The Republican administration will not be sworn in until Monday (20th January) but already the heat is rising on energy and climate policy following Chris Wright’s testimony at a Senate confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary.
While the tone was largely equable for the first hour and 11 minutes, the mood changed when Senator Alex Padilla from California began questioning the CEO of Liberty Energy.
He put Wright on the spot about social media comments relating to climate change as ‘hype’, at a time when Los Angeles struggles to come to terms with widespread destruction from the wildfires. “Tell that to the families of the more than two dozen lost,” he said.
While Wright was mindful not to repeat the word, he said he stood by his past comments – which seemed to jar with earlier comments in the hearing, that he has been following climate change for 20 years and it’s “a global, real issue”.
While one hearing can’t be construed as policy, on this evidence the new adminstration will look to keep all the energy balls in the air, maintaining support for oil, gas and LNG while fostering new renewable technologies, and one clear takeaway was a renewed push behind nuclear.
“We want more energy in the world – it’s what makes people’s lives better,” he said. “There isn’t dirty and clean, they all have different trade offs. It’s hard to displace hydrocarbons in the global energy system. Through market forces and leadership we are going to see abundant energy resource out of our country and globally.”
“A typical nuclear reactor is a gigawatt. The last one we built was over a decade and multiple times over budget. We have a new generation of reactors that are smaller that can be manufactured in a facility, and the costs of those are coming down. We need to build American nuclear infrastructure.”
The most pressing problem is the energy grid, he said. “We need to get building infrastructure, keeping prices down and keeping the grid stable,” he said.
On the key question of protecting IRA provisions or scrapping them, he said, “I’m not involved in law making, that will be here in the body of the Senate and the House. My goal will be to implement the laws of the land, and maybe make some decisions on allocation of capital or funds that are approved by congressional bodies.
“I will seek to allocate those funds in the most efficient way to grow our supply of affordable, reliable and secure energy, and to invest in technologies which can’t do that today, but have a clear pathway to do that in future.”
“There is a critical role in DOE in all those things. Our labs have been pioneers in energy innovation across the spectrum, it’s important to me to keep them focused and energised.”
