Similar to Bates's first symphony Liquid Interface, Alternative Energy chronicles environmental devastation of the Earth over a large timespan.
Bates described the meaning of the work in the score program notes, writing:Alternative Energy is an 'energy symphony' spanning four movements and hundreds of years.
Beginning in a rustic Midwestern junkyard in the late 19th Century, the piece travels through ever greater and more powerful forces of energy — a present-day particle collider, a futuristic Chinese nuclear plant — until it reaches a future Icelandic rainforest, where humanity’s last inhabitants seek a return to a simpler way of life.
Despite lauding an "engaging, artless audacity" to Bates's music, Johnson wrote:Yet I confess I found much of Alternative Energy overblown, slick and superficial, centered on surface sonic glitz and "hip" populist riffing with little musical substance at its core.
[3]Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle was more positive, however, describing the symphony as "fantastic" and opining, "Bates [...] writes music that is simultaneously old-fashioned in its outlook and bracingly new in its demeanor, and it satisfies the same urge for accessible novelty that people find in the other arts.