Fact-Checking Chris Wright on Energy

 

 

October 8, 2025 - There’s no clean energy revolution afoot, and climate change isn’t an existential crisis. You’re just looking at the data incorrectly.

That’s the message Energy Secretary Chris Wright routinely delivers as the former chief of fracking firm Liberty Energy barnstorms media outlets and industrial sites alike to champion fossil fuels.

Wright has emerged as a key spokesperson and emissary for the Trump administration’s oil, gas and coal agenda. In any setting, he rattles off a laundry list of data-centric talking points to downplay the rise of clean energy and threat of warming temperatures.

He speaks with on-camera poise and an arcane knowledge of the energy sector that comes from decades in the field. Wright also peppers in culture war messaging and unwavering support for President Donald Trump alongside the data he cites. He often says Trump administration energy policy “is getting rid of nonsense and bringing back common sense.” Recently, he’s said Trump deserves a “hero of the climate award.”

Meanwhile, his argument that renewables and batteries provide no real value to the electricity grid is applauded by fossil fuel supporters and decried by clean energy advocates.

“They raise the system cost of electricity,” Wright said at a New York Times event in September. “If they could deliver reliably at peak demand times, they’d be value added.”

His comments often win support on social media from conservatives like Alex Epstein, the head of a think tank promoting fossil fuels who pushed for cutting wind and solar subsidies on Capitol Hill.

DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told POLITICO’s E&E News that wind and solar have “only increased costs and made the energy grid less reliable.” He added that “the production of dispatchable energy sources such as coal, oil, gas and nuclear have been hindered by regulations, costly permitting burdens, and environmental activism.”

Wright has drawn fire from climate advocates for arguing that hurricanes are not increasing in intensity, Arctic sea coverage loss is no big deal and winters aren’t windy. Critics say his numbers on renewables are wrong or misleading.

Wright “seems to have a really loose grasp of the facts … and a clear bias toward fossil fuels,” said John Rogers, associate director of Energy Analytics at the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists.

Here are fact checks for four of Wright’s core electricity arguments:

‘We can deliver AI and stop the rise in electricity prices’

 

Wright made this statement last week on CNBC.

“The ultimate impact of AI should be able to make our grid more secure and actually lower the average delivery cost,” he said.

Electricity prices have risen more than 6 percent since last year. And many experts say higher U.S. electricity prices are all but guaranteed in the foreseeable future, driven in large part by surging demand from data centers that are likely to use eye-popping amounts of electricity to power artificial intelligence computing.

A recent report from the widely respected consultancy Rhodium Group says data centers could use roughly one-seventh of all U.S. electricity demand in 2040. That’s roughly triple the current data center demand in the U.S.

Ben King, a director at Rhodium’s Energy and Climate practice and lead author on the report, said “generationally high levels of demand growth,” along with cuts to renewable tax credits and deregulation at EPA, is likely to push up electricity bills 3-6 percent annually through the end of this decade.

That’s a stark contrast to falling electricity bills that the group forecast prior to the Trump administration.

“Over the past three or four years, additions of wind, solar, and batteries have been somewhere between 85 and 95 percent of new stuff on the grid,” King said. “As you look at meeting capacity needs, the clearest place to do that is by adding these resources that are already in the pipeline.

“The policy actions [under Trump] have made it more difficult to build that stuff,” he said.

Meanwhile, a new report from the Center for Energy & Environmental Analysis, a think tank, says electric and gas utility bills in data-center-heavy Virginia could rise by more than $1,100 on average by 2040.

Mike Jacobs, a senior manager for energy at Union of Concerned Scientists, said rising gas prices, along with coal plant bailouts and higher construction costs in part due to tariffs, are fueling higher electricity bills.

“The growth in demand from data centers driven by AI is growth the industry has not seen in anybody’s career,” Jacobs said. “The supply chain and the ability to build new power plants to keep up with that growth won’t be sufficient to lower prices and most likely will not keep up.

“Unfettered data center growth will raise prices,” he said.

But Wright also has defenders. Mario Loyola, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and an administration official in Trump’s first term, said renewable subsidies, state-level renewable portfolio standards, sluggish permitting and other factors have created a “toxic stew that is killing investment in the power sources that we need.”

Like Wright, Loyola says the U.S. needs more coal and gas plants to produce electricity reliably and cheaply.

“It’s pretty clear that the leadership at the Department of Energy understands what the problem is,” he said. “It will take some time for the interagency process to produce a strong, whole-of-government approach.”

‘There are not oil and gas subsidies’  

 

Wright says the Trump administration opposes renewables because it opposes subsidies. “The wind subsidies and solar subsidies are 33 years old, so it’s about time for industries to walk on their own,” he told the New York Times event.

But do fossil fuels get subsidies? Wright doesn’t think so.

“There are not oil and gas subsidies,” he said. “You can rapidly expense your drilling costs, which you can for all manufacturing.”

Wright was likely referring to a tax perk for “intangible drilling costs,” or IDCs. It’s one of many fossil fuel subsidies outlined in a recent report by the environmental group Oil Change International.

The report says the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republican legislation that cut short renewable subsidies, plussed up subsidies for fossil fuels, including through a bigger IDC deduction. The law’s expansion of the 45Q carbon capture tax credit for enhanced oil recovery will cost taxpayers more than $1.4 billion annually, the report says.

All told, the report says fossil fuels get at least $30 billion annually in U.S. federal subsidies.

Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International and author of the report, said Wright is denying fossil fuel subsidies exist to sidestep “a debate on the merits.”

“He’s now out there attacking this entire idea,” Rees said. “Fossil fuel subsidies are designed to, and do in actuality, flow to increase the profits of the biggest oil and gas companies on the planet, and they have for over 100 years.”

A report from the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, dated 2014, says the IDC carve-out is more than just a typical expense for businesses.

“In fact IDC deduction is not the same, or designed with the same purpose, as the [research and experimental] deduction available to other industries,” it says. “At this point in the technological development of the industry, the IDC deduction only serves to subsidize the business generally by allowing certain taxpayers to avoid the capitalization rules applying to other taxpayers.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is implementing a wide range of policies to boost coal production and use through direct grants and new tax cuts.

The OBBB provided a new 2.5 percent tax credit for metallurgical coal. Just five days after speaking at the New York Times event, Wright announced $625 million in DOE grants to keep coal plants running with new pollution controls — or even to reboot closed plants.

Rees says those policies are subsidies. Others say they’re just some money to help coal after years of strict coal regulations under recent Democratic presidents.

“Given that both the Obama and Biden administrations imposed massive costs on the coal industry as part of this kind of religious movement in opposition to coal and greenhouse gas emissions, this is a partial offset for that,” said Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “So I wouldn’t call it a subsidy. I call it a reduction in a negative subsidy.”

Critics of the fossil fuel subsidy argument also say it’s a red herring. That’s because renewables get a lot more help from the government.

“It’s really renewables [and] unconventional energy that get massive subsidies,” Zycher said. “The argument of fossil fuel subsidies is really a way to distract attention from the massive subsidies that renewables get and the distortions those produce for the electric power system.”

A 2023 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the data-crunching arm of DOE, said 46 percent of all energy subsidies were tied to renewable energy, while 35 percent of all energy subsidies were for consumption, including the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Renewables provided ‘2.6% of global energy last year’

 

Wright has touted the statistic in arguing that wind and solar subsidies should be eliminated.

“$5 trillion of … subsidized and mandated expenditures on wind, solar and batteries. Congratulations. 2.6 percent of global energy last year,” he said in late September duringa Foreign Press Centers briefing in New York.

Wright also cites the statistic in claiming that renewables are expensive and unreliable — an assertion challenged by the industry. “The more we load our grid with intermittent generation, the worse the grid performs during times of maximum stress and demand,” Wright wrote in the New York Post in June.

Conservatives often point to warnings, including from the U.S. grid monitor, that fossil fuel plant retirements are threatening the grid.

It is true that wind and solar accounted for roughly 3 percent of U.S. primary energy consumption last year, according to the EIA. That’s partly because transportation, which is dominated by oil, is a significant portion of energy use.

But with delivered energy — which counts energy that reaches an end user — solar’s share rises to roughly 7 percent.

In the electricity sector, wind and solar provided roughly 17 percent of U.S. power in 2024 after a decade of growth. And electricity is projected to constitute a growing share of U.S. energy because of electric vehicles and other factors, according to data analysis firm Ember.

There also are many documented cases of wind and solar helping keep power on during peak demand periods with support from linked batteries.

In one example, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator serving most of the state, said in June that solar growth made this summer “uneventful” for the grid, an improvement from the past when officials warned about outages during peak demand.

“Rising solar and battery output in ERCOT clearly enabled a summer of triple-digit heat without the close calls of previous summers and with lower prices to boot,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas wrote in a research note in January about similar effects from solar and batteries in summer 2024.

Unsubsidized renewables are now the most cost-competitive form of generation, particularly as new gas plants face a shortage of turbines, according to a June report from Lazard.

The levelized cost of electricity — the focus of Lazard’s analysis — has been criticized as not providing a full picture of costs to back up renewables. But federal data shows that the top four states producing wind and solar power are among the cheapest states for electricity. A POLITICO analysis found the majority of states tapping high amounts of renewables had electricity prices below the national average.

The Solar Energy Industries Association, which has accused Wright of lying on social media, says every dollar of federal subsidy for the industry saves Americans almost $3, because of lower electricity costs and federal and state tax revenue. Solar can be brought online faster than new gas and nuclear plants to meet AI demand, industry supporters say.

“When Sec. Burgum and Sec. Wright choke off supply, they’re the ones responsible for raising Americans’ energy prices. Every time a family sees that spike on their utility bill, they’ll know exactly who is to blame,” SEIA President and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said in an emailed statement.

‘People that live near wind farms don’t like them’

 

Wright has argued this point in explaining why the Trump administration has targeted wind power, including by reducing funding at the DOE and blocking Biden-era projects approved by the Interior Department.

“Wind is the opposite of natural gas. People that live near wind farms don’t like them. People that live far away, love them … people that live in oil fields, love it. People that live far away, hate it,” he said at an event hosted by The New York Times in September.

Wright added that opposition in rural communities to wind power is at a “fever pitch,” citing project cancellations and local bans on wind.

The secretary is correct that opposition to wind power locally has been growing, according to some analyses. A report from Columbia University’s law school in June found that 459 counties and municipalities in 44 states had adopted “severe” local restrictions on siting renewables by the end of last year, a 16 percent increase from 2023.

“While 2024 was a year of record-breaking success for the deployment of utility-scale renewables in the United States … recent studies suggest that installations could have been significantly higher absent restrictive zoning and local opposition,” the school’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law said.

However, oil and gas projects have also garnered local opposition in recent years, including protests against the Mountain Valley pipeline and outcry against hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania. In Colorado, many local officials have rejected fossil fuel development, including for a planned gasoline storage facility near an elementary school that prompted parents to threaten lawsuits.

Additionally, some polling suggests that public opposition to oil and gas development overall may be greater than for renewables.

The Pew Research Center reported this June that Americans’ support for wind and solar power is higher than for any other resource, even though support for renewables has dropped among Republicans since Trump’s first term. The same survey found majority support for development of offshore wind farms, including among GOP or GOP-leaning adults.

Other polling organizations, including Gallup, have similarly found that more Americans support development of renewables and alternative energy than production of oil, gas and coal.

“The public’s continued general preference for developing alternative energy may help explain its tepid support for fracking and offshore drilling,” Gallup said in April.

At the local level, Pew separately said in a survey last year that less than 10 percent of respondents said wind would hurt their local economy, although views varied by political party. In comparison, 33 percent said wind would help the local economy and about 30 percent said it would make no difference.