You might not have known it, but by 2021, more than 12 percent of the energy in your home will come from renewable sources. Well, that was the plan. As of right now, the “Affordable and Reliable Energy Act” aims to shrink that number in the name of making energy “more affordable.” A second piece of legislation, Senate Bill 394, stands to do away with North Carolina’s 30-year standing renewable energy tax credit as well.

The title of the “Affordable and Reliable Energy Act”, sponsored by N.C. General Assembly Rep. Mike Hager (R.), reveals something about its assumptions: fossil fuels are affordable and reliable, while renewables aren’t. In reality, both of these acts aim to do away with the only laws in this state that prevent these assumptions from being true in the first place.

But first we need to clear the air on something: Electricity is cheap. While nobody likes getting slapped with a bill at the end of the month, a look at some numbers is eye opening. In North Carolina, we pay about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. This is the standard unit used by utility companies to measure energy consumption per time, over the period of an hour. My own laptop takes about 90 minutes to fully charge using a 60-watt power adapter. This means that I can fully charge my computer (starting from an empty battery) eleven whole times before I use a full kilowatt-hour. That’s slightly over a cent per charge going by North Carolina’s rates.

But If that doesn’t make the point that grid electricity is cheap, consider this: Households in Belgium, Germany, Norway, the UK, Italy and France have lower median annual incomes than those in North Carolina, but electricity in these countries costs two to three times as much.

So if electricity is so cheap here, why do away with a marginal price increase which ensures that we’re at least getting it from the right sources? Unlike coal, renewable energy companies can provide jobs in North Carolina, not West Virginia. And while natural gas drilling (aka hydraulic fracking) could benefit our economy in the short term, we’re gambling with our water quality. Supporters of the act are clinging to self-defeating arguments that have no place influencing policy.

The often borrowed narrative cited by opponents of renewables goes as: “Solar and wind are nice ideas, but we should hold off investment because they aren’t ready yet.” The problem with basing legislative decisions on this argument is that the outcome will always be the same as its premise. Investment needs to come first. And considering that fossil fuel subsidies greatly outnumber those for renewables, we have a lot of catching up to do.

Even so, solar power has already made its mark in this state with the help of the tax incentives that some legislators are trying to repeal. A little over a week ago, Wake Tech installed dozens of solar panels on its campus. The college is selling that energy off to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships each year. But when we choose to take away the legislative framework that can make these investments possible, we are only guaranteeing that renewable energy will stay on the sidelines.

The irony of it all is these acts existing in the first place. Nobody is trying to enact a bill that will limit our electricity production from coal to 25 percent (half of its current role in our grid, and twice the percentage that is meant to be filled by renewables), or to ban hydraulic fracking altogether. And yet, those are the energy sources that stand to degrade our resources, costing us more than their upfront market value. Ultimately, when we bet against sustainable energy sources, we are betting against ourselves.