A new declaration of independence — of the national-energy kind — has been promulgated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as “ALEC,” which this week unveiled model legislative policy aiming to redirect the vital and contentious issue of American energy away from its Washington, D.C., battleground and to the 50 states, for the purpose of providing we the people a greater and more-localized say in energy security.
The Affordable, Reliable and Clean Energy Security Act, a product of ALEC’s nonpartisan Task Force on Energy, Environment and Agriculture, articulates a decidedly patriotic take on power — that thing of watts, volts, and miles per gallon — highlighting energy security, affordability, reliability, and cleanliness, each aspect with the potential to cause ideological umbrage.
Prompting the pushback effort, says Jonathan Williams, ALEC’s chief economist and vice president of policy, is “radical progressives’ war on energy.” Charging that leftist activism “has led to a myriad of problems — from driving the crushing inflation burden on hardworking Americans to threatening the security of America and our allies abroad,” Williams says. “It is essential for America to change course and lead the way by providing energy and infrastructure security in this time of global turbulence.”
On security, ALEC’s model bill emphasizes domestic production of fuel, as well as infrastructure “necessary to deliver energy to the customer,” thereby minimizing “reliance on foreign nations for critical materials or manufacturing.”
It defines an “affordable energy source” as one having a “stable and predictable cost” and that is a “cost-effective means of heating, cooling, and generating electricity.” The model definition of affordability eye-pokes Green New Deal worshippers by (a) prioritizing energy that “delivers substantial savings to homes and businesses compared to other resources based on the average cost per unit of energy output for the past five years,” and (b) is inclusive of “energy generated by reliable hydrocarbon as a resource.”
About that “reliability”: The draft bill goes to great lengths to define this dependability as meeting specific criteria, such as a fuel resource that “must be readily available to meet energy demands 24/7 with minimal interruptions during high usage periods,” and, again, that hydrocarbons are not an exempt class of fuel. Reliability also means power-generation standards requiring that “electricity output is dispatchable 24/7,” that “the capability to ramp up or down electricity generation within one hour, stabilizing the electrical grid,” and that there will be the “ability to complement and provide backup to renewable energy sources during periods of low availability.”
How to define “green energy”? ALEC’s language — influenced by action taken in Ohio and Tennessee in 2023 declaring “natural gas” to be “green” — means “any energy generated by using an energy resource in which the emissions are equivalent to the standard set by pipeline quality natural gas.” In other words, on par with what’s “emitted by residential gas stoves.” And there are more reasons why this definition is not to be found in AOC’s dictionary: Green energy, as contended by ALEC, is that which “releases reduced air pollutants,” that explicitly “includes energy generated by nuclear reactors,” and that uses “natural gas as a resource.”
This redefinition is not some argument’s-sake undertaking. The ALEC bill would make it consequential in the way our states conduct business and earmark taxpayer dollars, stipulating that “green energy” rightly redefined “will apply to all programs in the state that fund any ‘green energy’ or ‘clean energy’ initiatives.”
Conservatives, if not all Americans, should be cheered by this attempt to bring state leadership to an issue that is vital to national security, economic growth, energy abundance, and human flourishing. “Thankfully,” says Williams, “states are already leading the way in pushing back against politicized ESG divestment campaigns that weaken energy independence and instead supporting an ‘all of the above,’ free market approach for energy abundance.” He calls ALEC’s proposal “yet another key free-market energy-policy idea available to lawmakers across the nation. As the federal government continues to suffer from gridlock, we can always count on the states — the 50 laboratories of democracy — to provide innovative policy solutions to our key policy challenges.”