Press Conference with Secretary Wright at NREL - April 3rd, 2025

Thank you everybody for coming. My name is Martin Keller. I'm the director here at NREL. I'm here 9 years and it's my great honor to introduce to you the 17th Secretary of Energy. You probably all know our new Secretary. Of course, he's a Colorado native. His whole life in energy, so he knows this extremely well. We had a whole day of tours and great discussions. We could not be more excited to have our Secretary here. Of course, being also here from Colorado, showing off our lab here. As you all know, NREL, we're very proud of what you're doing here at NREL. So with this, Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here and I hand over the microphone to you. Thank you, Martin. Thank you. Well, it's fantastic to be back in my home state. I grew up in Colorado, just left Colorado three months ago to go to D.C. As Martin mentioned, I've been an engineer, entrepreneur my whole life. I'm new to the political role, but quite excited about it. I had a tremendous day, tremendous day at NREL today, hearing about a number of exciting scientific engineering efforts led by great scientists and engineers, highly motivated by the mission they're working in. Particularly interested and particularly critical for our national security and our national economic future is artificial intelligence and our electricity grid. We've had 20-plus years of very little growth in electricity demand in the United States. We've had growth in energy demand, but not in electricity demand. And in the last four years, unfortunately, with very little growth in electricity demand, well over 20% increase in national cost for electricity. This is which made voters unhappy and angry, and of course the trends continue to go in that same direction. We need to stop that. We need to produce more electricity and stop the price rises that are making life tougher for consumers and making it harder for businesses to locate in the United States. We need to do that at the same time that we have meaningful rise in demand. Artificial intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on. But these are just a piece of it. There's two huge other applications you don't hear much about. One is using AI specifically for scientific discovery. Think of drug discovery and how proteins fold. We can assimilate biological molecules, compounds that make up us and make up diseases, all the way down to the molecular level. The understanding from this will be enormously beneficial to humanity. Basic for fusion, for next generation nuclear. We're going to have better technology to drive better opportunities for human lives going forward. We're excited about this. AI is also critical for national defense, both in offensive and more importantly in defensive characteristics. If we move slow on artificial intelligence and our adversaries move ahead of us, this is a great risk to our country. So it is critical that we lead the race in AI. We have the scientists, we have the businesses, we have the private capital, but we have to deliver on the energy to make this work. The work at NREL on grid stability, on grid complexities, on cyber threats to our grid, fantastic. The work here on advanced computing and what's going to lead and enable AI, also critical at NREL. And I'll end mentioning two recent actions we did at the Department of Energy, and then I'll turn it back over to Martin. Number one, within two weeks of when I was sworn in as the Secretary of Energy, I called all of the national lab directors to D.C. We spent an afternoon together, we spent a dinner together, and we talked about what does your lab do, what drives innovation, what drives progress there, and most importantly, what's holding you back? What can we do better? What can I specifically do better to speed advancement and lower the cost of it in the United States? And Martin and his colleagues promptly delivered me a great list of these are the things that hold us back, and here's the most important ones. We acted quickly on those most important ones and made the necessary changes, essentially our own permitting reform in DOE that made it so much more expensive, if you're at a national lab to build a building, much more expensive and takes much longer. Like, where's the win in that? There is no win in that. So we took these actions, and Martin will tell you a little bit about those. And also, just this morning, the Department of Energy, we sent out a request for information. There are 17 national labs and a number of other facilities that are DOE properties. We have a lot of land. We sent out a request to see who's interested to build a data center and co-located power on laboratory lands. People are struggling with permitting and entitlements and making an AI built in this country. What we don't want to do is make it so hard so it gets built somewhere else. So we're saying, we have a bunch of land. Tell us where you would like to build on these lands. Let's make a deal. Private partnership. Build a data center. Build the energy that supplies that grid. Maybe swap some expertise and intelligence. Maybe share some of your computing power with our national labs. I think there's a lot of room for things to be done here with just a more creative, common-sense framework that we're trying to bring to this government. I had one last thing I was going to say, but I'll remember it in a second. Martin, let me turn it over to you. The things we did on the permitting reform and this potential co-location. What does this mean to you? Mr. Secretary, I thank you for spending – short after you got this new job, that you spent this time with all the lab directors. You said a couple of words that are still stuck in my head. One was, how can you all in the national labs go faster? How do we go this? How do we drive innovation? How do we make this happen at a faster pace to be competitive on a global scale? This is where the lab directors, we put all this together. I have to say, really, thank you because you implemented it immediately. All of you, you walked up here. You saw the big construction site here. It's our newest facility. This will be a brand-new facility to integrate from early-stage research to scaling with industry to really accelerate innovation for new energy materials across a lot of portfolios. What you have done with this memo is directly visible at this facility. There are two things which now really accelerate the construction of this facility. Number one is, through your memo, we can take a lot of this up-front bureaucracy out to really build this in a faster way. The second thing that happened in this facility, which is also a brand-new way in the lab system, we did this kind of pilot plan together with the Golden Field Office and DOE to build this facility how you do it in industry, which is a design-build contract which allows us to go much faster than in traditional ways. So we could, what you said, it was like music to our ears because we can immediately implement this. And now also this new memo helps us to do some of the other renovations, constructions here at this lab at a much faster pace. Let me then say something which is a great project here at NREL, and this is about AI and data centers. So as you all know, we have this everywhere. We at our laboratory, we do energy integration, energy systems. That's what we do. And right now, data centers for our country is very, very important. How do we build them into our communities? How do we integrate them? How do we make sure that we're all moving this along? So this, again, what we have in our program, we call this chips to grid. So this, again, how to integrate data centers. Can you use new technology, for example, geothermal cooling for the computers? Can you be faster in removing the off-heat and using this for our systems? So this is what we're doing, and Secretary mentioned, so we already put all our thoughts together and say, what can we do at NREL? Can we be part of this? Can we create a data center which should not be only a data center but also is helping us to understand how we can integrate this into our energy systems here in the United States? So both of these memos are, we have sharpened our pencil already. We are ready. And, Secretary, for NREL, this is core what we're doing, and thank you for doing this, and thank you for pushing us to ask us how can we go faster because we are here at NREL. We love to go fast because we want to create a better planet, so we have to move fast. So thank you for everybody doing this area. Thank you, Martin. All right. The hype is climate alarmism, and it's 100%. Calling climate change a crisis is just to say I'm not going to look at the science, I'm not going to look at the economics, I'm just going to run with the politics. So, yes, I've spent 20 years reading, studying, writing, engaging on climate change. So, yes, I stand behind that. Wildfires, if you want me to dive into any of those details, wildfires peaked over 100 years ago. The natural state of the West has tens of millions of acres burned in wildfires every year. And we had a fire in 1910, the big burn in Montana, killed dozens of people in two days and burned 10 million acres immediately. And the United States said, we're going to stop wildfires. We started to control the forest, thin out the forest. We started the Smokey the Bear campaign. We set observation towers all around. We plummeted down the amount of acres that burnt in wildfires. And we were there for decades. But in the 70s and 80s, we decided for environmental reasons, we're not going to touch the forest. We're not going to actively manage the forest, and we're not going to let fires burn them. That is a guaranteed disaster, and that was known decades ago. In about the last 30 years, we've had a 3% growth in the forest land in the western United States, and over 30% wood fuel growth. Like, this is obvious. We know the answer, which is forest management. You've got to control the fuels and the sources of fire. So calling the Marshall Fire or these other fires due to climate change is just simply not to look at the data. To call climate change a crisis is going to say, I'm not going to study the fact that deaths from extreme weather have dropped over 90%. I'm not going to study the facts that the economic studies of climate change show a maybe 1% or 2% reduction in GDP by the end of this century. Like, it's a real physical phenomenon. It's worth understanding a little bit. But to call it a crisis and point to disasters and say that that's climate change, that's to say I'm not going to do my homework. Human lives are way too important to not do your homework. Thank you. Well, and look, I think the last question illustrated that right away, which is to bring some honesty and sobriety back to the discussions around energy and climate change. The biggest barrier in energy development the last few decades is people for political reasons calling climate change a crisis, as if the 3 million people dying every year because they don't have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don't have sufficient food. The 10% of Americans that got a utility disconnection notice in the last year, and all those 10% did not have their electricity turned off, they got that threatening notice. Think about that. You're a young mom or dad at home, and you've just gotten a notice your utilities might be turned off if you don't divert funds from somewhere else to pay that bill. Those are crises of human beings. Our industry is outsourcing over to Asia because we make energy more expensive here. But if you call climate change a crisis and you don't look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything. You can stop building pipelines so people in New England have to pay two times more expensive electricity. You cannot allow the building of energy infrastructure so factories that would have been here in Colorado or instead are in Texas or in Asia. You can say this is all for climate change, but most of that is just nonsense. Honestly, it's just nonsense. It doesn't actually even reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If you make it hard to build something in this country powered by natural gas, and it's made in Asia, powered by coal, loaded on a diesel-powered ship, and delivered back here, that's not a climate policy. I really don't like hydrocarbons for some political reason, so I'm going to claim climate change is a crisis and blame everything on it. That kind of emotional, not fact-based stuff has been very destructive. It's why in the last administration we saw, think of the federal government's going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize something. It should be cheaper. If they were going to subsidize the building of everyone's houses, the government paid for a third the price of your house. Well, your house just got one third cheaper. Instead, we spent a huge amount of money subsidizing energy out of American taxpayer pockets, and the result has been higher increases in electricity prices. Look to Germany, the United Kingdom, California, where I lived many years. The more cheap energy that's put on the grid, the more expensive electricity gets, which means it's not cheap energy. It's system cost that matters. You have to have an electricity grid that works at the peak demand time, or else people die. So a rational focus on energy and climate change, a real physical phenomenon, is critical to enable bettering human lives, making energy more expensive and exporting industries overseas, because it sells newspapers to say, if we don't do that, the planet's going to burn next year or 10 years from now. That's to not do your homework. Absolutely. Thank you for asking that question. This is, of course, the hardest part. This is the hardest part of my job. In the last four years when I walked in, the headcount in the Department of Energy grew 20%. So 20% growth in the government, and mostly what we got out of it was a little bit more restrictions in energy production around the country. We got more energy subtraction, not any meaningful energy addition. And our government, I'm sure as you know, we collect about 18% of GDP in tax revenues, and then we spend 24% of GDP in taxes. Like that's just, think of your, if you took your salary, you take home money, and for every dollar you took in, you spent $1.30. That just doesn't work. It may feel good for a few weeks, but that's a fiscal train wreck. So every part of the government we have to look at, how can we make government services as good as they are today or better, but at lower cost? So like I did in my business, we have to look carefully at the business of where we are today, and how can we deliver services at least as good as we are today at lower cost? And so we are doing a very detailed organization, bottom up in each department, in each area. How can we get better and smarter at what we're doing? So that is an ongoing process. We are midstream on that. But frankly, it would be downright irresponsible if we weren't doing this. So absolutely, be private data center companies. That's where the capital is. That's where the investment is on federal land. And we make a commercial arrangement with them. Probably some combination of lease payments to use that land. It may be some allocation of the computing power from that data center to help the national lab where it's located. So no, it would be a commercial arrangement. But yeah, it's a commercial arrangement using our land to get some value out of it with a private company that both helps the lab and helps the country by getting more data centers built. The plan of these is you're going to co-locate power. You're going to build a data center, and you're going to build the power and resources to power it. A key thing, and I don't know if I said this very clearly, is the last four years we've had these huge rises in electricity price with almost no rise in demand. So the public understandably thinks, I don't want any data centers. My electricity prices are already going too high. That's just going to make it worse. So what we need to do is if you need 100 units of electricity, we want you to build 110. So you build the incremental power that you're going to use and you're additive to the grid. So you're helping reduce the bottlenecks we have in our electricity system. That's the idea. Great question. And I think your premise right up front is the goal of this administration, President Trump got elected to reduce costs on everyone. And I think you've already seen energy costs go down some, mostly just in anticipation. It's going to be an easier environment to produce more things. More supply should lead to lower prices. The tariffs, I think the best way to look at them right now is the reciprocal part of it. It will drive other countries to lower their tariffs. At the end of the day, hopefully we get to freer, fairer trade. Israel immediately announced reductions of their tariffs. I'd love to see that happen from around the world. From our trading partners to lower their tariffs and look at how they can buy more U.S. exports to get trade balances more in line. Thank you for being here. Thank you for covering this critical subject of energy, our country, and NREL.