Secretary Wright Joins Daily Caller Fireside Chat The New Age of American Power – September 17, 2026

Well, thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here. And thank you to all of you, as well as our more than 45,000 people who are currently watching on our live stream. I want to get right into this because we have limited time. It never feels like enough when we're talking about energy, to be honest. But one of the things that I've noticed with your leadership in this administration over the Department of Energy is that we're not just talking about energy independence anymore. But we're talking about energy abundance. Can you just outline what you view as the difference between those two terms and how that should matter to the everyday American? What benchmarks should they be taking notice of that tells them, okay, we have energy abundance? Yeah, absolutely, Amber. Great to be here. For President Trump, energy independence just wasn't enough. My whole life, when I was a kid, we were going to develop energy in America. We were going to become energy independent. We bottomed out 20 years ago, wildly energy dependent. And then we passed energy independence. And President Trump said, well, why stop there? If we have more energy, doesn't that mean energy will be cheaper? Absolutely. Energy will be cheaper. And if we have more energy, we can export energy to all our friends and allies abroad. And we can reduce the power of the bad actors in the world and displace them as necessary parts of country supply chains. So yes, I think we all share that view. Just more energy makes your life better, right? Everything you do, whether it's practical or your work, whatever, relies on energy. Energy is a force for good in the world. More energy, hands down, is just better, which is why it's just shocking, starting with the Obama administration and then with the Biden administration. They just doubled down on trying to shrink energy production and to make energy more expensive. That was just insane and infuriating to me and I would say to the whole administration. Well, and I recall as well that there were a lot of regulations and rules that were created during the Biden and Obama administrations that just made everyday life a little bit more annoying, whether it was shower, water, water pressure went down. Trump would often complain about the toilets not being able to flush properly. And it sounded like a joke to the mainstream media or people on the left who were talking about emissions and carbon and all of that. But for the everyday person, those things actually really mattered. Just so crazy in your quality of life. One of the first trips I did in my new job was down to Georgia. There was a factory that makes tankless hot water heaters, which are increasingly popular because they're cheap and they work. And new regulations from the Department of Energy, previous to my tenure, obviously, were making it illegal. This factory was going to shut down because the product they sold was illegal. A low cost hot water heater was illegal because it didn't meet their efficiency standards for a non-condensing water heater. You can't make this stuff up. It's crazy. You've been on a sort of generational travel run, Vienna, New York, Houston, and now you're with us. And we're so grateful that you've made time to be here. Tell us, surrounding these few trips you've been on, what do you think has been the through line in terms of the discussions you're having about what seems to be most important with the U.S. and its partners? The key thing that we try to establish is explaining the American energy policy. And obviously, some of our friends in Europe, they think we're dramatically, starkly different than theirs. And we are, in that we believe in more energy and lower cost energy. And honestly, they believe in less energy and more expensive energy. But they don't think that that's the way they view their policy. No, they just want cleaner. And it's cheaper. Ultimately, it's going to be cheaper. They want to believe this cheaper, cleaner, greener. And just engage in these dialogues. And really, the most important thing in the dialogue is just the math. I always say, look, everyone can have their different aspirations. Different countries should have different energy systems, because you've got different endowments, different industries, different trade-offs. But look at how your country actually works. Denmark is just the classic example there. They feel they're the most virtuous country on earth. And they've proven you can have an incredibly high lifestyle on all renewable energy. That is actually their view. I don't know how they don't Google the math. Quickly, I'm like, you know what the top three energy sources in Denmark are? It's burning oil, natural gas, and wood. They run on carbon-based energy. They've made electricity so expensive, they top the world, but it's only 17% of their primary energy consumption. So it's in that 17% slice, maybe a little less than 10% of the total energy in Denmark is wind, solar, and batteries. They think they run on wind, solar, and batteries. California has the same problem. They think they've gone all renewable. In California, electricity is only 15% of their energy. And their biggest source of electricity, number one is natural gas, and number two is imported from other states, which means coal and hydro and gas power that they import, but they don't count it because they don't produce it in California. So my whole thing is just, let's get down to common sense about energy. It matters for your economy. It matters for your national security. It matters for the quality of living of your citizens, particularly lower income quality of citizens. Who would be against affordable, abundant energy? There are virtuous forms of energy or clean forms of energy. They all have trade-offs. They all have trade-offs. In fact, we would have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American deaths in the end of January, which is embarrassing. This year, if Harris had won the election and they had closed the 15 gigawatts of coal plants they had slated to close in 2025, we were so close to the ragged edge for massive blackouts on the east coast of the United States. And when you get massive blackouts and it's very cold, people die. Texas proved this five years ago. Over 200 Texans froze to death as they drifted into stupid energy policy, put too many eggs in the basket of wind. And guess what? When it's cold and you get a high pressure system, the wind isn't blowing in a high pressure system when the air is still. And in the wintertime, peak demands in the evening and the sun isn't shining either. To the Trump administration, it's just about math and common sense. Energy policy should be about humans. We only produce energy to make people's lives better on math. And so much of the Democrats and so many people around the world just forget about that. They obviously can't do or choose not to do the math, and they forget the human element. We're not producing our energy system to be fashionable when we're drinking Chablis in San Francisco. It's about human beings' lives. Because you mentioned state policy, there are some states that are using renewable mandates and credit systems that critics say increase electricity prices and interfere with interstate energy markets. What can the Department of Energy and FERC do to potentially push back on these state policies? And is there a role for you to play? We've been very active in that. One of the things is the reforms at FERC. Ninety-five percent of all the things in the queue to be hooked up at FERC right now are wind and solar projects. And then there's just thousands of them in the queue. And then this sort of slow, first in, first out in the queue just makes it so hard to build anything else. So FERC has reformed to prioritize things that will actually deliver electricity when you need it, not just some of the time that we're not quite sure when, but it's getting the different independent system operators around the country. We're just engaging them constantly to just change the prioritization. You mentioned renewable portfolio standards. About half of states have them. And what distinguishes an RPS state from the other half is 40 to 50 percent more expensive electricity. It's not cherry picking this state versus that state. Half the states that have renewable portfolio standards have over 40 percent more expensive electricity than the other states. And they keep telling it's cheaper. It's cheaper because they do this stupid thing, levelized cost of electricity. It is not the same product. If you're not sure when it's going to be on, if it's going to be on, how much it's going to be on, that is not a comparable product to it's going to be there 24-7 no matter what the weather is, no matter if it's dark or cold or windy. They're just very, very different energy sources and energy systems. I took it one step further because people criticize the Trump administration for keeping these coal plants open. We're making it more expensive. We're imposing on consumers to keep these expensive coal plants on. I mentioned how they saved hundreds of lives. But here's the math. Ten states have forced all of the coal off their grid. So I compared the average electricity costs of those 10 states—not cherry picking, they're all across the country, 10 states with no coal—versus the 10 states that have the most coal-intensive electricity generation. Here, the difference in electricity prices is 80 percent. It's 80 percent more expensive, on average, to buy electricity in the states with no coal than the states that have. Coal was our largest source of electricity generation in the United States for a century until gas passed it probably 10 years ago, or 10, maybe 15 years ago. In any case, just look at the math, look at the numbers. Who in this room wants more expensive electricity and a less reliable grid? Is there a big constituency for that? No. Apparently not. Let's follow up on your work on coal plants and keeping them open. Do you view it mostly as a bridge to nuclear or natural gas, or do you view it being as part of the energy mix of the American supply chain for decades? The latter. Globally, coal has been the largest source of electricity globally since we started data around the turn of the century, the other turn of the century, 1800s and 1900s. Imagine a college sports team that's 126 and 0. It's a pretty safe bet that coal will be the largest source of electricity globally for decades to come. Michigan's virtuous because they closed a coal plant. That's just ridiculous. There are thousands of coal plants around the world. They provide over 35 percent of all global electricity, and they will continue to do so through the rest of our lives. In the United States, our goal is energy addition. It's not like, let's build a nuclear plant so we can close our coal plant. Let's build a nuclear plant so we can have even more electricity. We can reshore modern manufacturing here. We can build strategic defense things that we pushed offshore right here in the United States. We can have data centers and drive faster innovation. We can have whatever we want as Americans. There's a small number of ways to produce energy. There's an infinite number of ways to consume energy. Speaking of nuclear, there is a lot of enthusiasm in the U.S. right now for a potential nuclear renaissance, but we do know that those projects take a long time to come online. When can Americans expect to actually see the benefits from that, and how do you make sure that we don't immediately go the other direction if a different administration gets in charge? Fortunately, on the latter point, the support for nuclear is much more bipartisan now, and it's even stronger among the youth. People my age or older have a lot of the anti-nuclear people still in them. I would say maybe it's more split, but among the under 40-years-old, the support for nuclear is quite strong. It's become bipartisan. I would say there's always some good unintended consequences of crazy manias like climate change is the end of the world, which is just a fact-based, irrational, wildly destructive mania, but it has made the young grow nuclear. I'll check that up as a positive. That's not the only factor, but it is a factor. One of the things about nuclear is people always say it's too slow, it's not going to happen, it's not going anywhere. You mentioned, I heard that in the intro, we had four next-generation not-lightwater reactors go critical by July 4 of this year. None of those had happened in over 40 years. We've since had a fifth one. We'll have a sixth one very soon. You'll see new schedules or dates coming out from us, but I can leak a little bit. We will have continuous generation of electricity from these next-generation plants next year. They will be used for beneficial use, powering data centers or industry in 2028, two years from now. There are large factories being built today to build these small modular reactors at volume. It's actually going to happen pretty quick. We want to get the large reactors moving again. We've announced huge loan programs there. We're going to see relatively soon the start of construction. The large reactors do take longer to build. They take too long to build. We need to do innovations there to also make them faster and simpler. Things are going to move faster, but the small modular reactors will move very fast. They're going to be reality, and you're going to feel it in the next few years. To follow up on data centers, polls show that Americans are very concerned about data centers potentially increasing energy prices or consuming a lot of energy more generally. What can you tell the American people about our building out of the American energy supply to assuage their concerns? Do you think that data centers and their associated companies that are doing artificial intelligence should share some of the responsibility for potential strain on the grid? Absolutely, to that last point. This is President Trump from the start of the administration. He's like, artificial intelligence is going to be powerful. We need the lead. We can't have China be in the lead. Everybody tells me the constraint is on power, so we've got to build power as fast as we can. They have the money and they have the resources. We should let them build power. In fact, we should force them to build power. We codified this into the ratepayer protection pledge last year. All of the hyperscaler developers, a whole bunch of others have signed on and said, absolutely, it's just a reasonable tradeoff. The actual record of data centers coming on is they almost always are accompanied by a multi-year freeze in electricity prices. In real terms, a gradual decline in the cost of electricity. We've had areas in Indiana filing for rate reduction because of data centers. We had a controversial project in Georgia, where because of the tax revenues from the data centers, they got rid of property taxes in those counties. I was wondering how many people are really upset that they don't pay property taxes anymore. We didn't find any of those either. Done right, and that's what the Trump administration is doing, and that's what the developers want to do as well. These are a massive force to reduce the price of electricity and stop the price rises. It is an awesomely powerful technology. I understand people having concerns about it. It's great things, awesome things are going to come because of artificial intelligence, and some disturbing and disruptive things are going to come too. When you have a new powerful tool, people rightfully have concerns about it. I don't discard at all people's concerns about it, but the closer you look, the tradeoffs, the positives look quite a bit larger than the negatives. Are there any enforcement mechanisms in place for companies that don't sign the pledge or don't proactively seek to pay their own way effectively? You've got to get approvals and permits from the local governments to actually construct your stuff. They make deals with utilities that say, we will pay you this money in advance. We're going to sign up. They'll pay above market prices for electricity, and they are doing that. The nuclear renaissance is going to happen much faster because of data centers. They are today signing above market prices to allow those things to be built and constructed. I think there's a fair amount of teeth in it. Bill passed the House, I think just yesterday, sponsored by Gabe Evans from Colorado. It got three no votes, 440 votes to three. It's not in US federal government law yet, but it looks like it's on the way to become that way. Of course, you need common sense guardrails on building energy, on constructing data centers, and even the deployment of AI. A slow government bureaucracy would kill it. We can't have that. But should we watch carefully what happens with AI? Should we constantly dialogue as we do with the leading front developers of the frontier models? Should we be careful about this? Yes. As with all new tools, there's going to be trade-offs, but the wins, I think, are going to be wildly bigger than the losses. What is the status of rebuilding the strategic petroleum reserve, and what conditions would have to be met for that to become a higher priority for the administration? It's always been a high priority for the administration, but a challenge is in Congress to vote for money to buy oil that's going to be stored away for some emergency that's going to happen in the future. I was very unsuccessful in trying to sell that to get that into the budget a year ago as a brand new politician. Trump administration was all in on it. We had recommended it. We did not get a lot of funding from Congress to fill the SPR. That's obviously before we had the current crisis. But what we've done is we're not selling any barrels out of the SPR. We're lending barrels. We're saying, okay, the oil market is tight. You can take these barrels, and here's the delivery date on which we'll give them. And then when you return the barrels back to us, we're getting, on average, 1.25 barrels back for every barrel we're pushing out. Right now, the more barrels we push out of the SPR, the more free barrels American taxpayers will get added on top of the return to barrels. So the SPR, when we leave, will be fuller than when we arrive. And we will have gone through maybe one of the largest ever interruptions of oil flows in world history. So just responsible business management of the SPR is the key thing. And we have a couple of other very creative ideas that I've hinted at for a while. You'll hear more about them later, where we're going to put quite a few more barrels into the SPR at no cost to the U.S. taxpayers. You mentioned the current conflict in Iran, and I wanted to follow up on that, because I'm curious, as I talk to everyday Americans, they're obviously concerned about fuel prices and gas prices. Is there anything the administration can do in the next few months or year to help insulate Americans a little bit more from the shock of those prices? Well, so it is a thing that's seven days a week across the administration. Ideas are bouncing. The president reached out to me again late last night. He is passionate about driving energy prices down. And we are doing a lot. It's just, of course, it's a big challenge. It's a global market. We changed the refining specifications for refiners that allows them to produce more gasoline with the same refining capacity. That is in place. That is happening right now. We are growing. After 20 years decline in oil production in Alaska, Alaskan oil production is growing. Gulf of America oil production is growing. U.S. onshore production is growing. Venezuelan oil production is growing. So we're adding more oil into the marketplace. And with the U.S. military, we continue to grow the amount of oil going out of the Strait of Hormuz. You don't hear enough about that. Maybe close to 20 million barrels a day was normal before the conflict. Our running average right now is 11 million barrels a day. That's 55 percent of the flow that used to go through. And then there's millions of barrels that are going through on bypass pipelines, which are being expanded as well. So this is a fixable problem. It just takes some time. The longest pole in the tent is refining, which is these giant factories that take oil in and put out gasoline and jet fuel and diesel and all the things we consume. Refineries are enormously important infrastructure around the world. And the Biden administration celebrated not just how many coal plants they closed, but how many refineries they closed. And even in today, in the last year, last 12 months, Gavin Newsom has strangled two more large refineries in California. That's just crazy. So when you do that, then you have disruptions in the world. And of course, you're going to quickly go into a crisis. There's other factors as well. The Russia-Ukraine war. The Ukrainians have become remarkably effective at knocking out the Russian refineries. Russia was one of the biggest exporters of diesel fuel on the planet. Today, they're a small importer of diesel fuel and a non-trivial importer of gasoline. Think about that. Russia is importing diesel, and Russia is importing hundreds of thousands of barrels every day of gasoline to fill their tanks. That is a huge disruption to global markets. We've lost refining capacity in the Middle East, of course, because of that conflict. We're slowly getting that back. And we've got an additional factor of China. It's very profitable to run a refinery today. China is refining less products. They're refining enough to supply all of China. But that was also a big export business for them. And they've dialed back meaningfully their exports of refined products to Asia. That's caused some stress in that region. So there's a number of different things that have reduced refining capacity. But we need common sense to grow American refining capacity. We cannot afford these crazy democratic policies that celebrate choking refineries. In my home state of Colorado, they are still trying to cruck the Suncor refinery that's just north of Denver. We'd have an immediate rise in gasoline prices and diesel prices there. But it's crazy how that's still popular. Again, it's just this misunderstanding of climate change and somehow viewing less energy as virtuous. Less energy is foolish, not virtuous. Some people have watched the supply shock to the American markets and said, well, we need to keep more of the U.S. supply here at home and have advocated for things like export tariffs or export bans. Why does the administration think that those would not be proper solutions and wouldn't actually lower prices? It's just an amazingly interconnected network around the world. Fortunately, the United States is in a great position. We're an exporter. We supply the world with diesel, but often we get gasoline from the rest of the world. We consume a larger percent of gasoline out of each barrel of oil than a barrel of oil yields. So if you said, hey, diesel prices are really high, let's stop exporting diesel from the United States, pretty quickly our refineries would have to refine less because what would they do with the diesel? We could fill up storage in two or three weeks and then we'd be producing less gasoline and we'd have more expensive gasoline right away. So it's a global interconnected system. The thing we need when prices are high is more supply. We need to do everything we can to grow supply. And if you start putting barriers on flows, pretty quickly you will reduce the production and you'll have less supply. We need more supply, not less supply. European climate and sustainability rules can ultimately affect the price of energy here in the United States. So how do you work with our partners abroad to make sure that maybe their boneheaded climate policies are not meaningfully impacting American consumers? I appreciate you using the technical term there because that is what they're doing. And that is a constant dialogue between the Trump administration and our colleagues in Europe. In fact, just at the G20 meeting in Houston, we discussed that a lot because they have rules. Exxon has come out recently and said, we may need to stop running our refineries in Europe because they're going to be afoul of the law. And the European response is, we're not going to enforce any penalties, at least for the next three years. Sounds like we're not going to violate a law, even if you tell us you're not going to enforce penalties against us. We're a business and we follow the rule of law. So it is a concerning situation, what's going on. They have rules for methane. They're enormously dependent on natural gas in Europe. Literally, their factories would shut down and they would freeze in the dark if they don't have natural gas. And where did they sign up to get all their natural gas from years ago? Russia. So that's a great partner. You want to count on your life and your economy from the Russians. So now they're trying to get, they still haven't fully got off Russian gas because they want to keep the lights on and their homes warm. But they have crimped down dramatically their supply of Russian gas. It's mostly been replaced by American gas. So I think it's a great story of a cross-Atlantic trade. But these new rules, this methane rule they have coming in place, is so virtuous that even the cleanest producers of natural gas in the United States would not be compliant with their laws. And if they decide you're not compliant, they don't fine you or penalize you on the gas you import to Europe. Their fines are based on your total global revenue. So they're just so far beyond the pale as far as rule of law and all that. But yes, they are a risk to energy supplies in Europe and they are a risk of disrupting the system. They're aware of it. So it is a constant dialogue. But of course, it went through their parliament and they can't just change this law. But yes, it's a risk. When you do bad things with energy policy, you impact everyone. And I could go on and on of what the Obama administration and the Biden administration did. One of the biggest goals of the Trump administration is unwinding all the damage that was done to the American energy production, the electricity system, exporting of natural gas, production on federal lands, these ridiculous restrictions on devices you can build and can't build. We're passionate about it and we're going to get it done. But here we are 20 months in, running seven days a week, and we have not fixed all the damage. A lot of what we're doing will go to the Supreme Court. But having a free and prosperous and wealthy and well-energized America is a central goal of the Trump administration and we will fight every day we have. Thank you so much, Secretary, both for being here and the work that you're doing. We very much appreciate it. Thanks so much, Amber, and thanks so much to everyone in the Daily Caller world.