With its wind and waves, Rhode Island is well positioned to move more aggressively toward alternative energy. That should be encouraged, given America’s enslavement to heavily polluting fossil fuel, whose costs are soaring, with no end in sight.

That is why four bills submitted by Senate President Joseph Montalbano (D.-Lincoln), and supported by two prominent environmental organizations — Environmental Rhode Island and the Conservation Law Foundation — appear to make sense.

Senator Montalbano’s legislation would require National Grid to enter into long-term contracts to buy renewable energy from developers that create large-scale projects, such as wind farms. Such contracts are absolutely necessary to help companies obtain the capital to make such ventures commercially viable.

In the past, National Grid resisted such contracts, for fear that it would get stuck buying energy that it could not sell off to customers. Under the bill, the risk would be spread among National Grid’s ratepayers, through a distribution-rate surcharge. This might end up costing the consumer more for a while, though the soaring price of fossil fuel — and increasingly urgent questions about its availability and environmental impacts — mandates that we move rapidly toward alternative energy.

Other bills in the package would consolidate separate sources of money for renewable energy under one agency, the state Economic Development Corporation; let customers who have wind turbines or solar panels sell back more of their excess energy; and require officials overseeing state buildings to have the state buy a percentage of the energy from renewable sources.

Again, this may not be the cheapest way to do business right now (coal, especially, is fairly cheap — if filthy and highly toxic), but alternative energy will almost certainly be much cheaper in the long run, with timing depending on what happens, geopolitically and otherwise, with fossil fuels. In any event, it makes sense for the local economy, the environment, and our freedom from fossil-fuel dependency to be taking these small steps to encourage the development of renewable energy.