Energy Secretary Chris Wright on the Future of American Energy | All-In Summit 2025

0:00Brake, frack, frack, and drill, baby drill. He's all in. I'm bringing common sense back to energy. More energy is better than less energy. The US oil industry has become more productive than ever. The long talked about nuclear redness on it is finally going to happen. Unleash American energy, American entrepreneurship, American innovation. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the United States Secretary of Energy, Chris That's right.

0:36There he is. Come on, H. Good to see you. Oh, too! Let's go. Awesome. Can you see you? Very good to see you. Well, thanks for putting up with us again. I know that the last time was such a joy for you. That is a joy. It was a joy. For those of you who missed it, J .Kell decided to turn our very short panel into a debate about batteries. And no, it's solar. Well, the solar plays. He's like, just throws in batteries on the solar, and then it works great. What do you mean? Like, OK. But thank you for being here. Yesterday, we were talking about the panel, and Shama said, why are we talking about nuclear?

1:12It's not even real. We shouldn't be doing this. Which I think is a really good way. I don't know. Let me be clear. Nuclear is small. It's interesting, but it's the pimple on the dog's ass. And so I just want to give you a statistic, and get you to respond to the future state of nuclear in this country. It's, I think, about 4 ,000 bucks a kilogram for enriched uranium to go into a nuclear power plant. To have a gigawatt nuclear power plant is only burning 3 to 4 million bucks. Oh, sorry, it's only burning about 3 to 4 million of electricity per day for 12 ,000 bucks of fuel. of uranium fuel. So the incredible production capacity of nuclear is unmatched with any other energy source.

1:54Why does it take so long? And why does it then cost billions of dollars? And when I can turn $12 ,000 of fuel into $4 million of electricity, what's going on in the structural challenges with scalability of nuclear, particularly in the United States? And why is it not a real path to kind of scalable energy production in this country for us right now. I mean, it will be in the long run. For the reason you just said, the greatest energy density. That's the key thing. If you can get a lot out of a little, that's got running room. But nuclear involves something people can't see and they can't understand.

2:32And therefore, it's easy to scare people about. So nuclear really has been a victim of fear in our world. It's the safest form of energy production we've ever seen. for amount of energy is produced and the amount of negative impacts. But people think it's the scariest and the most dangerous. So if you make it very long, very bureaucratic to permit things, if you make it so that, therefore you've got a so over -design and so over -engineer everything, it's so hard to permit enrichment. So you make everything expensive and you make everything move slow. And then you have other energy sources that turn on and off and you pay people a lot to build those things.

3:11That also erodes the economics of nuclear of something that's reliable. So we, meaning the government, has killed nuclear over the last four generations, and the goal of the Trump administration is to reverse that strangulation of nuclear and let it fly again. But you're right, it'll take some time. Sorry, but let me just make one with what is China doing differently? I hate to say it, but just more rational. You know, China is just, they're worried about if nuclear accident happens and it injures people, makes them sick, then they're gonna look bad. That's gonna kill them. But there's their Design criterion or just for human safety, not for getting the environmental groups off them or doubling down because someone else will be mad at them.

3:56So they're just pragmatic. They're building reactors faster and therefore cheaper and they've got 20 plus under construction right now. Chris, let's break down the challenge as the world needs an infinite amount of electrons and an infinite amount of heat Fair. Yes Why don't you just ground people on where we get those things today and You know like what percentage comes from coal what percentage comes from that gas what percentage comes from nuclear globally just so that we can Maybe figure out where we need to go and how do we get this more of this stuff now? Yeah, so in 1973 and I used that year because that's the yum Kapoor war That's when oil prices tripled later in the decade they doubled again in the Iranian Revolution So we said we got to get off oil and gas so in 1973 oil gas and coal provided 85 % of global energy and last year 2024 85 % of global energy so they and they've continued to grow over that 50 years, natural gas is grown 3 % compound annual growth rate, coal 2 % oil 1 % oil is the most expensive and most flexible.

5:05coal is cheapest if you don't have infrastructure, natural gas can be the cheapest if you have infrastructure. So it's growing the fastest natural gas is the fastest growing energy source. So that's 85 % from hydrocarbons, 4 % from nuclear, used to be 6th year 2000 and today 3 % a little less than 3 % of total energy comes from wind solar and batteries. Hydro is in there, geothermal is in there. The biggest component I didn't mention is traditional biomass burning wood. That is twice the total global energy of wind solar and batteries combined. Two billion people still cook their daily meals and heat their homes burning wood indoors.

5:51two to three million easily preventable deaths a year to switch out that wood burning and liberation of women with just a simple propane stove. There was a chart that got a lot of distribution on X over the weekend which was just the rise in electricity prices in the United States. And can you sort of explain why that's happening and how we get around it so that it doesn't trigger inflation and other kind of like pernicious things that we don't want to see. It is a huge challenge. It's a meaningful part of the reason why President Trump got elected. Energy exists, it's the sector of the economy that enables everything else.

6:37If you get energy wrong, everything hurts, and particularly for low income people. So look, the backbone of our electricity grid has been coal and hydro. Those are the two electricity sources we started with. Then oil got added. We used to get a lot of electricity from oil very little today, except in Puerto Rico or Hawaii, because oil is flexible and you can transport it more easily. Today, the backbone of our electricity grid has been coal, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear. Today, natural gas is 43 % of our electricity. Nuclear is about 20%. coal was over 50%, but now it's only about 15 % or 16%.

7:20Together, they're 80 % of U .S. We did put in hydro. They're about 83 % of U .S. electricity. And for 100 years, we had a declining inflation adjusted price of electricity. It's just an infrastructure for our country. It boomed in this 60s and 70s as people got air conditioning for the first time, drove up electricity to man a lot. And then about Obama administration really launched it, but this sort of overwrought, and I think irrational fear of climate change, it wasn't a rational, let's look at the math on the trade -offs, it was just sort of a reason politicians could do things. So we started to spend a huge amount of money to subsidize the building of what are called zero carbon, of course they're nothing of the sort, But they are lower carbon electricity sources wind and solar.

8:13They're all made out of hydrocarbons made with hydrocarbons maintained and installed with hydrocarbons But I call them derivative energy production sources than them But think about that if you add on to the electricity grid a bunch of sources that sometimes provide electricity and and sometimes don't, what's the value of that? Like are there any customers for electricity? You turn on your lightswitch, and it'll turn on when the wind starts blowing or the sun comes from out of the cloud. And then in the middle of the football game, the sun went behind the cloud and the football game will turn off.

8:50You're in the middle of a surgery and those things go off. So of course there's no customers for that. But if you put them on a grid that has these sort of reliable, despachable resources, What do they have to do now? They have to turn up and down as the wind blows or the sun shines. So all you... Peak demand for electricity is what a grid is designed for. Right? When it's really cold in a winter evening, when everyone comes home to work, if electricity goes out and stays out that night, thousands of people will die. Texas had 200 plus deaths just a few years ago with it with an electricity outage.

9:30So you have to design the grid to heat at peak demand. So at peak demand in the winter time is in the evening and it's cold. And it's cold because a high pressure system and air masses come down from the north and sits there. So there's no wind during a high pressure system. And it's in the evening so there's no sun. So you're not getting any electricity for wind or solar at inauguration day back east. At peak demand, we got 2 to 3 % from wind solar and batteries. The traditional grid has to supply everything. And that's at peak demand. So if you have traditional sources that can supply peak demand, of course, they can supply it every other time.

10:08Is that why the utilities keep raising the prices? Is just the complexity of servicing all of this and building all of this? Because you're adding new sources on, and you have to build new transmission lines. and you've got to operate the traditional sources in a more complicated fashion. And wind, the wind blows, what happens when the wind blows? Nuclear power plants operate relatively steady, coal plants you can turn up and down but slowly. So when the wind starts to blow, natural gas turns down a little bit. You generate a little less electricity to balance out the increased wind power. The government pays that wind power producer four cents a kilowatt hour in a subsidy to pay it.

10:48That's straight from the federal government to the provider of that wind power. The utility pays something for that wind power. The avoided cost is when you burn a little bit less natural gas. If you're in Texas, that's two cents for one kilowatt hours worth of gas. If you're in New England, that could be three or four cents of a avoided cost. That's less than the government subsidy to produce that. little loan the utility or my former home state of Colorado where they they have additional subsidies and mandates that we must get our electricity or some percent of our electricity from these other sources but if you're not despatchable you're not adding to the peak capacity of a grid you're just a parasite.

11:30Parasites are expensive. Let me ask you a little bit about China. In 2024 they have installed two to three times the amount of solar that America did per capita. They also have 33 nuclear power plants under construction, 200 planned. Your administration, David included, you keep talking about clean, beautiful coal. You keep dissing solar and batteries and wind and deriding it like you just did. What does China, you keep talking about NACAS and clean, beautiful coal? What is China understand and that you don't. Okay. That, so great. And tell me how beautiful and clean the coal is and how terrible and ugly these windmills are.

12:13Please explain to us what we're missing. Well, of course, coal has been the biggest source of global electricity for 125 years. That's as long as we have good data and it will be for decades more. So I know you don't like it, but it's not going away. It's by far and away the biggest source of electricity in China. and they built a hundred coal plants last year. They built capacity more than almost every country in the world has new capacity. So they do build a lot of wind and solar. It's still a very small percent of their energy, just like it is here, but they have an awesome industry of exporting those products around the world.

12:46They're over 80 % of the solar, they don't export much coal at all actually. They export solar. All of their 80 % of the solar supply chain. And think about this. Is that why you guys are down on it that we would have to buy the solar panels from them because it seems like you're looking backwards and China's looking forward. That's where the disconnect is coming from me. But there's no there there. There is no there in solar and battery so Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And if we could make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet.

13:23Solar never gets to 10 % of global energy. Solar has a future and so after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own as an energy source, it has roles, there's remote power that in the United Arab Emirates, they're building a firm one gigawatt solar, eight gigawatts of panels and a ton of batteries, they've got great sun resources, they have low cost labor, they can build things there, solar has a role, but we've had this inflated role that somehow the world is going to run on solar panels. There's no math that shows that it'll ever happen, and China doesn't believe it for a moment.

13:58But think of it great. It's still in three times as many as us per capita then. And why are they so effective in installing nuclear power plants? This is what I don't know if you're gaslighting us, no pun intended. And this is just like a Trump magazine where we have to dis natural sources. But do you really want to dig coal out and burn it and pollute the environment that we're giving to our kids? I want energy to better human lives. and the cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources, the other thing we should say electricity delivers 20 % of global energy, wrapped the whole planet solar panel, you got 20 % of energy delivered.

14:38Where's the other 80 % going to come from? It's processed heat, it's transportation fuels to run jets, to run ships, that's not going to come from solar. Let me ever let me ask like maybe we can just and I'll follow up on Jason's question One of the challenges with natural gas, which is actually methane is that as a greenhouse gas methane is roughly called it 80 times more heat Capacitive than CO2 so one of the pushbacks on that gas historically has been if there's even 1 % leakage in the supply lines It's worse than coal or oil or some other sort of hydrocarbon -based fuel source even though if you have no leakage, it's better.

15:15It has probably what half or something of the footprint. But importantly, what's the administration's view on putting carbon into the atmosphere? As a cost to society. And I don't ask that in an antagonistic way. I'm just like, because I met with a foreign minister from a European nation the other day, a couple of weeks ago, and the whole delegation, this was a big topic, like what is the difference between our point of view, which they have, No carbon in the atmosphere spend all the money to keep that from happening and our point of view and I just ask for like Like a hope level set a little bit on What's the point of view on where carbon goes in the atmosphere over time and how important it is to mitigate that so like everything else is about looking at the facts and the numbers and the data It's we don't want to be cute like China We and of course I think you misunderstand China's plan for wind and solar but we want to look at the facts.

16:09How big of a deal is climate change today? It is a real physical phenomenon. We've raised atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50 % from burning hydrocarbons, from developing a modern world. It's a real thing. It absorbs in for red radiation. It's contributed to some warming. But if you look at the math and the economics of it, it's just not even close to top 10 problem in the world today. If you look at the intergovernmental panel on climate change economics projections to the end of this century. Nobody knows what the world's going to look like in the end of this century, but think of the intergovernmental panel on climate change.

16:46These are the people that are dedicating their lives to work on climate change. Their estimates range from 0 .2 to maybe 3, 4 % reduction in per capita income at the end of this century. So that's in 75 years, we might lose a couple months, we might lose a year of economic growth in 75 years. That's a bummer. It's not nothing, but compared to two to three million people dying simply because they don't have a clean cooking stove. And of course, the political movement that's too focused on climate change has been against lending or bringing any capital to the developing world so that they can live longer healthier lives.

17:29They can get clean cooking stoves. They can get industry. So the administration is humans first. The previous administration, climate change was first. Energy was a subset of climate change. Human lives were a subset of energy. For this administration, it's the opposite. Humans first. Energy is the great enabler of human quality of life. And climate change should play the appropriate role. Let me just say, let me just bring to Mahten for a second here, because I think maybe to level set this, It felt like obviously, you know, Al Gore and the climate change movement were completely wrong, were not sitting in three feet of water right now.

18:12It was overblown, but you agreed that it exists. I've never heard of a J -Caliphate something like that. We should be concerned about. But I just call Boston Strikes. Chimoff, you are invested heavily in solar. You were just talking this weekend about your batteries. and batteries and solar. So when is what we're hearing here, just politics and like one group went too far left, this group is going too far, and then you actually believe. I believe, I agree with Chris. Let me give you my framework. First of all, energy, in my opinion, is not a climate change issue. Energy is a national security issue.

18:48So the reason why, and everybody cherry picks a chart. Let me show this little nuclear chart going up into the right for China, wake up people. China has no access to natural resources. The reason they do everything, the real accurate chart, if you want to be on top of this issue, is what are they investing in? They're investing in every form of energy production. Why? Because if push comes to shove in the future, China cannot be reliant on anybody for energy. It is the same in the United States. Okay? So that's number one. That's why they're investing in everything. So it's inaccurate to cherry pick the thing that helps you reinforce your bias.

19:27This is why I find nuclear such a kind of a dead end conversation boring. The real conversation is the strategic gameplay of what's happening on the field. That's number one. Number two, in the United States, my fundamental belief is that the utilities are broken. Because no matter how cheap you make the making of the energy, and I really don't care how you make it, you have to spend an inordinate amount of money transmitting it and distributing it. And all of that indirection is what the average consumer pays. So if you are smart, eventually you will say to yourself, I'll just make it myself.

20:05Yes. And that doesn't have to compete with Chris's vision because what Chris has to do is enable the broader framework for industry, for manufacturing, for transportation. We can't do that. My belief is that the largest utility in the United States will be a distributed utility of homeowners. That's a solar and very complimentary. And that means solar and batteries at home because you're obviously not putting... Yes, because you're not going to put a nuclear reactor on your daughter's bed. Who's going to do that? So let's not have this... Actually, nobody can do that. And Reedberg is an investment in a small modular nuclear gen 4.

20:41It's going to go in my daughter's bed. Well, when you put it under your daughter's bed, call me. Okay. And Jay, let me come back on that. I'm not anti -solar. I just sound that way. I constantly I just talked to numbers of it. Okay. I worked in solar energy I bought thousands of solar energy panels to power instruments remotely I've supported money to bring them to Africa to charge cell phones and bring lights I'm for all energy sources that better human lives, okay, but I'm for I'm for math I'm for looking at numbers and by the way as a person that's that's in the solar and storage business I also like the math the math before was It was un -economic.

21:17You have a lot of people, homeowners, that are going to suffer because they have all of these solar projects that they put on their homes by the shadiest of companies that were subsidized by these things. So as a competitor in the market, the first thing I applauded was get these stupid subsidies away, let the best companies compete. Let us win. Secretary, let me... Exactly. Let me just change the topic for a minute. The Department of Energy in addition to being responsible for progressing energy production in the United States and our infrastructure is also the facilitator, the administrator of all of our national labs.

21:54And these labs do some of the most important pure research in the world. We have the world's first cyclotron up at Lawrence Berkeley lab where I used to work for a few years. I've worked at a DOE lab. We have obviously at Al -Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos. I mean, there's labs all over the country that are doing pure research that create fundamental breakthroughs that ultimately lead to industrial success for America. This administration's published out of the OMB massive budget cuts to some of this research. How do you address that topic as the Secretary of Energy? How do you facilitate conversation with the White House and how do you view the importance of this research in the United States?

22:34Yes, so the 17 national labs we have across the country most of them created soon after World War II Their original use was the Manhattan Project win World War II and develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany The greatest group science ever done simply phenomenal. I love the 17 national labs around our country I'm passionate about their value for our country for their value for the human spirit What it means to try to probe to understand what's fundamental about nature? What is dark matter? How do neutrinos really behave? We don't have commercial applications for those in the next five or ten years.

23:14I take that back. We do have a neutrino application. But I don't believe you have to have immediate commercial applications for the science to be worth doing at our labs. They are gems. They are places of scientific discovery. Tons of innovations we use today, MRI machines. Those came out of work done at our national labs. So yes, I came to Washington Why we were collecting a dollar in taxes and spending a dollar 40 for every dollar in taxes? That is a train wreck. I am passionate about shrinking government expenditures in the in the one big beautiful bill We cut over 500 billion dollars of subsidies for energy technologies.

23:53I wanted to cut the full one trillion all of them not successful in that, but the much smaller amount of money, around $10 billion we spend every year for these 17 national labs. I've been a passionate defender to stop cuts to that. And I think I will succeed at that. That's great. I will succeed at that. That's great to hear. These are critically important things. And Chris, and you have members in Congress that support you in that representation? Absolutely. And of course across the administration, you come in, you want to cut everything. I get it. All I'm doing is in my little narrow area of science, technology, and nuclear weapons is saying let's be smart and thoughtful about what we should grow.

24:36Chris, very narrow question. Sax, well sorry, Sax, go ahead. So let's talk about AI data centers for a second. So we know that there's this huge infrastructure investment happening. I think it's been estimated that we're going to need, I don't know, at least dozens of gigawatts of new energy to power these data centers just over the next several years. How are we going to do that? Where is that going to come from? How do you avoid the increase in residential rates because of that? A huge challenge. And David, this problem is going to keep getting worse. We saw retail electricity prices rose 25 % during the Biden administration.

25:09Wholesale electricity prices rose far more than that, over 50%. So we have done great damage to our electricity grid. In the dialogue, we were just having. Not that I don't like those technologies. I don't like expensive electricity. It's a challenge. The fastest growing energy source in the world and the fastest solution we have to power data centers is natural gas. Just by far the cheapest, of course we have supply chain issues with turbines there, but people are ramping up capacity to build those. There's simpler things we can do. There's environmental regulations that peak our gas turbines.

25:45They're only allowed to run a certain number of hours in a year. Oh, that's what they're permitted for. We have a natural gas generator, we can burn more gas and generate more electricity cheaply, and we're not going to do it because we had some climate regs that limited that. We can fix problems like that. There's also a bunch of backup generators, not just at data centers, but elsewhere around the world that can't sell electricity into the grid. They don't have air permits to be regular providers. We don't need more electrons. We need more electrons. We only need more electrons. A few hours a year at peak demand.

26:20We have slack capacity, 98 % of the time huge amount in our grid. So what we need is, how from existing assets can you hit that peak capacity? We're gonna change some regulations. So all those backup generators when we hit those peak hours, we're gonna turn on those diesel generators of those natural gas generators. Know that climate isn't gonna collapse because we ran diesel generators for a few hours, but it's gonna allow us to have gigawatts more of firm electric generating capacity on the grid we have today. Chris, can you explain to us how much flexibility can you have on federal lands for just you and the Trump administration and maybe subsequent administrations who are in charge to control this without the involvement of state and local actors and all of these other third party organizations to slow these things down.