ACTION ALERT: Minnesota Senate will vote on the Blackout Bill tomorrow

Sources have told me that the Minnesota Senate will be voting on Senate File 4 tomorrow, which will force electricity prices to skyrocket and cause rolling blackouts by mandating that 100 percent of Minnesota’s electricity come from carbon-free electricity sources by 2040.

Hence the name, Blackout Bill.

If you have not yet signed our petition telling your Senator to vote NO, now is the time to do it. Please share the link to this post with your friends and family to get as many signatures as possible. So far, over 24,000 emails have been sent demanding reliable and affordable energy.

Why it matters

Some news outlets, in my opinion, have downplayed the dangers presented by this legislation by emphasizing the lip service paid to reliability and affordability in the bill in the theoretical offramps that exist in the legislation.

However, these supposed offramps don’t exist in any measurable or meaningful way.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce was unable to describe what a “reasonable” increase in electricity prices actually was, which you can see in the video below. This means the potential offramps that are nominally in this legislation are solely at the discretion of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC).

In other words, a “reasonable” increase is whatever the PUC says it is.

The same is true for reliability.

In fact, conservative Senators offered specific amendments that would suspend enforcement of the carbon-free electricity mandates if our state experiences a blackout, but the progressive committee members unanimously voted against this amendment.

Senator Frentz, the author of the bill, specifically urged members to vote against this bill because it would “widen the offramps” for grid reliability. In other words, Senate liberals literally voted to enforce the mandates, even if it causes blackouts.

The Blackout Bill is possibly the most dangerous piece of legislation in the history of Minnesota because it has zero measurable standards to protect Minnesotans from skyrocketing prices and rolling blackouts.

If we experience a winter blackout, as American Experiment’s report on this legislation suggests, it will mean people do desperate things to stay warm, like start grills or sleep in their running cars in their garages, which is precisely what happened in Texas during their blackout of 2021.

This will increase the likelihood of carbon-monoxide-related deaths in our state, and it will be the fault of the lawmakers who voted for legislation that forced reliable power plants offline and mandated the use of wind, solar, and battery storage.