Energy Secretary Chris Wright vows to reverse Biden climate policies, and says renewables can’t replace natural gas,
“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” Wright said at the S&P Global energy conference in Las Vegas and dismissed the previous administration’s focus on climate as “myopic.”
Natural gas is responsible for 43% of U.S. electricity production. There “is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” Wright said.
This article examines the veracity of this statement.
The following table is an AI generated analysis of the levelized cost of natural gas at 50 and 90 percent capacities.
These costs range from between $.0263 and $.0554 per kilowatt hour.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the average size of a natural gas-fired combined-cycle power plant is around 500 megawatts (MW) for power blocks installed between 2002 and 2014, with newer plants tending to be larger, reaching an average of 820 MW in 2017 and showed that about 50% of the plants in the 820 MW range were 1,000 MW or greater.
Visual Capitalist showed that the total energy consumption in 2023 was 620 Exajoules and that 144 of those was for natural gas. 
The average cost NG for the year was $2.57 per million British thermal units for a total of $2.3 trillion dollars.
The 144 EJ of natural gas represents 23% of the 19.9 terawatts of energy consumed in 2023 for a total consumption of about 4.6 terawatts.
Thirty one thousand Thermodynamic Geoengineering would produce 31 terawatts of power at a cost of $2.6 trillion dollars per year or 28% of the cost of all energy consumed in 2023 including natural gas per the following table.
The discounted cost for Thermodynamic Geoengineering is derived from the 2024 Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) Economics: Updates and Strategies which notes that the latest heat exchangers can reduce the OTEC by 33 percent and the previous analysis of Paul Curto, former Chief Technologist for NASA and the studies of Nagan Srinivasan that show that a deep water condenser design for OTEC like Thermodynamic Geoengineering would be 30% cheaper than the conventional design.
When you include that environmental cost of burning fossil fuels like natural gas, Thermodynamic Geoengineering is 16% of the cost of a combined basket of all energy sources.
Extrapolating from the AI study of natural gas, Thermodynamic Geoengineering produce power would between $.008 and $.017 per kilowatt hour.
The energy secretary said the Trump administration supports anything that adds to “affordable, reliable, secure energy.”
Which leads to only one conclusion, the American public are being gaslit about the cost of their energy.
