Why Chris Wright Won’t Say ‘Renewable Energy’

In the first six months of 2025, solar and wind projects accounted for 13.8 GW, or 91%, of all new electric power in the United States. 

So, why won’t Energy Secretary Chris Wright say “renewable energy” or any words even vaguely related to it? In recent weeks, he has eliminated the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and its Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and turned the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado into the National Laboratory of the Rockies.

It is beginning to feel a bit ridiculous and 1984-ish, but at the same time, unsettling.  I keep thinking about the early 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan wouldn’t say anything about the AIDS pandemic. I was living in San Francisco at the time, reading the obituaries that every week covered several pages in the city’s gay press. Thousands were dying, and for four years, until the disease killed Hollywood icon Rock Hudson in 1985, the president would not say the word “AIDS.” 

Certainly, the current situation is not so immediately life-threatening, but we do face an epidemic of rising utility bills across the country and ever-increasing forecasts of just how much new electricity must be put online by 2030 to power artificial intelligence data centers. Even one of these gigawatt-guzzling monsters would be the equivalent of adding a major city — like San Francisco or New York  — to the grid, and by some estimates, 166 GW of new power could be needed in the next four to five years.

Meanwhile, Wright is ordering utilities to keep dirty, expensive coal plants online, while at the end of 2024, 2,290 GW of mostly solar, wind and storage projects were sitting in regional queues, waiting for approval to connect to the grid. Securing such “interconnection agreements” is a critical step in project financing and construction.

I wrote about this situation back in June, when I found out DOE was sitting on an authoritative report on regional queues from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Up until this year, the Berkeley Lab’s annual report on projects waiting to get online in the U.S., called Queued Up, had been the go-to source for this information for the industry, policy makers and reporters like me.

According to an anonymous source at the lab, the 2025 report – detailing the waiting projects up to the end of 2024 – was completed and sent to DOE for review earlier this year. Now, usually, the publication of the report would be announced with a press release and a comprehensive slide deck on the lab’s website, followed by a well-publicized webinar with the researchers who had worked on it and appropriate articles in the industry media. 

This year, as far as I can see on the lab’s website, no announcement was made, no webinar was scheduled, and rather than a slide deck, the information is presented via a series of spreadsheets, which are not exactly user-friendly.

To figure out how much solar, wind and storage are currently in the queues involved scrolling through a 175-line collection of data because the 2024 figures were all at the bottom. But I was able calculate a final total, showing that renewables accounted for 2,059 GW, or 90%, of the power waiting to get online last year, versus 136.3 GW, or just 5%, for gas (see Berkeley Lab chart below). 

The shoddy treatment of a widely respected report like Queued Up is one more example of how hollow and skewed Trump and Wright’s talk about energy dominance, abundance and affordability are. Why fast-track the approval of 136 GW of new gas projects — as the administration and some grid operators are trying to do — when we have so much solar, wind and storage champing at the bit?

Further, attempting to erase renewables from the public discourse about how to meet the expected explosion in demand growth — from data centers, manufacturing and electrification — closes off innovative thinking and options that could be quickly tested and deployed.

Jamie Skaar is an industry analyst and consultant who does wild and wonderful things with AI, coming up with fresh insights that he publishes on LinkedIn. 

In a recent post, he takes up the issue of curtailment, which is what happens when too much renewable power is being generated and, to maintain balance on the grid, at least some of it has to be disconnected. Critics point to it as one of the problems that makes renewables “unreliable.”

Skaar counters that curtailment should be reframed “as temporarily unused capacity, not destroyed fuel.”

Natural gas “peaker” plants — one of the most expensive forms of energy, used only to fill gaps in power supply at times of peak demand — may “sit idle 85% of the year,” he says. “It’s called being ready when needed. … But frame solar curtailment at 10% and suddenly the technology is ‘fundamentally broken.’

“Curtailment isn’t proof renewables fail,” Skaar says. “It’s proof our grids, storage and demand flexibility aren’t yet optimized to capture the abundance we’re creating.”

A June report from Ember, a U.K.-based think tank, expands on Skaar’s ideas, arguing that solar and storage are already capable of providing 24/7 power in very sunny regions.

The first 24/7 gigawatt-scale solar plus storage project is being developed in the United Arab Emirates, combining 5.2 GW of solar with 19 GWh of battery storage “to provide 1 GW uninterrupted electricity supply to the grid,” the report says. 

I have to get a bit wonky here to explain how those numbers work. Here in the U.S., we often think of utility-scale batteries as having a set, limited amount of time they can provide power – generally around four hours. Calculating duration this way assumes that batteries will always discharge as much power as they can for as along as they can.

But, in real-life operation, the amount of electricity a battery produces can be varied, which means it can run for longer periods of time. Or, as Ember explains it, the battery “flattens” out the solar, so it can be used whenever the sun is not shining. 

The catch is that projects like the UAE plant have to overbuild the solar, storage or both.

So, while such projects “may not solve every challenge at the grid level, since not all places are as sunny and the electricity demand varies hourly and seasonally, it provides a pathway for solar to become the backbone of a clean power system in sunny regions and to play a much bigger role in less sunny regions,” the report says.

Ember believes that solar and storage could provide up to 97% of electric power in sunny regions — including the U.S. Southwest — and between 60 and 90% elsewhere (see above). Plus, as battery chemistries and panel efficiency improve and prices drop, solar and storage will be increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. 

Now, in all fairness, Wright is on record saying that solar might be a good option for remote villages in Alaska and similar places largely dependent on imported fossil fuels. 

Still, his refusal to recognize the evolution of renewables as a mainstream, dispatchable power source with an increasingly vital role in the U.S. economy is politically motivated and shows a calculated disregard for American businesses and consumers. Remember that before leading DOE, Wright was CEO of a natural gas fracking company and actively promoted fossil fuels as the foundation of Western democracy, social welfare and modern lifestyles.

But, as with AIDs in the 1980s, not talking about renewables doesn’t mean they’re going away. 

Instead, renewables continue to provide a highly visible and determined counternarrative to the administration’s claims that national prosperity and security rely on building new fossil-fueled and nuclear generation, both of which are expensive and will take years to bring online.

To get almost year-end figures on how much solar, wind, storage and other renewables — hydro and geothermal — are waiting to go online in the U.S., I checked in with Chris Talley and Steven Zhang, the data wizards who run interconnection.fyi, a website that tracks interconnection requests across the country on a weekly basis.

As of Dec. 4, they have 1,929 GW of projects actively seeking to connect to the grid, with renewables accounting for 1,622.7 GW, or 84%. Trump’s rollback of tax credits and other incentives, along with inflation and tariffs, are part of the reason gigawatts in the queues are falling, but other factors, such as new, tighter application requirements, are having an impact.

As secretary of energy, Wright has too much power to be completely ignored. But — as Skaar, Ember and others are showing every day — renewables are the future, and China is leading the transition. The U.S. market faces some bumps, but will reset and rebound as it has done repeatedly in the past. 

The longer Wright ignores renewables, the higher electric bills are likely to go and the more irrelevant he and the Trump administration will become. The country needs and deserves better.