Transition Finance Weekly - July 16, 2026
Subject: Colorado Renewable Milestone, Data Center Pause, Clean Energy Brings the Cool, San Francisco Moves Towards Muni Grid
HIGHLIGHT: Colorado Achieves 53% Clean Energy
Colorado reached a major milestone in the first quarter of 2026, meeting 53% of its electricity demand with renewable resources, up from 43% in 2025. Colorado is likely to exceed the 50% threshold for the rest of the year. Colorado utilities are required to meet 100% of energy needs by 2050 with clean energy.
Colorado’s grid is getting cleaner, despite efforts from the Trump Administration to keep coal plants like Craig Power Station open, despite plans to close it at the end of 2025. Tri-State and Platte River, the operators of Craig Station, have argued that the unit is no longer needed and that it is creating significant costs for their customers.
1. New York Announces First Statewide Data Center Moratorium
Governor Kathy Hochul is the first to pause new data center development as electricity costs take the spotlight.
New York is now the first and only state in the country with a one-year moratorium on new data centers larger than 50 MW. Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order prohibiting new permits for large hyperscale data centers for the next 12 months as state agencies develop new frameworks for managing the costs associated with new data centers. Hochul has so far refused to sign more stringent legislation that would implement a 1-year ban on data centers larger than 20 MW in peak demand.
Data centers are proving to be a challenging political football: other governors have been walking a political tightrope and have opposed moratoriums, while supporting reforms. Governor Janet Mills vetoed a moratorium in Maine (the project she was protecting was later canceled). Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed some guidelines for data centers after cheerleading major developments across the state, mirroring Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s similar turn on data centers.
A moratorium can buy time to solve complex challenges, but durable reforms are needed to guide sustainable data center development. Examples like the Power Act, being considered in Illinois, provide a roadmap: requirements for new clean energy, protections for ratepayers, guarantees on new grid infrastructure costs, and a focus on cost-saving clean energy technologies.
Hochul, on New York’s next steps: “New York will lead the way in creating the strongest standards in the nation for data center development, ensuring that when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too.”
2. Grids Brave Heat Waves With Help From Clean Resources
Clean additions to the country’s electricity system protected regional grids from excessive strain as extreme heat threatened a majority of the country.
As much of the United States suffered temperatures over 100 degrees in early July, the country’s regional grids anticipated, but didn’t experience, significant grid disruptions, largely thanks to the massive new renewable additions to the grid.
In Texas, solar met more than 30% of ERCOT’s demand during the region’s all-time July peak demand record, averting emergency outages and sky-high prices. In New England, offshore wind resources helped avert significant crises, and precluded the need for expensive backup oil-fired power plants. Distributed resources, too, helped avert larger crises.
Still, extreme weather including heat will get worse, threatening a grid already strained under the pressure of massive new demand growth driven by data centers. Infrastructure will need to meet growing demand, and the growing threats from climate change.
Former FERC Chair Richard Glick: “We need to figure out how to meet the demands of [load] growth, but also extreme weather.”
3. San Francisco Inches Closer To PG&E Takeover
San Francisco checked a box in the long march towards municipal ownership of the city’s energy grid.
On Thursday, San Francisco’s planning commission approved an Environmental Impact Report required before the city can purchase PG&E’s assets in a bid to create a municipal utility. The road towards a publicly-owned distribution grid in San Francisco isn’t clear of obstacles, however.
San Francisco offered to buy PG&E’s assets to create a municipal utility in 2019 as wildfire-related liability and criminal conduct drove PG&E towards bankruptcy. PG&E, then and now, firmly rejected any offers to buy its San Francisco-based assets.
Proponents of the public power push say that the move will save residents millions of dollars. However, it’ll also concentrate enormous catastrophe risk in the form of fire risk in PG&E’s remaining customer base, further isolating vulnerable and risky areas.
4. Boulder Launches Clean Resilience Program
The city of Boulder, Colorado launched a $50,000 grant program for clean backup power systems.
Boulder, Colorado last week announced a new pilot program to provide nonprofits with grants up to $50,000 to fund battery and solar-plus-storage backup power systems. The backup power systems seek to maximize resilience under emergency conditions, and require eligible products to support a number of priorities like providing shelter, supporting medical equipment, and maintaining communication access.
Boulder’s program is one of many seeking to prove the resilience value of clean distributed energy resources. In Louisiana, a “Community Lighthouse” program has supported the development of distributed clean energy, specifically targeting houses of worship, to support local resilience, especially during hurricanes.
The risks facing Boulder are very different, but the distributed energy resources provide a similar safety net. The DERs also give places like Boulder greater flexibility in reducing risk via emergency public safety power shutoffs, which Boulder experienced in December 2025 as Xcel Energy cut off power lines to reduce ignition risk.
5. Hawaii County Looks To Improve Building Codes After Devastating Fires
Kaua’i County, Hawaii moved to strengthen its building codes and Zone Zero regulations as wildfires threaten the island.
In 2024, a major fire burned around 1,000 acres of Hawaii’s Kaua’i island, one year after the 2023 Lahaina wildfires that killed 102 people. Now, the county council is moving a proposal from planners to upgrade the island’s building codes and create new landscaping requirements to make homes more fire-resistant.
Both building codes and landscaping requirements are critical to reducing, but not entirely eliminating, wildfire risk. Importantly, insulating against wildfire risk requires significantly more communal and community-wide resilience work, increasing the need for universal, high standards for new construction.
Landscaping standards, however, haven’t been universally liked. In Berkeley, California, residents pushed back against rules mandating the removal of vegetation within 5 feet of homes. The city weakened the rules due to heavy pushback from residents, who launched a recall election against city leaders.
SPOTLIGHT: Resilience Program Design Matters
In late June, Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee signed two bills that create the “Strengthen Rhody Homes” program, which creates a new program under the State Division of Insurance to provide grants to homeowners to fund resilience projects for single family homes. Across the country, states are designing and implementing similar property-level mitigation grant programs, many modeled on the Strengthen Homes Program in Alabama.
Still, the program isn’t perfect: Rhode Island’s new law comes with no dedicated funding, instead requiring the program to seek federal and private funding for its grant program, despite the administration’s attacks on funding for emergency preparedness and resilience. Other programs, however, more closely follow best practices in designing resilience grant programs. In Colorado, lawmakers this year passed SB 155, a pared down version of 2025’s HB1302, which creates the Strengthen Colorado Homes Program, funded by a 0.5% premium fee on insurers.
