Want to track energy legislation on the state and/or federal level? Use the Advanced Energy Legislation Tracker.
Using the tracker, the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University was able to analyze ALEC’s ability to impact Renewable Portfolio Standards in the states during this past legislative session.
by Tom Plant
As a former legislator, I know that when you’re crafting legislation, sometimes you feel like you’re re-inventing the wheel. We all want to promote legislation that can achieve our objectives, but determining the most effective mechanism for doing so is a daunting challenge. Surely, someone must have introduced legislation on this before, right?
Enter the Advanced Energy Legislation Tracker (AEL Tracker).
This free service is spearheaded by Colorado State University’s Center for the New Energy Economy (Center) and the Advanced Energy Economy Institute (AEE). Finally, there is a resource to identify all energy legislation introduced around the country using and easy and adaptable interface.
Former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter established the Center when he left office in 2011. He is nationally recognized as a visionary leader on energy policy, signing 57 bills that moved Colorado into its current leadership position on advanced energy.
I was fortunate to serve as Gov. Ritter’s energy office director for four years, and today I work for both the Center and AEE, promoting good state energy policy around the country. I can tell you, I use this tool on a daily basis.
The AEL Tracker is useful to legislators and their staff to identify legislation and then link to the language of the bill. But it also contains a robust set of capabilities that makes it an indispensable tool for anyone working on researching state activity on energy policy.
Let’s take an example. If you want to find all legislation introduced in the country concerning solar energy, you will find 333 bills: 48.5% of these deal directly with electricity generation, while 44.4% deal with financing. Finding that information took exactly 7 seconds. There’s also a geographic distribution map to show the number of bills meeting those criteria in each state.
Let’s drill down further. Maybe I want to limit that search to just New York. Some 52 bills meet those criteria. I see one, A5060, for which I’d like a little more information. when I click on the bill, I find that it has had five actions taken on it since being introduced February 15, 2013. Four versions of the bill are available through the AEL Tracker, including the latest version. There’s also a link to an article written at Fierce Energy about the bill, entitled, "NY Senate commits to a ten year program extension."
Furthermore, I see that the legislation has 63 sponsors. I can click on any of them and see their district information, plus a link to email the legislator directly.
All of this information took less than a minute to discover. Previously, this kind of search would have taken days.
This resource is valuable for advocates of all types, such as researchers, journalists who want to follow trends and activity, and businesses who want to identify market opportunities and legislation worthy of support.
If the Center provided only this tool, it would be a revolutionary step forward. But as a dedicated research center, they dive into the data, providing analysis and identification of policy trends. Since launching the Tracker in May, they published a paper on energy-efficiency legislative trends, and one on the more than 550 bills to develop financing mechanisms for energy efficiency and clean energy technologies.
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Tom Plant is vice president for state policy at AEE and senior policy advisor at the Center. Before serving Gov. Ritter, he was a state legislator for 8 years.
This article first appeared in Solar Today.
Here is the AEL Tracker:
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