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The energy secretary’s philosophy is all over the Senate mega-bill.

As the Senate Finance Committee worked on its version of the reconciliation bill that would, among things, overhaul the Inflation Reduction Act, there was much speculation among observers that there could be a carve out for sources of power like geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear, which provide steady generation and tend to be more popular among Republicans, along the lines of the slightly better treatment received by advanced nuclear in the House bill.
Instead, the Senate Finance Committee’s text didn’t carve out these “firm” sources of power, it carved out solar and wind, preserving tax credits for everything else through 2035, while sunsetting solar and wind by 2028.
For much of the last few months — and for years before he was sworn in as Secretary of Energy — Chris Wright has been expounding on his philosophy of energy and climate. If anything, the Senate Finance draft seems to hew closer to Wright’s worldview than Trump’s, which is less specific, even more critical of renewables (especially wind), and largely in favor of nuclear power when it comes to non-carbon-emitting generation.
“I’m sure Secretary Wright’s strong support for firm technologies over the past few months played a role in Chairman Crapo’s approach to energy tax credit reform,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
Wright argues that climate change is real but not a top-tier concern and that it certainly should not be addressed by restricting energy usage, which he sees as foundational to the good life here and abroad.
And among energy sources, the former fracking executive is no opponent of fossil fuels but is also enthusiastic about energy innovation.
In his company Liberty Energy’s Bettering Human Lives report, published last year, which doubles as a kind of manifesto, Wright wrote that “viable paths to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can only come from reliable and affordable low-carbon energy technologies,” and specifically listed next-generation nuclear and geothermal, which Liberty had invested in through the geothermal company Fervo and nuclear company Oklo.
“To achieve largescale human betterment, we will need significant future energy additions from nuclear, hydropower, geothermal, and all other viable energy technologies,” the report read.
And he’s often been skeptical of renewables along the lines of many Congressional Republicans, that they aren’t reliable enough and require additional resources to fully support the grid.
“Maybe the biggest problem is intermittency,” Wright said at a Liberty Energy event last year.
“You can build a lot of wind and solar, and then at night, the sun’s not shining and then sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, and you have no energy. So to keep society running, you have to have a whole second separate energy system,” Wright said.
In testimony to the House of Representatives last week, Wright said “If you’re not there at peak demand, you’re just a parasite on the grid, because you just make the other sources turn up and down as you come and go.”
Many critics of the Republican reconciliation bills have noted that much of the electricity generation pipeline is solar, wind, or storage, and so cutting off their tax credits risks leaving the country at an energy shortage while gas turbines take years and years to actually get on the grid.
But as Congress was working on the reconciliation bill, Wright made a series of widely noted public appearances where he promoted clean firm power and continued government support for it.
“My recommendation has been to leave behind the equivalent of the wind and solar tax credits — through if you start construction by 2031 — for nuclear fission and fusion and geothermal,” Wright said at an event earlier this month.
In May, Wright addressed the Nuclear Energy Institute, outlining his support for sunsetting wind and solar tax credits will working to kickstart nuclear power. “My personal goal would be to much more rapidly sunset the technologies that have been around and have been living on decades of subsidies,” Wright said. He also supported a “window” of “favorable treatment” for nuclear and geothermal.
“I’m in favor of every nudge, every incentive we can get from the federal government to restart this industry,” Wright said.
While Wright has been skeptical of wind and solar and optimistic about nuclear and geothermal for years, he’s also started talking more positively about energy storage. In the past, he’s talked up hydrocarbons for “coming with their own storage,” as he put it in a 2018 podcast.
But at an appearance at ARPA-E in March, Wright gave some of his most extended thoughts on energy storage, which sits somewhat awkwardly between variable resources like solar and wind and firm resources like nuclear and geothermal.
“Solar is growing very fast, getting more efficient and taking panels, cheaper materials and developing energy,” Wright said. “The biggest problem there is the sun doesn’t always shine, and we don’t know when clouds are going to come and when it’s not going to shine, but if we can get energy storage better, that’s a game changer.”
At least until 2035.
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All the workers who helped build Georgia’s new Vogtle plants are building data centers now.
The Trump administration wants to have 10 new large nuclear reactors under construction by 2030 — an ambitious goal under any circumstances. It looks downright zany, though, when you consider that the workforce that should be driving steel into the ground, pouring concrete, and laying down wires for nuclear plants is instead building and linking up data centers.
This isn’t how it was supposed to be. Thousands of people, from construction laborers to pipefitters to electricians, worked on the two new reactors at the Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which were intended to be the start of a sequence of projects, erecting new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors across Georgia and South Carolina. Instead, years of delays and cost overruns resulted in two long-delayed reactors 35 miles southeast of Augusta, Georgia — and nothing else.
“We had challenges as we were building a new supply chain for a new technology and then workforce,” John Williams, an executive at Southern Nuclear Operating Company, which owns over 45% of Plant Vogtle, said in a webinar hosted by the environmental group Resources for the Future in October.
“It had been 30 years since we had built a new nuclear plant from scratch in the United States. Our workforce didn’t have that muscle memory that they have in other parts of the world, where they have been building on a more regular frequency.”
That workforce “hasn’t been building nuclear plants” since heavy construction stopped at Vogtle in 2023, he noted — but they have been busy “building data centers and car manufacturing in Georgia.”
Williams said that it would take another “six to 10” AP1000 projects for costs to come down far enough to make nuclear construction routine. “If we were currently building the next AP1000s, we would be farther down that road,” he said. “But we’ve stopped again.”
J.R. Richardson, business manager and financial secretary of the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers Local 1579, based in Augusta, Georgia, told me his union “had 2,000 electricians on that job,” referring to Vogtle. “So now we have a skill set with electricians that did that project. If you wait 20 or 30 years, that skill set is not going to be there anymore.”
Richardson pointed to the potential revitalization of the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina, saying that his union had already been reached out to about it starting up again. Until then, he said, he had 350 electricians working on a Meta data center project between Augusta and Atlanta.
“They’re all basically the same,” he told me of the data center projects. “They’re like cookie cutter homes, but it’s on a bigger scale.”
To be clear, though the segue from nuclear construction to data center construction may hold back the nuclear industry, it has been great for workers, especially unionized electrical and construction workers.
“If an IBEW electrician says they're going hungry, something’s wrong with them,” Richardson said.
Meta’s Northwest Louisiana data center project will require 700 or 800 electricians sitewide, Richardson told me. He estimated that of the IBEW’s 875,000 members, about a tenth were working on data centers, and about 30% of his local were on a single data center job.
When I asked him whether that workforce could be reassembled for future nuclear plants, he said that the “majority” of the workforce likes working on nuclear projects, even if they’re currently doing data center work. “A lot of IBEW electricians look at the longevity of the job,” Richardson told me — and nuclear plants famously take a long, long time to build.
America isn’t building any new nuclear power plants right now (though it will soon if Rick Perry gets his way), but the question of how to balance a workforce between energy construction and data center projects is a pressing one across the country.
It’s not just nuclear developers that have to think about data centers when it comes to recruiting workers — it’s renewables developers, as well.
“We don’t see people leaving the workforce,” said Adam Sokolski, director of regulatory and economic affairs at EDF Renewables North America. “We do see some competition.”
He pointed specifically to Ohio, where he said, “You have a strong concentration of solar happening at the same time as a strong concentration of data center work and manufacturing expansion. There’s something in the water there.”
Sokolski told me that for EDF’s renewable projects, in order to secure workers, he and the company have to “communicate real early where we know we’re going to do a project and start talking to labor in those areas. We’re trying to give them a market signal as a way to say, We’re going to be here in two years.”
Solar and data center projects have lots of overlapping personnel needs, Sokolski said. There are operating engineers “working excavators and bulldozers and graders” or pounding posts into place. And then, of course, there are electricians, who Sokolski said were “a big, big piece of the puzzle — everything from picking up the solar panel off from the pallet to installing it on the racking system, wiring it together to the substations, the inverters to the communication systems, ultimately up to the high voltage step-up transformers and onto the grid.”
On the other hand, explained Kevin Pranis, marketing manager of the Great Lakes regional organizing committee of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, a data center is like a “fancy, very nice warehouse.” This means that when a data center project starts up, “you basically have pretty much all building trades” working on it. “You’ve got site and civil work, and you’re doing a big concrete foundation, and then you’re erecting iron and putting a building around it.”
Data centers also have more mechanical systems than the average building, “so you have more electricians and more plumbers and pipefitters” on site, as well.
Individual projects may face competition for workers, but Pranis framed the larger issue differently: Renewable energy projects are often built to support data centers. “If we get a data center, that means we probably also get a wind or solar project, and batteries,” he said.
While the data center boom is putting upward pressure on labor demand, Pranis told me that in some parts of the country, like the Upper Midwest, it’s helping to compensate for a slump in commercial real estate, which is one of the bread and butter industries for his construction union.
Data centers, Pranis said, aren’t the best projects for his members to work on. They really like doing manufacturing work. But, he added, it’s “a nice large load and it’s a nice big building, and there’s some number of good jobs.”
A conversation with Dustin Mulvaney of San Jose State University
This week’s conversation is a follow up with Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University. As you may recall we spoke with Mulvaney in the immediate aftermath of the Moss Landing battery fire disaster, which occurred near his university’s campus. Mulvaney told us the blaze created a true-blue PR crisis for the energy storage industry in California and predicted it would cause a wave of local moratoria on development. Eight months after our conversation, it’s clear as day how right he was. So I wanted to check back in with him to see how the state’s development landscape looks now and what the future may hold with the Moss Landing dust settled.
Help my readers get a state of play – where are we now in terms of the post-Moss Landing resistance landscape?
A couple things are going on. Monterey Bay is surrounded by Monterey County and Santa Cruz County and both are considering ordinances around battery storage. That’s different than a ban – important. You can have an ordinance that helps facilitate storage. Some people here are very focused on climate change issues and the grid, because here in Santa Cruz County we’re at a terminal point where there really is no renewable energy, so we have to have battery storage. And like, in Santa Cruz County the ordinance would be for unincorporated areas – I’m not sure how materially that would impact things. There’s one storage project in Watsonville near Moss Landing, and the ordinance wouldn’t even impact that. Even in Monterey County, the idea is to issue a moratorium and again, that’s in unincorporated areas, too.
It’s important to say how important battery storage is going to be for the coastal areas. That’s where you see the opposition, but all of our renewables are trapped in southern California and we have a bottleneck that moves power up and down the state. If California doesn’t get offshore wind or wind from Wyoming into the northern part of the state, we’re relying on batteries to get that part of the grid decarbonized.
In the areas of California where batteries are being opposed, who is supporting them and fighting against the protests? I mean, aside from the developers and an occasional climate activist.
The state has been strongly supporting the industry. Lawmakers in the state have been really behind energy storage and keeping things headed in that direction of more deployment. Other than that, I think you’re right to point out there’s not local advocates saying, “We need more battery storage.” It tends to come from Sacramento. I’m not sure you’d see local folks in energy siting usually, but I think it’s also because we are still actually deploying battery storage in some areas of the state. If we were having even more trouble, maybe we’d have more advocacy for development in response.
Has the Moss Landing incident impacted renewable energy development in California? I’ve seen some references to fears about that incident crop up in fights over solar in Imperial County, for example, which I know has been coveted for development.
Everywhere there’s batteries, people are pointing at Moss Landing and asking how people will deal with fires. I don’t know how powerful the arguments are in California, but I see it in almost every single renewable project that has a battery.
Okay, then what do you think the next phase of this is? Are we just going to be trapped in a battery fire fear cycle, or do you think this backlash will evolve?
We’re starting to see it play out here with the state opt-in process where developers can seek state approval to build without local approval. As this situation after Moss Landing has played out, more battery developers have wound up in the opt-in process. So what we’ll see is more battery developers try to get permission from the state as opposed to local officials.
There are some trade-offs with that. But there are benefits in having more resources to help make the decisions. The state will have more expertise in emergency response, for example, whereas every local jurisdiction has to educate themselves. But no matter what I think they’ll be pursuing the opt-in process – there’s nothing local governments can really do to stop them with that.
Part of what we’re seeing though is, you have to have a community benefit agreement in place for the project to advance under the California Environmental Quality Act. The state has been pretty strict about that, and that’s the one thing local folks could still do – influence whether a developer can get a community benefits agreement with representatives on the ground. That’s the one strategy local folks who want to push back on a battery could use, block those agreements. Other than that, I think some counties here in California may not have much resistance. They need the revenue and see these as economic opportunities.
I can’t help but hear optimism in your tone of voice here. It seems like in spite of the disaster, development is still moving forward. Do you think California is doing a better or worse job than other states at deploying battery storage and handling the trade offs?
Oh, better. I think the opt-in process looks like a nice balance between taking local authority away over things and the better decision-making that can be brought in. The state creating that program is one way to help encourage renewables and avoid a backlash, honestly, while staying on track with its decarbonization goals.
The week’s most important fights around renewable energy.
1. Nantucket, Massachusetts – A federal court for the first time has granted the Trump administration legal permission to rescind permits given to renewable energy projects.
2. Harvey County, Kansas – The sleeper election result of 2025 happened in the town of Halstead, Kansas, where voters backed a moratorium on battery storage.
3. Cheboygan County, Michigan – A group of landowners is waging a new legal challenge against Michigan’s permitting primacy law, which gives renewables developers a shot at circumventing local restrictions.
4. Klamath County, Oregon – It’s not all bad news today, as this rural Oregon county blessed a very large solar project with permits.
5. Muscatine County, Iowa – To quote DJ Khaled, another one: This county is also advancing a solar farm, eliding a handful of upset neighbors.