The Hidden Truth About the US Energy Grid: Subsidies, Demand & Rising Prices - Chris Wright

There he is. Good to see you.

Round two.

Let's go.

Awesome. Good to see you.

Thanks for putting up with us again. I know that the last time was such a joy for you.

That is a joy.

It was a joy. For those of you who missed it, JCal decided to turn our very short panel into a debate about batteries and solar. He's like, “Just throw some batteries on the solar, and then it works great.” What do you mean?

Like, okay, but thank you for being here. Yesterday, we were talking about the panel, and Chamath said, “Why are we talking about nuclear? It's not even real. We shouldn't be doing this,” which I think—

No, no, let me be clear. Nuclear is small. It's interesting, but it's the pimple on the dog's ass.

I just want to give you a statistic and get you to respond to the future state of nuclear in this country. It's, I think, about $4,000 a kilogram for enriched uranium to go into a nuclear power plant. To have a gigawatt nuclear power plant, it's only producing about $3 million to $4 million of electricity per day for $12,000 worth of uranium fuel.

The incredible production capacity of nuclear is unmatched by any other energy source. Why does it take so long, and why does it cost billions of dollars? When I can turn $12,000 worth of fuel into $4 million of electricity, what's going on with the structural challenges of scaling nuclear, particularly in the United States? Why is it not a real path to scalable energy production in this country for us right now?

It will be in the long run, for the reason you just said: the greatest energy density. That's the key thing. If you can get a lot out of a little, that's got running room.

But nuclear involves something people can't see and can't understand, and therefore it's easy to scare people about. Nuclear has really been a victim of fear in our world. It's the safest form of energy production we've ever seen for the amount of energy it's produced and the amount of negative impacts. But people think it's the scariest and most dangerous.

If you make it very long and bureaucratic to permit things, and make it so that you've got to overdesign and overengineer everything, it's very hard to permit enrichment. You make everything expensive and move slowly, and then you have other energy sources that turn on and off, and you pay people a lot to build those things. That also erodes the economics of nuclear, which is reliable.

So, we—the government—have killed nuclear over the last 4 decades. The goal of the Trump administration is to reverse that strangulation of nuclear and let it fly again. But you're right: it'll take some time.

What is China doing differently?

I hate to say it, but they're just more rational. China is worried that if a nuclear accident happens and it injures people or makes them sick, then the government is going to look bad. That's going to kill them. But their design criteria are just for human safety, not for getting environmental groups off their backs or doubling down because someone else will be mad at them.

They're just pragmatic. They're building reactors faster and therefore cheaper, and they have more than 20 under construction right now.

Chris, let's break down the challenge as the world needs an infinite amount of electrons and an infinite amount of heat.

Fair.

Yes. Why don't you ground people on where we get those things today? What percentage comes from coal, what percentage comes from natural gas, and what percentage comes from nuclear globally, so that we can figure out where we need to go and how we get more of this stuff now?

In 1973—and I use that year because that's when the Yom Kippur War happened and oil prices tripled; later in the decade they doubled again during the Iranian Revolution—we said, “We've got to get off oil and gas.”

In 1973, oil, gas, and coal provided 85% of global energy. Last year, in 2024, they provided 85% of global energy. They've continued to grow. Over those 50 years, natural gas has grown at a 3% compound annual growth rate, coal at 2%, and oil at 1%.

Oil is the most expensive and most flexible. Coal is the cheapest if you don't have infrastructure. Natural gas can be the cheapest if you have infrastructure, so it's growing the fastest. Natural gas is the fastest-growing energy source.

So, 85% comes from hydrocarbons, 4% from nuclear, which used to be 6% in 2000, and today a little less than 3% of total energy comes from wind, solar, and batteries. Hydro is in there, and geothermal is in there.

The biggest component I didn't mention is traditional biomass—burning wood. That is twice the total global energy from wind, solar, and batteries combined.

Two billion people still cook their daily meals and heat their homes by burning wood indoors. You could prevent 2 million to 3 million easily preventable deaths a year and liberate women with just a simple propane stove.

There was a chart that got a lot of distribution on X over the weekend showing the rise in electricity prices in the United States. Can you explain why that's happening and how we get around it so that it doesn't trigger inflation and other pernicious things that we don't want to see?

It is a huge challenge. It's a meaningful part of the reason why President Trump got elected. Energy is the sector of the economy that enables everything else. If you get energy wrong, everything hurts, particularly for low-income people.

The backbone of our electricity grid has been coal and hydro. Those are the 2 electricity sources we started with. Then oil got added. We used to get a lot of electricity from oil, but very little today, except in Puerto Rico or Hawaii, because oil is flexible and easier to transport.

Today, the backbone of our electricity grid is coal, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear. Natural gas is 43% of our electricity. Nuclear is about 20%. Coal was over 50%, but now it's only about 15% or 16%. Together, they're 80% of US electricity. Actually, when you add hydro, they're about 83% of US electricity.

For 100 years, we had a declining, inflation-adjusted price of electricity. It's infrastructure for our country. Electricity demand boomed in the 1960s and 1970s as people got air conditioning for the first time, which drove up electricity demand a lot.

Then the Obama administration really launched this sort of overwrought and irrational fear of climate change. It wasn't a rational look at the math and the trade-offs; it was just a reason politicians could do things. So we started to spend a huge amount of money subsidizing the building of what are called zero-carbon electricity sources. Of course, they're nothing of the sort, but they are lower-carbon electricity sources: wind and solar.

They're all made out of hydrocarbons, made with hydrocarbons, and maintained and installed with hydrocarbons. I call them derivative energy-production sources.

Think about that. If you add a bunch of sources to the electricity grid that sometimes provide electricity and sometimes don't, what's the value of that? Are there any customers for electricity who turn on their light switch and have it turn on when the wind starts blowing or the sun comes out from behind a cloud?

In the middle of the football game, the sun goes behind a cloud and the football game turns off. You're in the middle of surgery and those things go off. So, of course, there's no customer for that.

But if you put them on a grid that has reliable, dispatchable resources, what do they have to do now? They have to turn up and down as the wind blows or the sun shines.

Peak demand for electricity is what a grid is designed for, right? When it's really cold on a winter evening, when everyone comes home from work, if electricity goes out and stays out that night, thousands of people will die. Texas had more than 200 deaths just a few years ago from an electricity outage.

So you have to design the grid to meet peak demand. Peak demand in the wintertime is in the evening, and it's cold because a high-pressure system—an air mass—has come down from the north and is sitting there. So there's no wind during a high-pressure system, and it's in the evening, so there's no sun.

On Inauguration Day back east, at peak demand, we get 2% to 3% from wind, solar, and batteries. The traditional grid has to supply everything, and that's at peak demand. If you have traditional sources that can supply at peak demand, of course they can supply at every other time as well.

Is that why the utilities keep raising the prices? Is it just the complexity of servicing and building all of this?

You're adding new sources, and you have to build new transmission lines. You also have to operate the traditional sources in a more complicated fashion. When the wind blows, what happens when the wind blows? Nuclear power plants operate relatively steadily. Coal plants you can turn up and down, but slowly.

So when the wind starts to blow, natural gas turns down a little bit. You generate a little less electricity to balance out the increased wind power. The government pays that wind power producer a 4-cent-per-kilowatt-hour subsidy. That’s straight from the federal government to the provider of that wind power.

The utility pays something for that wind power. The avoided cost is when you burn a little bit less natural gas. If you’re in Texas, that’s 2 cents for 1 kilowatt-hour’s worth of gas. If you’re in New England, that could be 3 or 4 cents of avoided cost. That’s less than the government subsidy to produce that, let alone the utility—or, in my former home state of Colorado, where they have additional subsidies and mandates that we must get our electricity, or some percentage of our electricity, from these other sources. But if you’re not dispatchable, you’re not adding to the peak capacity of a grid; you’re just a parasite. Parasites are expensive.

Let me ask you a little bit about China. In 2024, they installed 2–3 times the amount of solar that America did per capita. They also have 33 nuclear power plants under construction and 200 planned. Your administration, David included, keeps talking about clean, beautiful coal. You keep dissing solar, batteries, and wind and deriding them, like you just did. You keep talking about natural gas and clean, beautiful coal. What does China understand that you don’t?

Okay, that’s so great. Tell us how beautiful and clean the coal is and how terrible and ugly these windmills are. Please explain what we’re missing.

Of course, coal has been the biggest source of global electricity for 125 years. That’s as long as we have good data, and it will be for decades more. I know you don’t like it, but it’s not going away. It’s by far and away the biggest source of electricity in China. They built 100 coal plants last year. They built more capacity than almost every country in the world added in new capacity.

They do build a lot of wind and solar. It’s still a very small percentage of their energy, just like it is here. But they have an awesome industry exporting those products around the world. They’re over 80% of the solar supply chain. They don’t export much coal at all; they export solar.

And think about this: Is that why you guys are down on it? We would have to buy the solar panels from them, because it seems like you’re looking backward and China’s looking forward. That’s where the disconnect is coming from for me.

But there’s no there there with solar and batteries. Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. If we could make a bet 50 years out, I’ll make a bet that solar never gets to 10% of global energy.

Solar has a future, and after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own as an energy source. It has roles. There’s remote power. In the United Arab Emirates, they’re building a firmed 1-gigawatt solar facility with 8 gigawatts of panels and a ton of batteries. They’ve got great sun resources and low-cost labor, so they can build things there. Solar has a role, but we’ve had this inflated view that somehow the world is going to run on solar panels. There’s no math that shows that will ever happen. China doesn’t believe it for a moment.

Why are they installing 3 times as many as us per capita, then? And why are they so effective at installing nuclear power plants? This is what I don’t know—if you’re gaslighting us, no pun intended. This is just like a Trump magazine where we have to diss natural sources. But do you really want to dig coal out, burn it, and pollute the environment that we’re giving to our kids?

I want energy to better human lives. The cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources matter. The other thing we should say is that electricity delivers 20% of global energy. Wrap the whole planet in a solar panel, and you get 20% of energy delivered. Where’s the other 80% going to come from? It’s processed heat. It’s transportation fuels to run jets and ships. That’s not going to come from solar, ever.

Let me ask about the challenge with natural gas, which is actually methane. As a greenhouse gas, methane is roughly 80 times more heat-trapping than CO2. One of the historical pushbacks on natural gas has been that if there’s even 1% leakage in the supply lines, it’s worse than coal or oil or some other hydrocarbon-based fuel source, even though, if you have no leakage, it’s better. It probably has half the footprint, or something like that.

More importantly, what’s the administration’s view on putting carbon into the atmosphere as a cost to society? I don’t ask that in an antagonistic way. I met with a foreign minister from a European nation a couple of weeks ago, and the whole delegation was focused on this topic: What is the difference between their point of view—that there should be no carbon in the atmosphere and that we should spend all the money necessary to keep that from happening—and our point of view? I’m just asking for help to level-set a little bit on the administration’s view of where carbon goes in the atmosphere over time and how important it is to mitigate that.

Like everything else, it’s about looking at the facts, numbers, and data. We don’t want to be cute like China. I think you misunderstand China’s plan for wind and solar, but we want to look at the facts. How big of a deal is climate change today? It is a real physical phenomenon. We’ve raised atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50% from burning hydrocarbons and developing a modern world. It’s a real thing. It absorbs infrared radiation and has contributed to some warming.

But if you look at the math and economics of it, it’s not even close to a top-10 problem in the world today. If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s economic projections to the end of this century—nobody knows what the world is going to look like at the end of the century—these are the people dedicating their lives to working on climate change. Their estimates range from a 0.2% to maybe a 3–4% reduction in per-capita income at the end of this century. So, in 75 years, we might lose a couple of months; we might lose a year of economic growth in 75 years. That’s a bummer. It’s not nothing.

But compared to 2–3 million people dying simply because they don’t have clean cooking stoves—and, of course, the political movement that’s too focused on climate change has been against lending or bringing any capital to the developing world so that people can live longer, healthier lives, get clean cooking stoves, and build industry—the administration is humans first.

The previous administration put climate change first. Energy was a subset of climate change, and human lives were a subset of energy. For this administration, it’s the opposite: humans first. Energy is the great enabler of human quality of life, and climate change should play the appropriate role, if it does.

Hold on. Let me just bring this in for a second, because I think maybe, to level-set this, it felt like, obviously, Al Gore and the climate-change movement were completely wrong. We’re not sitting in 3 feet of water right now. It was overblown. But you agree that it exists. I’ve never heard you say we should be concerned about—

But I just called bullshit, Chamath. You are invested heavily in solar. You were just talking this weekend about your batteries and solar. So when is what we’re hearing here just politics, with one group going too far left and this group going too far, and when do you actually believe—

I agree with Chris. Let me give you my framework. First of all, energy, in my opinion, is a national-security issue. The reason why—and everybody cherry-picks a chart. Let me show this little nuclear chart going up and to the right for China. Wake up, people. China has no access to natural resources.

The real, accurate chart, if you want to be on top of this issue, is: What are they investing in? They’re investing in every form of energy production. Why? Because if push comes to shove in the future, China cannot be reliant on anybody for energy. It is the same in the United States. That’s number one. That’s why they’re investing in everything.

It’s inaccurate to cherry-pick the thing that helps reinforce your bias. This is why I find nuclear such a dead-end conversation—boring. The real conversation is the strategic gameplay of what’s happening on the field.

That’s number one. Number two, in the United States, my fundamental belief is that the utilities are broken because no matter how cheap you make the energy—and I really don’t care how you make it—you have to spend an inordinate amount of money transmitting and distributing it. All of that indirection is what the average consumer pays. So if you’re smart, eventually you’ll say to yourself, “I’ll just make it myself.”

Yes. And that doesn’t have to compete with Chris’s vision, because what Chris has to do is enable the broader framework for industry, manufacturing, and transportation. We can’t do that. My belief is that the largest utility in the United States will be a distributed utility of homeowners having solar complemented with batteries. That means solar and batteries at home, because you’re obviously not putting—

Yes, because you’re not going to put a nuclear reactor in your daughter’s bed.

Who’s going to do that? So let’s stop having this.

Nobody’s going to do that.

Greenberg is an investment in a small modular nuclear gen 4, and it’s going to go in my daughter’s—

When you put it under your daughter’s bed, call me.

Okay. And, JK, let me come back on that. I’m not anti-solar. I worked in solar energy. I bought thousands of solar-energy panels to power instruments remotely. I’ve supported funding to bring them to Africa to charge cell phones and bring lights. I’m for all energy sources that better human lives. But I’m for math. I’m for looking at numbers.

You sound that way constantly.

I just talk about the numbers. I worked in solar energy.

And, by the way, as a person who’s in the solar and storage business, I also like the math. The math before was perturbed. It was uneconomic. You have a lot of homeowners who are going to suffer because they have all of these solar projects that they put on their homes, by the shadiest of companies, that were subsidized by these things. So, as a competitor in the market, the first thing I applauded was: get these stupid subsidies away. Let the best companies compete. Yes.

Let us win.

Yeah.

Let me just change the topic for a minute. The Department of Energy, in addition to being responsible for advancing energy production in the United States and our infrastructure, is also the facilitator and administrator of all of our national labs. These labs do some of the most important pure research in the world.

We have the world’s first cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where I used to work for a few years. I’ve worked at a DOE lab. We have, obviously, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. There are labs all over the country doing pure research that create fundamental breakthroughs that ultimately lead to industrial success for America.

This administration has proposed massive budget cuts to some of this research. How do you address that topic as the secretary of energy? How do you facilitate conversation with the White House, and how do you view the importance of this research in the United States?

Yeah. So, the 17 national labs we have across the country, most of them were created soon after World War II. Their original use was the Manhattan Project: win World War II and develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. The greatest group science ever done. Simply phenomenal.

I love the 17 national labs around our country. I am passionate about their value for our country and for the human spirit—what it means to try to probe and understand what’s fundamental about nature. What is dark matter? How do neutrinos really behave? We don’t have commercial applications for those in the next 5 or 10 years. I take that back. We do have a neutrino application, but I don’t believe you have to have immediate commercial applications for the science to be worth doing at our labs.

They are gems. They are places of scientific discovery. Tons of innovations we use today—MRI machines. Those came out of work done at our national labs.

So, yes, I came to Washington when we were collecting $1 in taxes and spending $140 for every dollar in taxes. That is a train wreck. I am passionate about shrinking government expenditures. In the One Big Beautiful Bill, we cut over $500 billion of subsidies for energy technologies. I wanted to cut the full $1 trillion—all of them. Not successful in that, but the much smaller amount of money, around $10 billion we spend every year for these 17 national labs, I’ve been a passionate defender to stop cuts to that, and I think I will succeed at that. I will succeed at that. These are critically important.

Chris, you have members in Congress who support you in that regard.

Absolutely. And, of course, across the administration, you come in, you want to cut everything. I get it. All I’m doing, in my little narrow area of science, technology, and nuclear weapons, is saying, “Let’s be smart and thoughtful about what we should cut and what we should grow.”

Chris, very narrow question.

Sax—

Sorry, Sax, go ahead.

So, let’s talk about AI data centers for a second. We know that there’s this huge infrastructure investment happening. I think it’s been estimated that we’re going to need at least dozens of gigawatts of new energy to power these data centers just over the next several years. How are we going to do that? Where is that going to come from? How do you avoid the increase in residential rates because of that?

A huge challenge. And, David, this problem is going to keep getting worse. We saw retail electricity prices rise 25% during the Biden administration. Wholesale electricity prices rose far more than that, over 50%. So, we have done great damage to our electricity grid.

In the dialogue we were just having, it’s not that I don’t like those technologies; I don’t like expensive electricity. It’s a challenge. The fastest-growing energy source in the world and the fastest solution we have to power data centers is natural gas. Just by far the cheapest and fastest. Of course, we have supply-chain issues with turbines there, but people are ramping up capacity to build those.

There are simpler things we can do. There are environmental regulations that limit peaker gas turbines. They’re only allowed to run a certain number of hours in a year. That’s what they’re permitted for. We have a natural-gas generator; we can burn more gas and generate more electricity cheaply, and we’re not going to do it because we had some climate regs that limited that. We can fix problems like that.

There’s also a bunch of backup generators, not just at data centers but elsewhere around the world, that can’t sell electricity into the grid. They don’t have air permits to be regular providers. We only need more electrons a few hours a year, at peak demand. We have slack capacity 98% of the time—a huge amount in our grid.

So what we need is to figure out how, from existing assets, you can hit that peak capacity. We’re going to change some regulations. So all those backup generators, when we hit those peak hours, we’re going to turn on those diesel generators and those natural-gas generators. No, the climate isn’t going to collapse because we ran diesel generators for a few hours, but it’s going to allow us to have gigawatts more of firm electric-generating capacity on the grid we have today.

Chris, can you explain to us how much flexibility you can have on federal lands for you and the Trump administration, and maybe subsequent administrations, to control this without the involvement of state and local actors and all of these other third-party organizations to slow these things down?

So, if it is the case that you want to build a nuclear reactor, is it possible to just do it with federal approval? Is there any way on federal land or some other way where you can find an avenue to do this without all these other folks gumming up the system and slowing things down?

We will have new next-generation small modular reactors reach criticality next year. Our goal is by July 4, and I think we will beat that.

You’ll have an operational small modular reactor by July next year?

By July of next year, it will not be selling electricity into the grid. It will be running on federal land at the Idaho National Laboratory. It’ll be demonstrating that it can sell electricity. It will be permitted by DOE, but we’re working hand in hand with NRC as well.

So we will see commercial reactors break ground—actually, many before then. But nuclear is going to move at a faster pace than it has before.

Back to David’s question: the 17 national labs have a ton of land on them. We sent out an RFP: who wants to build data centers on our lab land? We’ll permit them quickly. We’ll help you get energy. We had 300 responses to that.

Every large data-center developer will partner with us to build data centers quickly on land. We have infrastructure because we must win the AI race. We have the capital. We have the people. And that means it will not impact consumers’ electricity costs. That’s the key piece.

What an amazing transition from the Manhattan Project to operating data centers on Department of Energy labs. Examples.

But let me ask one more question, because this has come up every time we go to D.C. We hear DOGE. Is DOGE dead? There’s a conversation that happens. Can you tell us a little bit about DOGE and the Department of Energy? Is it still around? And if so, what are the team members working on, and what’s the impact you’re seeing?

We have a fantastic crew of teammates. Some of them came as part of the original DOGE program, so it’s just been rebranded. But this idea of getting smart, technical, and financial patriots who are leaving their jobs and leaving their careers to come work with us—that is as strong and thriving as ever.

The country and I have benefited enormously from the—you could call them—DOGE alumni who are at the DOE today, looking through our labs and working with us in every process, everything we’re doing. How could it be better?

I am touched by the patriotism of people who are walking away mid-career or taking a hiatus mid-career, like David Sachs. David’s a perfect example of that. So many people are doing that because they believe in this country. They believe in bringing common sense back.

And again, people think I’m this crazy guy who denies climate change. Of course, nothing of the sort. I’ve been writing and talking about climate change for 20 years. I just want it treated rationally as a trade-off. Everything in life is a trade-off.

That is the attitude that pervades DOGE and all these people coming to Washington who had never been in Washington before. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I never did politics.

We appreciate you engaging in the dialogue, and you're a true bestie in the All-In sense of the word. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Chris Wright.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Great. Great job. Great job.