Secretary Chris Wright: They Tried to Ban Your Water Heater | CPAC 2025

President Trump came in and he is strong and he is bold and he gets energy. His goal was we're going to bring back common sense. So what's the plan? Drill baby drill and build baby build. To produce more energy you need the infrastructure to move that energy to customers. Think of the consumers in New England. You know they don't have enough access for natural gas there and they have sky-high electricity prices and you don't get industries placed in those states. Every state that's driven up the price of energy it not only impoverishes their citizens but it makes it so businesses don't want to locate there. Those businesses are going to locate in another state and frankly over the last four years a lot of those businesses are going to locate in another country. We don't want that. We want things built in America. We want those jobs in America which means we need that energy produced and consumed in America. We're on the cusp of a brand new industry. An energy intensive manufacturing industry called artificial intelligence. This is an industry we want to lead in. This is American technology. It matters not just for the efficiency of our economy. It matters from the enormous benefits that will come in drug discovery and product manufacturing and frankly in driving costs down and it also matters for national security. We want China to lead the way in AI. I would feel naked if their AI was better than ours. What does that say about the balance of power and the security of our country? We need to lead and win the competition in AI and the only way to do that is to have tremendous energy production that we can both grow our electricity production which is what AI runs on but stop the price rises. They had almost no demand growth and they raised prices. This administration needs to do the opposite. We need to have demand growth and supply growth and not raising prices. Everything we can do to push prices down. That's how we can better human lives. Better opportunities for Americans. Lower cost of living. More industries that want to invest and build things here in the United States. That is this president's agenda. As I dig into my job and my colleagues and other cabinet positions there is an immense amount of barriers to making things happen. Our country it's become a place where it's very hard to build something and unfortunately it's very easy to stop something. One regulation. One protest. There is so our government is littered with inefficiency and traps that can be exploited to prevent people from building things. So the task before us is big. It's not modest. It's not simple. But we have a committed team who are working every day to get these barriers out of the way. Let America grow our energy production. Build our energy infrastructure. Bring jobs and investment back to our country. Raise American wages and lower American prices. And back to those appliances. Who here is in favor of more expensive lower performing appliances? How many votes do we have for that one? President Trump. So under this administration in my department and actually in many other departments in the Trump administration we are working feverishly to remove these regulations to free American producers to build the appliances people want to buy. We have a factory in the southeastern part of the United States that employs hundreds of people to build a particularly popular product these days. It is a tankless water heater powered by natural gas. It's among the cheapest ways to heat your water. Takes the least space. Lower cost. Burns natural gas. Our lowest cost thermal energy we can have in our houses. It's a win on every box. That's why they've been selling like hotcakes and are an emerging product. So what did the Biden administration do? They see a hot product. All Americans are voting yes. They passed a regulation that would make that product illegal and that company would be dead. In fact, that company is very fearful for the jobs and opportunity of those workers. Now that's hundreds of American jobs. I care personally about that. But it's much bigger than that. It's all Americans would not have available to them a low cost efficient option to have hot water for their showers and their washing machines and everything else we use it for. That's just completely nuts. But again, President Trump fixed that problem. Fixed that problem. We found a fix and we are fixing that problem. That factory staying open, those products are going to be built in mass and they're going to be shipped all across the country for the American consumers that want to buy them. We're not going to tell you what to buy. We want to enable you to buy what you want to buy. That's that crazy freedom idea. I'll end with saying America's back, baby. Thank you all.