Energy

POLL: Tom Steyer’s Green Energy Campaign Isn’t Very Popular

No featured image available

A renewable energy campaign financed by Tom Steyer is trailing by double digits, an indication that Arizona voters are not too excited about a dramatic shift to wind and solar.

Through his environmental group, NextGen Climate Action, Steyer has dropped over $10 million in an effort to force more renewable energy on Arizona’s generation industry. The initiative, officially called Proposition 127, calls for 50 percent of the state’s electricity derive from renewable energy, such as wind and solar, by 2030. If passed, the mandate would be a dramatic rise from the state’s current mandate of 15 percent by 2025.

Arizona voters are to decide the fate of the proposal on Election Day. Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona is currently waging a campaign to convince voters that such a major shift to wind and solar would be beneficial to the state.

However, if current polling is correctly reflecting voter sentiment, Steyer’s campaign is losing the public relations battle.

Forty-six percent of voters would vote no on replacing “Arizona’s current plan for transitioning nongovernmental electric utilities to renewable energy with a constitutional mandate that, irrespective of cost to consumers, 50 percent of the retail energy sales of these utilities come from certain types of renewable energy,” according to a new survey from Suffolk University and The Arizona Republic.

The “no” voters outnumber the “yes” voters by double digits, with only 33 percent of respondents stating that they would support such a measure. A fairly large number, 19.8 percent, of voters are still undecided.

Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona, which is now more commonly referred to as Yes on 127, is campaigning against Arizonans for Affordable for Affordable Electricity, a group that is against the proposal. Arizonans for Affordable Electricity, also known as No on 127, is backed by the state’s largest electricity utility.

“Support for Prop 127 is collapsing as Arizona voters learn the truth: this initiative will hike their electric bills and kill jobs. With just 1 in 3 Arizona voters supporting Prop 127 a week before early ballots are mailed, it appears increasingly clear Arizona voters are rejecting Tom Steyer and his radical agenda,” Matthew Benson, a spokesman for Arizonans For Affordable Electricity, stated to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.

Follow Jason on Twitter.