Christopher Wright, President Trump’s choice for energy secretary, has been well received in the energy industry.
He gets good marks for being of the industry instead of another discipline, parachuted into the Department of Energy — which has often been the case under both Republican and Democratic presidents. One DOE secretary was a dentist, another was a Coca-Cola Company president, another was an admiral, and several were political operatives.
So it is with some relief that the components of the energy industry — from pipelines to oil and gas companies to the vast, sprawling electric utility sector, with its nearly 3,000 separate utilities — have learned that Trump’s energy secretary is someone who understands energy.
On LinkedIn, Wright says of himself, “Tech nerd turned entrepreneur. Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Liberty Energy. Passion for bringing the benefits of energy to every country in the world. I am all in on energy from my start in nuclear, solar and geothermal to my current efforts in oil and gas and next generation geothermal. I don’t care where energy comes, as long as it is secure, reliable, affordable and betters human lives.”
Wright lands in a department that is more of a vast archipelago than a conventional cabinet department. It is responsible not just for energy and all of its complexities, but also for the U.S. nuclear weapons program: the design, construction, verification and stockpile. Its remit runs from making nuclear pits in Texas to designing new weapons and making sure, via computer simulation, they will work.
The secretary is de facto America’s chief scientist and controls the DOE’s 17 national laboratories, a research establishment that is the envy of the world. Some secretaries have arrived knowing little about what the labs do and have left not having gotten a good grasp on their work.
Note to Wright: Mr. Secretary, very soon you will find the labs are your greatest asset. They are your shock troops and will do whatever your bidding, so long as you defend them from predators in Congress and elsewhere in the administration, who would cut their funding or limit the scope of their activities.
The labs are also the department’s best lobbyists. Their influence with the congressional delegations is considerable; members of Congress simply don’t go against the labs. They are large employers and bring in tranches of federal money.
In New Mexico, Sandia and Los Alamos national labs are major employers. In California, the impact of Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national labs is notable.
The labs study everything from corrosion in naval vessels to cancer. They played a key role in the Human Genome Project and are in the forefront of artificial intelligence, although their presence there is less heralded than that of commercial companies.
The fact is that DOE is much more than it seems, and energy is one leaf in its diverse portfolio. For example, it monitors nuclear detonation worldwide and is working on a new generation of batteries for space exploration.
Without worrying about the labs too much, Wright will have enough to do with the “national energy emergency” that Trump has declared. This would seem, along with promises to slash permitting, to be aimed at increasing coal, oil and gas production.
Electricity is more problematic.
For example, Trump has halted payments committed under the Biden administration to strengthen the grid and has suspended new offshore wind power leases.
The president’s antipathy to the wind generation will be difficult for Wright to deal with. He comes from the West and knows that the major wind resource there is critical to utilities.
Texas, desperately short of electricity anyway, is the nation’s largest wind generator and about a third of its power is now supplied by wind. Many Texas utilities have plans to add more wind power and, at this point, the only known impediment is transmission. Even in Texas, the wind resource and the demand centers are far apart.
Equally, utilities have invested heavily in a carbon-free future, and — with the exception of gas — they have little interest in going back to burning more coal and oil for generation.
Wright will also have decisions to make about nuclear power and how to get the new generation of small modular reactors across the finish line and widely deployed — an issue further complicated by the imminent arrival of the first fusion power plants. Whether these will deliver isn’t known, but they are complicating factors. The nuclear industry is seeking first-of-kind funding.
Even if there are mandates or irresistible incentives, utilities aren’t going to want to go back to fossil fuels, if their local regulators allow — which is problematic, as they will expect that future administrations will reverse the Trump fossil fuel initiatives.
Wright may be the right man, but running DOE won’t be an easy.
He is a graduate of MIT, which should endear him to the lab community. He may appreciate that entrée.