Chris Wright is the current Secretary of Energy; before his appointment, he was the chief executive officer of Liberty Energy, the country’s second largest fracking company. He has been by far the most publicity-seeking member of President Trump’s energy policy team. He has helped oversee the president’s somewhat contradictory goals of seeking to reduce energy costs for Americans, support domestic fossil fuel companies, get OPEC to drill more, export as much natural gas as possible, and block the construction of new large-scale transmission lines and wind farms.
His substantive policy work is the focus of many other articles on Heatmap. For now, I want to focus on his and his department’s unpredictably confused political communications.
It began with the Department of Energy on the social network X. Several weeks ago, I started to conclude that the official agency account must have at least two authors. One of these people is familiar with how federal agencies usually speak — even if they add a small Trumpian flourish:
The other enjoys capitalizing verbs and has only a vague grasp of economic history:
One could nitpick here — “planes,” in the mid-1800s? — but there is no need to do so. As time has gone on, the official Energy Department account has begun to make more meaningful errors.
On Monday, for instance, the official DOE account proclaimed: “6 gigawatts of AMERICAN NUCLEAR ENERGY added to our grid!”
Six gigawatts of new nuclear energy is a lot. It took 11 years to build two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, and that project added only 2.2 gigawatts. But the U.S. did not really add 6 gigawatts. In reality, the Tennessee Valley Authority had signed a confidential memo to eventually develop up to 6 gigawatts of modular nuclear reactor capacity. The memo contained no project timeline or financial terms. These 6 gigawatts remain, in other words, largely hypothetical.
As X users will know, some especially erroneous posts now get a “community note,” a community correction of sorts containing “important context” or an outright fact check written by other users. These notes are supposed to contain a link to an authoritative source. The Energy Department “6 gigawatts” tweet is the first post I’ve ever seen to get a community note linking to a news story also linked to in the post itself.
But this is not the end of the foolishness. Take this claim, from last week:
This is just not a very sophisticated thing to say. It is true that wind and solar pose a distinct reliability challenge for power grids, and that grid engineers have expended time and effort thinking about how to manage that challenge. It is even true that advocates sometimes downplay these challenges. But it is not true that these technologies — or the power they generate — are “essentially worthless.” Grid-scale batteries, for instance, exist; they can store energy during the day and then release it onto the grid at times of peak demand. Transmission lines — like the sizable Grain Belt Express project, which was due to receive a federal loan guarantee until Wright canceled the funding — can also help manage these resources.
But perhaps such errors are forgivable when they come from an official account. What’s odd is that the secretary’s own account has made even stranger errors:
I had to reread this post several times to make sure I understood it correctly. Even then, I didn’t believe I had the right interpretation until the internet energy pundit Alex Epstein clarified it.
At first, I thought Wright was making some technical argument about how solar panels will never be able to meet total global energy demand. This would not have been true, but at least it would have been sort of interesting. No, per Epstein, what Wright was trying to communicate is that if you coated the world in solar panels, you would only produce electricity. And since electricity makes up 20% of the world’s total energy use today, “you would” — as Wright says “only be producing 20% of global energy.”
Never mind that if you did cover the world with solar panels (which would, to be clear, be a very bad idea), you would in fact produce vastly more energy than the global economy consumes today. Never mind that if you even covered half or a quarter of the world with solar panels (still a bad idea), you would obviously shift the economics of electricity — so that you could then, for instance, use the excess power to synthesize liquid fuel replacements for use in cars, ships, planes, etc. Never mind that, by one estimate, a single solar farm the size of New Mexico would meet the world’s electricity demand. (Building this would also be a bad idea, but not nearly as bad as the others.)
No, Wright is not saying any of that. What Wright is saying is the far more inane thought that solar panels only generate electricity, and the global economy does not only run on electricity. Thank you for that insight, Mr. Secretary.
Perhaps Wright does not know much about renewables; he was, after all, a fracking executive until recently. But his account is also curiously mistaken about fossil fuels:
This tweet is somehow wrong twice — it understates our own accomplishments. The United States is already the world’s powerhouse of natural gas. It has held that position since the first Obama administration, when it surpassed Russia to become the leading producer of natural gas globally. It became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas in 2023.
Natural gas, however, is not the world’s fastest growing source of energy; it is merely the fastest growing source of fossil fuel energy. The fastest growing energy source — of any kind — is solar photovoltaics. Solar generation grew by an astounding 30% from 2023 to 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. By a slightly different metric, renewables (which include wind) grew by 6% last year, while natural gas grew by 2.7%, per the IEA.
It is worth reading some of the replies to Wright’s solar tweet; what you see are plenty of Trump-friendly (or at least Trump-agnostic) accounts raising their eyebrows at his clownishness. Fossil nerds, based tech bros, even AI experts are raising their eyebrows and asking: Surely the Energy Secretary couldn’t be this, well, ignorant?
I can’t claim to know what’s happening in Wright’s mind. But I do know what’s happening with his policy — and this weak messaging, in my view, points to the intractability of Wright’s position. On the one hand, Wright leads the Trump administration’s energy policy, and that policy is now dominated by a culture war against any type of electricity generation that doesn’t, in some way, “own the libs” — meaning coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The government has arbitrarily halted offshore wind construction, blocked hundreds of millions in funding, and yanked approvals away from nearly complete projects. Even if Wright believes that offshore wind is ill-advised, this kind of interference with businesses and contracts is even more costly — it is not how someone acts when he is focused on energy affordability above all.
On the other hand, Wright represents that quadrant of the modern Republican Party that remains focused (however feebly) on technological development and economic growth. This cohort champions artificial intelligence and American re-industrialization; they want an abundance of cheap energy; they fear a rising China. They are also alert and informed enough to realize that China must be doing something right — otherwise it wouldn’t be industrializing so quickly — and that a country that can add 256 gigawatts of electricity in six months without breaking a sweat will probably find some useful way to use it.
Between these two poles, Wright must scurry. So he insists that the Trump administration is working to add as much electricity capacity as possible for AI, and brags that AI turns electricity into intelligence, then qualifies that only some types of electricity generation are good for AI:
He says that AI “is going to massively empower the human mind” and transform the economy, but adds implicitly that this can only come under certain conditions, which don’t involve power lines that irritate farmers, wind farms that trouble the president, or the fastest-growing new source of power on the planet. He calls AI “the Manhattan Project of our time” and says that therefore the government needs to get out of the way.
It is an act that has worked, up to a point, so far. But Wright’s public performance of his complicated role can only go on for so long. Everyone who enters the Trump administration imagines that they will do so with their public image and integrity intact. Not everyone can pull it off.
Stanford.
China's clean-energy investments are paying green dividends. Ember