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.
