This Forbes article summarizes advanced energy victories resulting from midterm elections with comments from AEE’s J.R. Tolbert, Vice President, Policy, made during an AEE members-only webinar. Link to the full article here.

Excerpts of the Forbes story are below: 

Seven new governors have two things in common: they all pledged to move their states to 100 percent clean energy, and they all won.

"Tuesday night was a great night for advanced energy in the states with pro-advanced energy governors winning all across the country," said J.R. Tolbert, AEE's vice president of state policy, "and in the middle of the country, and not just on the coasts."

Those new governors are Janet Mills of Maine, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Jared Polis of Colorado, and Steve Sisolak of Nevada.

If those governors-elect back their promises with policies, those states will join Hawaii and California in committing to 100 percent clean energy by 2050…

Tolbert acknowledges that the governors-elect may not all keep those promises, or may face legislative opposition, but he counts it a victory anyway that seven gubernatorial candidates campaigned successfully on a clean-energy pledge.

"They won, and they won openly campaigning on increasing the share of advanced energy on their state’s grid," he said. "The political process at this point needs to play out but recognizing that these candidates actually ran on this as a major piece of their platform, we expect over the next 18 months to two years to really see an uptick in governors pushing for 100 percent renewable energy."

For more insight into lesser-known victories, continue reading the complete Forbes story here.