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You might even call the Energy Secretary ... Chris Wrong.
I resent, as a rule, any news story about a politician’s social media presence. The social media post is simultaneously the lowest form of political communication and, for the journalist, the lowest hanging fruit. It is too easy to sit at your laptop, read tweets, and then write about them.
But I speak for hundreds of engineers, policy wonks, and hangers-on across the world of energy and climate when I ask: What the heck is happening with Chris Wright’s Twitter account?
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.
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More than a quarter say they’re being hit hard, according to a Heatmap Pro poll.
Most Americans say that rising electricity bills are having at least “a decent amount” of impact on their household finances, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll.
The poll, which surveyed more than 3,700 registered voters last month, gives context to how electricity prices have come to dominate national headlines in recent months — and why they’ve become an urgent issue at the state and local level in a few key regions.
On the 2024 campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to cut voters’ power bills in half within a year of getting elected. So far, that hasn’t happened: Electricity prices have risen more than twice as fast as inflation over the past 12 months and are still rising, according to government data.
Voters are beginning to feel the squeeze from that inflation. In our poll, 26% of American registered voters said that rising electricity prices were having “a lot” of impact on their personal finances. Another 31% said that rising prices were having a “decent amount” of impact.
Still, for about 40% of the country, those high prices are more a pinch than a pain. Thirty percent of registered voters said that rising prices only had “a little bit” of impact on their personal finances, while 9% said they were having “none at all.” There wasn’t a significant partisan division in sensitivity to the high prices.
The survey did show some regional distinctions, however. In the Northeast, 63% of registered voters reported that rising power prices were causing them “a lot” or “a decent amount” of trouble. In the Midwest, only 52% of voters told the poll the same thing. The South, with 56%, and the West, with 61%, landed somewhere in between.
As might be expected, lower-income voters described more trouble. More than 70% of voters with household income below $50,000 a year said that rising power bills were having “a lot” of impact on their finances. Some 62% of voters earning less than $100,000 also described issues. So did 59% of white voters without a college degree.
The rising cost of power has become a major question in New Jersey’s political race, where it has haunted ads and led Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate, to promise to freeze power rates for a year if she is elected.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said that rising electricity costs are his No. 1 concern as energy secretary, although he has conceded the Trump administration is “going to get blamed” for surging power rates. The Trump administration has revoked permits for new offshore projects along the East Coast, and congressional Republicans have ended tax credits for solar and wind energy.
Wright told Politico in August that he blames “momentum of the Obama-Biden policies” for the surging power rates. Donald Trump was president from 2017 to 2021, after Obama and before Biden.
On Trump’s coal push, PJM’s progress, and PG&E’s spending plan
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is gaining wind intensity this week, bringing flooding rain and storm surge to the southeastern U.S. • Hurricane Humberto, now a Category 4 storm, is passing west of Bermuda, bringing marine hazards to the U.S. East Coast • Typhoon Bualoi is pummeling the Philippines and Vietnam, where it’s already killed a dozen people.
If you were planning to cash in on the $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an electric vehicle, you’d better make moves. Today’s the last day to claim the so-called 30D tax credit. Congress moved the expiration date for the writeoff to September 30 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That doesn’t mean all government incentives for EVs are going away. New York still offers a $2,000 “Drive Clean Rebate” for some vehicles, and California offers up to $7,000 in rebates. Prices for new electric cars are still higher than those for comparable internal combustion vehicles, a frustratingly persistent condition the federal tax credit was meant to help address. Owning an EV has its own rewards, however, including lower fuel and maintenance costs over time. For more on how to go about choosing an EV, here’s Andrew Moseman’s guide from our Decarbonize Your Life series.
Stacks at the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
The Trump administration is opening more than 13 million acres of federal land to leasing for new coal mines. And it’s providing funding to keep demand for coal roaring. The Department of Energy announced Monday it will offer $625 million to upgrade, reopen, and “modernize” coal-fired power plants across the country.
It’s a sign of the trend Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin clocked in July: “Global coal demand is rising,” he wrote, “and America wants in.” Indeed, in a press release, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright boasted that the new funding would “keep our nation’s coal plants operating” and would ultimately help lower rising electricity prices. “Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Wright said. “Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
The Trump administration is shutting down or shrinking roughly one third of the federal offices that track bird populations after hurricanes, map megafire risks in the Midwest, figure out new ways to fight invasive plants, and prepare communities’ stormwater drains against intense flooding. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers “are expected to drastically wind down and possibly close after Tuesday because of a lack of funds,” The Washington Post reported Monday. The centers in the South Central, Northeast, and Pacific Islands regions, which “collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department,” are potentially facing permanent closure.
The shuttering isn’t linked to a potential government shutdown, and appears planned as part of the Trump administration’s broader cuts to federal research. “We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor, told the newspaper. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, utility giant Constellation, and power company Talen came together to propose a way to meet electricity needs in the nation’s largest power grid. Under their plan, the PJM Interconnection would allow large power users to volunteer for time-limited periods of reducing electricity demand when the grid is stressed. The proposal also outlines plans for time-limited use of backup generation. If making the load more flexible doesn’t work, PJM would increase the supply of firm power through procurement.
The pitch comes in response to an earlier mandatory curtailment proposal from PJM, which drew fierce blowback from many of the companies that wrote up this alternative. (“Everyone hates it,” Matthew wrote.) As analyst Aniruddh Mohan noted, PJM ultimately withdrew its initial load flexibility proposal.
Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans to spend $73 billion on upgrades to the electrical grid in California to meet the surge in demand from data centers. PG&E, as it’s known, has been deemed responsible for multiple large-scale wildfires in recent years, incurring billions in damages. As the utility told investors on a call Monday, the new investment plan “comes on the heels” of new liability reforms in the state. Under Senate Bill 254, the state expanded its wildfire fund by $18 billion and “acknowledged that the utilities and their customers cannot continue to carry the full burden of climate-driven catastrophic wildfires, especially when the utility has acted prudently,” PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe said, according to Power magazine. The utility had filed a proposal in March to build 700 miles of underground power lines between 2026 and 2028 and complete 500 miles of additional wildfire safety system upgrades by next year.
Fervo Energy, the company using fracking technology to harness the planet’s molten energy, is undeniably leading the race to commercialize next-generation geothermal. But a clear second-place contender emerged Tuesday when XGS Energy released the results from its first commercial test, the company told Heatmap exclusively. The startup’s system outperformed the executives’ expectations, setting the stage for full-scale development. While Fervo’s technology represents what’s known as “enhanced” geothermal system, XGS’ approach is what’s known as “advanced” geothermal systems that rely on closed-loop infrastructure, as Matthew previously explained.
The company is vying to challenge Fervo for leadership in the next-generation geothermal market.
The geothermal startup XGS Energy has now completed four months of tests to see whether its technology can maintain steady production of heat at temperatures above what’s needed to generate energy. Over 3,000 hours, the company monitored the drilling process and checked how heat flowed from its wells, the status of their temperature, and how precisely XGS’ mathematical predictions matched the outcome of the testing.
The results, which the company shared exclusively with Heatmap, were “almost too good,” XGS CEO Josh Prueher told me.
“Had we been within 10% of predictive performance, we would have been pretty happy with the outcome,” Prueher said. “Turns out we were within 2% under a variety of different parameters.”
“It worked like a charm,” he said.
To understand what makes XGS Energy stand out among the geothermal startups racing to commercialize next-generation technology, it helps to compare the company to its fellow Houston-based rival that’s currently leading the sector, Fervo Energy. Unlike Fervo, XGS doesn’t use fracking technology to drill horizontal wells in pursuit of hot, dry rocks from which to harvest energy.
Instead, XGS drills vertical wells and inserts a closed steel pipe with water and fills the gap between the metal and the rock with a patented slurry that conducts heat. Technology like Fervo’s requires pumping cold water over the fractured hot rocks to harvest heat. But with its method, XGS claims, it avoids losing any water.
The testing took place off the US-395 highway in a volcanic field in California’s Mojave desert, sandwiched between the eastern edge of the Sequoia National Park and western border of Death Valley National Park. The geothermal field XGS tapped is already actively producing energy for the Coso Operating Company, which runs a 270-megawatt geothermal power plant on the land. The results, the company said, showed the “unprecedented predictability and active control of field performance” of XGS’ technology “versus other geothermal systems, which are subject to complex and continuously changing subsurface reservoir conditions.”
At least one outside observer agreed. “This is impressive, and something to be proud of,” Advait Arun, an energy analyst and senior associate at the think tank Center for Energy Enterprise who co-authored a recent report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
While the 3,000 hours of testing still falls short of the year’s worth of data Fervo has produced at one of its sites, it’s the longest any other competitor in the space has successfully demonstrated its approach so far, Arun said.
“These guys would be second to Fervo in terms of their ability to prove a commercial-scale performance test,” he added.
XGS is now poised to build a 150-megawatt power plant for Meta’s New Mexico data centers. Even after that’s complete, however, Prueher said the surrounding area has nearly 3 gigawatts of untapped heat. In California, where the company is headquartered and carried out its demonstration project, there’s a growing need for clean power sources that don’t further tax the depleted water table.
“A lot of the historical sensitivities around developing in California — a state where, like many others, water usage for industrial development is kind of a no-no — because we don’t need water, we have some real advantages,” Prueher said.
At a moment when surging demand from data centers is supercharging dealmaking in the electricity sector, Prueher said XGS is looking beyond the boom from the artificial intelligence buildout.
“It’s not about data centers,” he said. “It really is just the fundamental power needs of California. With the restrictions around water usage, we line up really, really well for California.”
For now, the company remains focused on the U.S. But Prueher said XGS is well suited to export its technology to East Asia, as well, where countries along the Pacific Rim have vast geothermal potential and growing electricity demand but limited development. XGS already has ties to the Philippines and “may actually be subsurface” — i.e. digging wells — there by the end of 2026, Prueher told me.
The “big enchilada,” he said, would be establishing a foothold in Japan, where the onsen hotspring industry has long protested geothermal development they say could diminish the resource that makes the ancient bathhouse tradition possible. Prueher told me his technology mitigates concerns over fracking-induced earthquakes, as well.
For now, he said, his main market is in the fast-growing Southwest. The executive compared this moment to 2021, when he worked at a battery company. That February, Winter Storm Uri collapsed the Texas grid as natural gas pipes froze and demand for electricity to heat homes designed to stay cool in a typically arid climate skyrocketed. Back then, he said, batteries were “still a pretty new asset class.”
“People were still uncertain about how it would perform,” Prueher said. But his company was “able to keep our batteries up and operating 100% of the time, no one minute of downtime during that entire episode.”
“From a market perspective, the storm showed that, if you can bring this new type of technology into the market, it can really deliver remarkable value,” he added. “We made 10 years of revenue in six days.”
In a lot of ways, he went on, “this is the same thing.”
“We’ve proven a technology is reliable,” Prueher said. “It works at commercial scale over a period of time. We would regard this as a real pivot point in the industry.”