been pushed a bit to the back burner because of affordability, because data centers. How are you seeing that play out?
Charles Hua:
My take is that the only way that we will be able to get out and through the next five years without significantly damaging the grid or significantly jacking up utility bills or significantly making the system less reliable is that the path of smart policy and smart technology deployment will become increasingly narrow. And there increasingly will be a need to orient around this pathway of first getting more out of our existing grid and then making it easier to build new grid infrastructure. And I think regardless of your motivation, there are things that everybody, regardless of political party, can agree on, which is that people want lower utility bills and they want their lights to turn on when they flip the switch. And the thing is that the set of solutions that'll get us there I think will increasingly require us to deploy these advanced and innovative grid solutions, these grid enhancing technologies that can accommodate more resources.
And then it's a question of, on the generation side, whichever resources can get connected onto the grid, the quickest will win. And who is it for me to say what exactly that mix will look like? But I think we need to make it so that it is truly an even playing field where any technology can compete in this marketplace. And part of the bottleneck right now that we have is an aging grid that often doesn't have enough capacity to bring on new electrons. And that's also led to other issues like our backlogged interconnection queues or our other kind of permitting and citing challenges. And it does require us really, I think, taking a look at the regulatory infrastructure that is now in some ways aging even faster than our physical grid infrastructure, almost ironically. But we need to take a hard look at that and say, "Here's the stuff that still makes sense about the way that we set it up a hundred years ago, and here's what no longer makes sense, and here's what we're going to do about it." And that's not easy, that's not going to be solved overnight, but I think that more and more people trying to really tackle that question around our utility regulatory system will be a necessary condition for us to get out of these next five years alive and intact.
Brad Langley:
We covered a handful of them already, but any other races that we didn't cover, whether for governor or for PUC commissioner, that you want to make sure we look out for because they're interesting just in terms of what they're covering?
Charles Hua:
I guess I will add, what's interesting is that, just to give you another example of strange bedfellows that are talking about this, Governor Hochul in New York and Governor Abbott in Texas both a couple months ago announced data center moratoria. Again, they may be facing different pressures or maybe have different reasons or motivations. They may be wed to that campaign commitment in different ways. Who is to say? But the fact that you can have such geographically disparate and such politically disparate folks saying the same thing, I think speaks to the fact that we are entering a new era of electricity, a new politics of electricity that perhaps at least on the grid side, the transmission and distribution side may become increasingly bipartisan, which is in general a healthier environment for us to make better policy decisions when we're actually focused on solving the problems and returning to the north star of here's why we set it up in the first place, which is we invented this incredible technology of electricity and we want to commercialize it and get it in front of as many people as possible.
And that requires serious problem solving. And I think that does require good and effective policy. And my hope would be that over the next few years, we find ourselves in an environment where we are bringing an even keeled, constructive, solution oriented perspective to this space and that policymakers do that as well. So I'll just flag that this has become interesting in part because it's a national issue now and pretty much every state on the map that we found, we were able to find somebody, if not folks on both sides of the aisle, say something on these issues of energy affordability, and that's interesting.
Brad Langley:
I'm all for politics being both even keel and constructive, so I like that. We call the show with great power, which is not the energy industry. It's also a Spider-Man quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." So Charles, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Charles Hua:
I think maybe I'm a sucker for punishment in that I do like thinking about the overlooked and under-addressed institutions that play such an important role in our society. And for me, I feel lucky that for at least the last five years that that institution has been public utility commissions. They have public in the name because I think that, again, they're there to serve the public interest. And there's something that's so interesting to me about thinking about this really multifaceted problem through that lens of somebody who would be willing to serve the public and in some sense make a sacrifice to do that. And I think for me, I've always been attracted to the idea of public service. And part of that is thinking about these unglamorous, let's say, institutions that have such an important role in shaping the fabric of our modern economy. And I think it's long overdue that they're getting the recognition that, frankly, I think they deserve for what they bring to the table every day and the types of decisions that they need to make.
And so that's my superpower is being interested in the things that can be uninteresting and bringing the curiosity and creativity to what I find an interesting space.
Brad Langley:
Charles, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Charles Hua:
Thanks so much, Brad. This was really fun.
Brad Langley:
Charles Hua is the founder and executive director of Power Lines. You can find the link to their guide to governor and PUC races in the show notes for this episode. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on the clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy, all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid. Mary Catherine O'Connor produced the show. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenny Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you can help us spread the word.
You can rate your review us at Apple and Spotify or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks so much for listening. I'm Brad Langley.