To challenge the Left’s environmental radicalism, we need a prudent vision for an environmentally friendly but reliable electric grid that delivers for families and businesses — and it all begins at the state level.
North Carolina has provided an excellent model for other states to follow.
In 2021, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a landmark, bipartisan legislation that accomplishes carbon reduction while prioritizing reliability and fiscal restraint.
First, North Carolina lawmakers accepted carbon reduction as a given. The bill states that the North Carolina Utilities Commission must take “reasonable steps” to meet its carbon-reduction goals.
Second, lawmakers set these carbon-reduction goals by mandating reliability and least-cost procurement. By linking reliability and least-cost standards, they created an all-of-the-above approach with significant policy guardrails to limit sources threatening reliability or incurring unnecessary costs. Additionally, the bill requires reevaluation of any energy-generation plan every two years for technological innovations.
Policies to ensure grid reliability will take robust federalism, with state legislatures and public utility commissions crafting and promoting common sense policies, just as North Carolina did.
Ensuring grid reliability is foundational to restoring American energy dominance. If our grid is unreliable or lawmakers arbitrarily spend countless dollars on upgrades to add energy sources that only fracture reliability, we not only damage our economic environment but also do nothing to improve our natural environment.
A reliable grid is cost-effective and protects ratepayers from unnecessarily increased energy costs or negative impacts on production due to power disruptions. More importantly, a dependable grid protects people during extreme weather. We learned this tragic lesson in Texas when the state’s grid failed in the middle of a winter storm, killing 246 residents.
Without a reliable grid, all other energy debates are worthless.
Choosing reliable energy sources is paramount. By its design, the grid can accept dispatchable (on-demand and adjustable) baseload (a stable, foundational source) energy sources, such as nuclear and natural gas.
The grid, however, can only accept small amounts of intermittent or non-dispatchable energy sources, such as wind and solar. External forces (i.e., the wind and the sun) determine these sources’ output — the quality of which is not equal to baseload power. Adding large amounts of renewables to the grid, which would still require baseload sources to back them up, requires massive amounts of expensive grid upgrades, increasing costs unnecessarily.
Renewables have a place in a diversified grid. However, renewable and battery-storage technology cannot match dispatchable or baseload sources’ reliability or power quality.
Replacing retiring dispatchable baseload power sources with intermittent, non-baseload sources weakens reliability. Decisions to increase renewables tend to be linked to alarmist views on climate and are heavily funded by renewable lobbyists. These lobbyists, however, know they cannot compete on reliability standards on an equal playing field — hence, their need for subsidies and “renewable portfolio standards.”
Lawmakers must craft policies that ensure a standard of reliability rather than picking energy source winners and losers and throwing reliability out the window.
Liberal climate activists and the environmental Left constantly push a narrative of alarmism and extremism in the energy space. Much of the Left’s climate radicalism fuels policy decisions that leave grid reliability vulnerable and create unnecessary increases in energy costs for arbitrary virtue signaling. They ignore the real emergency — a grid that cannot withstand seasonal weather variations, let alone periods of extreme cold.
The Right cannot respond in kind with fringe (or cringe) extremism, nor can we ignore these debates altogether. We must be leaders in the energy space, relying on the principles of reasoned common sense and fiscal responsibility.
Moreover, we must concede that the Overton Window has shifted in the carbon reduction debate. We must accept the political reality that any new energy plan must address carbon reduction.
That said, renewables are not the only pathway to reducing carbon emissions. Nuclear power and fossil fuels must be at the center of a reliable, clean energy future. Technological advances in carbon capture and small module reactors will further change the playing field.
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By allowing the market to drive technological improvements and lawmakers crafting policies that ensure reliability, we can see a resurgence in American energy dominance. The market is more effective at reducing carbon, even if we disagree on whether that is a problem. States can steer the ship of energy policy forward responsibly, as they did in North Carolina.
By linking reliability and cost together in a conservative framework for a clean energy future, prudence — not radicalism — will win the day.
André Béliveau (@TheRealBeliveau) is the senior manager of energy policy at the Commonwealth Foundation and a visiting fellow at the John Locke Foundation.
