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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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Amarillo-area residents successfully beat back a $600 million project from Xcel Energy that would have provided useful tax revenue.
Power giant Xcel Energy just suffered a major public relations flap in the Texas Panhandle, scrubbing plans for a solar project amidst harsh backlash from local residents.
On Friday, Xcel Energy withdrew plans to build a $600 million solar project right outside of Rolling Hills, a small, relatively isolated residential neighborhood just north of the city of Amarillo, Texas. The project was part of several solar farms it had proposed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission to meet the load growth created by the state’s AI data center boom. As we’ve covered in The Fight, Texas should’ve been an easier place to do this, and there were few if any legal obstacles standing in the way of the project, dubbed Oneida 2. It was sited on private lands, and Texas counties lack the sort of authority to veto projects you’re used to seeing in, say, Ohio or California.
But a full-on revolt from homeowners and realtors apparently created a public relations crisis.
Mere weeks ago, shortly after word of the project made its way through the small community that is Rolling Hills, more than 60 complaints were filed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission in protest. When Xcel organized a public forum to try and educate the public about the project’s potential benefits, at least 150 residents turned out, overwhelmingly to oppose its construction. This led the Minnesota-based power company to say it would scrap the project entirely.
Xcel has tried to put a happy face on the situation. “We are grateful that so many people from the Rolling Hills neighborhood shared their concerns about this project because it gives us an opportunity to better serve our communities,” the company said in a statement to me. “Moving forward, we will ask for regulatory approval to build more generation sources to meet the needs of our growing economy, but we are taking the lessons from this project seriously.”
But what lessons, exactly, could Xcel have learned? What seems to have happened is that it simply tried to put a solar project in the wrong place, prizing convenience and proximity to an existing electrical grid over the risk of backlash in an area with a conservative, older population that is resistant to change.
Just ask John Coffee, one of the commissioners for Potter County, which includes Amarillo, Rolling Hills, and a lot of characteristically barren Texas landscape. As he told me over the phone this week, this solar farm would’ve been the first utility-scale project in the county. For years, he said, renewable energy developers have explored potentially building a project in the area. He’s entertained those conversations for two big reasons – the potential tax revenue benefits he’s seen elsewhere in Texas; and because ordinarily, a project like Oneida 2 would’ve been welcomed in any of the pockets of brush and plain where people don’t actually live.
“We’re struggling with tax rates and increases and stuff. In the proper location, it would be well-received,” he told me. “The issue is, it’s right next to a residential area.”
Indeed, Oneida 2 would’ve been smack dab up against Rolling Hills, occupying what project maps show would be the land surrounding the neighborhood’s southeast perimeter – truly the sort of encompassing adjacency that anti-solar advocates like to describe as a bogeyman.
Cotton also told me he wasn’t notified about the project’s existence until a few weeks ago, at the same time resident complaints began to reach a fever pitch. He recalled hearing from homeowners who were worried that they’d no longer be able to sell their properties. When I asked him if there was any data backing up the solar farm’s potential damage to home prices, he said he didn’t have hard numbers, but that the concerns he heard directly from the head of Amarillo’s Realtors Association should be evidence enough.
Many of the complaints against Oneida 2 were the sort of stuff we’re used to at The Fight, including fears of fires and stormwater runoff. But Cotton said it really boiled down to property values – and the likelihood that the solar farm would change the cultural fabric in Rolling Hills.
“This is a rural area. There are about 300 homes out there. Everybody sitting out there has half an acre, an acre, two acres, and they like to enjoy the quiet, look out their windows and doors, and see some distance,” he said.
Ironically, Cotton opposed the project on the urging of his constituents, but is now publicly asking Xcel to continue to develop solar in the county. “Hopefully they’ll look at other areas in Potter County,” he told me, adding that at least one resident has already come to him with potential properties the company could acquire. “We could really use the tax money from it. But you just can’t harm a community for tax dollars. That’s not what I’m about.”
I asked Xcel how all this happened and what their plans are next. A spokesperson repeatedly denied my requests to discuss Oneida 2 in any capacity. In a statement, the company told me it “will provide updates if the project is moved to another site,” and that “the company will continue to evaluate whether there is another location within Potter County, or elsewhere, to locate the solar project.”
Meanwhile, Amarillo may be about to welcome data center development because of course, and there’s speculation the first AI Stargate facility may be sited near Amarillo, as well.
City officials will decide in the coming weeks on whether to finalize a key water agreement with a 5,600-acre private “hypergrid” project from Fermi America, a new company cofounded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, says will provide upwards of 11 gigawatts to help fuel artificial intelligence services. Fermi claims that at least 1 gigawatt of power will be available by the end of next year – a lot of power.
The company promises that its “hypergrid” AI campus will use on-site gas and nuclear generation, as well as contracted gas and solar capacity. One thing’s for sure – it definitely won’t be benefiting from a large solar farm nearby anytime soon.
And more of the most important news about renewable projects fighting it out this week.
1. Racine County, Wisconsin – Microsoft is scrapping plans for a data center after fierce opposition from a host community in Wisconsin.
2. Rockingham County, Virginia – Another day, another chokepoint in Dominion Energy’s effort to build more solar energy to power surging load growth in the state, this time in the quaint town of Timberville.
3. Clark County, Ohio – This county is one step closer to its first utility-scale solar project, despite the local government restricting development of new projects.
4. Coles County, Illinois – Speaking of good news, this county reaffirmed the special use permit for Earthrise Energy’s Glacier Moraine solar project, rebuffing loud criticisms from surrounding households.
5. Lee County, Mississippi – It’s full steam ahead for the Jugfork solar project in Mississippi, a Competitive Power Ventures proposal that is expected to feed electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A conversation with Enchanted Rock’s Joel Yu.
This week’s chat was with Joel Yu, senior vice president for policy and external affairs at the data center micro-grid services company Enchanted Rock. Now, Enchanted Rock does work I usually don’t elevate in The Fight – gas-power tracking – but I wanted to talk to him about how conflicts over renewable energy are affecting his business, too. You see, when you talk to solar or wind developers about the potential downsides in this difficult economic environment, they’re willing to be candid … but only to a certain extent. As I expected, someone like Yu who is separated enough from the heartburn that is the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda was able to give me a sober truth: Land use and conflicts over siting are going to advantage fossil fuels in at least some cases.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Help me understand where, from your perspective, the generation for new data centers is going to come from. I know there are gas turbine shortages, but also that solar and wind are dealing with headwinds in the United States given cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are a lot of stories out there about certain technologies coming out to the forefront to solve the problem, whether it’s gas generation or something else. But the scale and the scope of this stuff … I don’t think there is a silver bullet where it’s all going to come from one place.
The Energy Department put out a request for information looking for ways to get to 3 gigawatts quickly, but I don’t think there is any way to do that quickly in the United States. It’s going to take work from generation developers, batteries, thermal generation, emerging storage technologies, and transmission. Reality is, whether it is supply chain issues or technology readiness or the grid’s readiness to accept that load generation profile, none of it is ready. We need investment and innovation on all fronts.
How do conflicts over siting play into solving the data center power problem? Like, how much of the generation that we need for data center development is being held back by those fights?
I do have an intuitive sense that the local siting and permitting concerns around data centers are expanding in scope from the normal noise and water considerations to include impacts to energy affordability and reliability, as well as the selection of certain generation technologies. We’ve seen diesel generation, for example, come into the spotlight. It’s had to do with data center permitting in certain jurisdictions, in places like Maryland and Minnesota. Folks are realizing that a data center comes with a big power plant – their diesel generation. When other power sources fall short, they’ll rely on their diesel more frequently, so folks are raising red flags there. Then, with respect to gas turbines or large cycle units, there’s concerns about viewsheds, noise and cooling requirements, on top of water usage.
How many data center projects are getting their generation on-site versus through the grid today?
Very few are using on-site generation today. There’s a lot of talk about it and interest, but in order to serve our traditional cloud services data center or AI-type loads, they’re looking for really high availability rates. That’s really costly and really difficult to do if you’re off the grid and being serviced by on-site generation.
In the context of policy discussions, co-location has primarily meant baseload resources on sites that are serving the data centers 24/7 – the big stories behind Three Mile Island and the Susquehanna nuclear plant. But to be fair, most data centers operational today have on-site generation. That’s their diesel backup, what backstops the grid reliability.
I think where you’re seeing innovation is modular gas storage technologies and battery storage technologies that try to come in and take the space of the diesel generation that is the standard today, increasing the capability of data centers in terms of on-site power relative to status quo. Renewable power for data centers at scale – talking about hundreds of megawatts at a time – I think land is constraining.
If a data center is looking to scale up and play a balancing act of competing capacity versus land for energy production, the competing capacity is extremely valuable. They’re going to prioritize that first and pack as much as they can into whatever land they have to develop. Data centers trying to procure zero-carbon energy are primarily focused on getting that energy over wires. Grid connection, transmission service for large-scale renewables that can match the scale of natural gas, there’s still very strong demand to stay connected to the grid for reliability and sustainability.
Have you seen the state of conflict around renewable energy development impact data center development?
Not necessarily. There is an opportunity for data center development to coincide with renewable project development from a siting perspective, if they’re going to be co-located or near to each other in remote areas. For some of these multi-gigawatt data centers, the reason they’re out in the middle of nowhere is a combination of favorable permitting and siting conditions for thousands of acres of data center building, substations and transmission –
Sorry, but even for projects not siting generation, if megawatts – if not gigawatts – are held up from coming to the grid over local conflicts, do you think that’s going to impact data center development at all? The affordability conversions? The environmental ones?
Oh yeah, I think so. In the big picture, the concern is if you can integrate large loads reliably and affordably. Governors, state lawmakers are thinking about this, and it’s bubbling up to the federal level. You need a broad set of resources on the grid to provide that adequacy. To the extent you hold up any grid resources, renewable or otherwise, you’re going to be staring down some serious challenges in serving the load. Virginia’s a good example, where local groups have held up large-scale renewable projects in the state, and Dominion’s trying to build a gas peaker plant that’s being debated, too. But in the meantime, it is Data Center Alley, and there are gigawatts of data centers that continue to want to get in and get online as quickly as possible. But the resources to serve that load are not coming online in time.
The push toward co-location probably does favor thermal generation and battery storage technologies over straight renewable energy resources. But a battery can’t cover 24/7 use cases for a data center, and neither will our unit. We’re positioned to be a bridge resource for 24/7 use for a few years until they can get more power to the market, and then we can be a flexible backup resource – not a replacement for the large-scale and transmission-connected baseload power resources, like solar and wind. Texas has benefited from huge deployments of solar and wind. That has trickled down to lower electricity costs. Those resources can’t do it alone, and there’s thermal to balance the system, but you need it all to meet the load growth.