ALEC Pushes Idiotic Anti-Renewable Legislation In Ohio

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Just yesterday, we reported on two bills wending their way through the Florida legislature that would criminalize thoughts and speech — unless, of course, those thoughts and speech support the approved government talking points. In that article, we wondered who is feeding this garbage to gullible state legislators who don’t have the intellectual skills to think for themselves.

Many readers will be surprised to learn that there are organizations that do nothing but dream up new legislative initiatives that benefit their clients at the expense of others. One of them is the American Legislative Exchange Council, which Wikipedia describes as follows:

“The American Legislative Exchange Council is a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives who draft and share model legislation for distribution among state governments in the United States.

“ALEC provides a forum for state legislators and private sector members to collaborate on model bills and draft legislation that members may customize and introduce for debate in their own state legislatures. ALEC has produced model bills on a broad range of issues, such as reducing regulation and individual and corporate taxation, combating illegal immigration, loosening environmental regulations, tightening voter identification rules, weakening labor unions, and opposing gun control.

“ALEC also serves as a networking tool among certain state legislators, allowing them to research conservative policies implemented in other states. Many ALEC legislators say the organization converts campaign rhetoric and nascent policy ideas into legislative language.”

From that description, it is fairly easy to see that ALEC is closely aligned with most of the policy initiatives that are at the core of the MAGA movement as expressed in Project 2025, the official playbook for the current US administration.

This year, ALEC is proposing legislation in Ohio that would cripple renewable energy. Similar bills are under consideration in Utah, Louisiana, and New Hampshire. According to Inside Climate News, “the proposed legislation is part of a push by fossil fuel interest groups to promote natural gas and hurt competing power sources.”

Capacity Factor

The Ohio bill, Senate Bill 294, attempts to leverage the intermittency of renewables to prevent them from being considered when planning to add new generating capacity to the grid. The bill would adopt a new definition of “reliable energy source” that would require new power plants to be able to operate at any time of day or night and have “a minimum capacity factor” of 50%.

Capacity factor is a measure of how a facilities actual output compares to the maximum that is technically possible. If a plant runs at full capacity around the clock for a year, its capacity factor would be 100%.

As ICN’s Dan Gearino explains, wind and solar installations have lower capacity factors because they depend on the sun and wind. But grid operators and power companies still rely heavily on wind and solar because they understand the attributes of their power plants and view them as part of a portfolio.

“To put a 50 percent requirement in state law borders on incoherent,” Gearino says. “Almost no power technologies make the cut. To help explain, let’s look at the average capacity factors for each major power plant technology in 2024, the most recent full year available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.”

“It’s no surprise to see nuclear at the top, with 90.8 percent. But then there is a big drop-off before the runner-up, combined-cycle natural gas, at 60.5 percent. Wood burning power plants are next with 55.8 percent. After that, every other power source is below the 50 percent benchmark in the Ohio bill. This includes renewables, such as wind and solar, which have capacity factors of 34.3 percent and 23.2 percent, respectively. Hydropower, another leading renewable energy source, is 34.6 percent.”

Coal Has Low Capacity Factor

But here’s the kicker that exposes the stunning stupidity of ALEC. Many fossil fuel power plants also fall below the 50% capacity threshold — including coal-fired generating stations that achieve only a 42.6% capacity factor. BOOM! No more coal power in Ohio! Is that what ALEC intended? Of course not, but this level of idiocy is what happens when you put ideology over common sense. Methane-powered peaker plants, such as simple-cycle gas turbines, have a dismal capacity factor of 13.9%, while oil fired facilities are lowest of all at 10%.

“Coal plants have low capacity factors largely because their owners often choose to run less expensive alternatives, and most are old and need downtime for maintenance,” Gearino writes. Methane peakers have low capacity factors by design. Their job is to be available during periods of high demand and to operate in short bursts.”

Gearino asks a pertinent question. “Did the people who wrote this bill determine which power plants have capacity factors below 50 percent, or did they assume this dragnet would only capture wind and solar? But the question isn’t for the Ohio co-sponsors, since much of the text — including the capacity factor wording — came from model legislation written by ALEC, an organization with a long track record of hostility toward renewable energy and support for fossil fuels.”

The ALEC model legislation, called “The Affordable, Reliable and Clean Energy Security Act,” was finalized in September 2024 and described as “a common sense energy agenda for the future.” What is common sense is often a matter of political orientation rather than logic, however.

Opponents To ALEC Bill

In Ohio, clean energy groups and the Ohio Chamber Of Commerce have voiced opposition to the bill. At the hearing, Senator Brian Chavez, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, explained the reasoning behind the capacity factor requirement. “If I have limited funds, do I want to buy a car that’s effective less than 50 percent of the time or do I want to spend my money on a vehicle that is 95 percent effective and will speed up and slow down when I need it?” A spokesperson for Chavez said a key consideration is that Ohio has limited space, so it’s important that new power plants make efficient use of land.

Emily Grubert, an energy systems expert at Notre Dame, told ICN, “Capacity factor is a terrible metric for ‘reliability.’ It just measures how much the plant is actually running as a percentage of the maximum possible output. This is essentially like saying that a car isn’t reliable unless it’s driving 100 mph 24 hours a day or 200 mph 12 hours a day.”

She pointed out that facilities that have a high capacity can also be unreliable. For instance, a plant built to run at an 80% capacity factor may actually run at about 50% most of the time because of maintenance issues, meaning it is not always available when needed. She said the Oho legislation is “absolutely bonkers.”

Josiah Neeley, a senior fellow for energy policy at the R Street Institute, a think tank that supports open markets, shared his thoughts on the proposed legislation sponsored by ALEC.  “Maintaining electric reliability is very important, but it’s also important to remember that reliability is not based on individual plants — it’s system-wide reliability.”

“If an individual source has a lower capacity factor, if they’re not running as much, that’s not necessarily a reliability problem. And I think one of the big costs of an approach like this is that lower-cost resources are not going to be able to come online, and so that will raise costs for consumers.”

Free Is Good

Neeley puts the spotlight on one of the primary benefits of wind and solar — the “fuel” is free. That means their operating costs are lower and more predictable than competing sources. At a time when the cost of electricity is going up dramatically all across America — it has risen more than 30% in New Jersey in the past two years alone — free fuel should be a prime considerations for any new source of electrical power.

Gearino concludes by saying he thinks the bill will not pass in the Ohio legislature, at least not in this session. “But the idea of shaping state policy to benefit natural gas while harming renewables is not going away,” he says.

It is so interesting to see how theoretically intelligent people will bend themselves into the shape of a pretzel to promote their beliefs. The recent experience of Texas is instructive. Its electrical grid is specifically designed to promote the least expensive electricity. That led to a massive increase in renewables coupled with battery storage. But when that started to drive out new thermal generation, the ideologues in Texas began rewriting the rules to favor methane-fired generation.

So-called conservatives always like to beat their breasts and proclaim their love for free enterprise and a level playing field, but then they always try to game the system to tilt the playing field in their favor. Ideology is a poor basis for policy making and always favors the few over the many. People should stop voting for ideologues and start voting for people who actually know what they are doing.