The Exchanges

Q Uh, why don't you just ground people on where we get those things today? And, you know, like, what percentage comes from coal? What percentage comes from rat gas? What percentage comes from nuclear globally? Just so that we can maybe figure out where we need to go, and how do we get this, more of this stuff now?

A Yeah, so, so in 1973, and I use that year because that's the Yom Kippur War. That's when oil prices tripled. Later in the decade, they doubled again in the Iranian Revolution. So we said, we gotta get off oil and gas. So in 1973, oil, gas, and coal provided 85% of global energy, and last year, twenty-twenty-four, 85% of global energy. So they, and they've continued to grow. Over, over that, uh, 50 years, Natural gas has grown three percent compound annual growth rate. Coal, two percent. Oil, one percent. Oil is the most expensive and most flexible. Coal is 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 that's 85% from hydrocarbons. Four percent from nuclear. Used to be six in year 2000. And today, three percent, a little less than three percent of total energy comes from, ah, wind, solar, and batteries. Hydro's in there, geothermal's in there. The, the biggest component I didn't mention is traditional biomass. Burning wood. That is twice the total global energy of wind, solar, and batteries combined. Two billion people still cook their daily meals and heat their homes burning wood indoors. Two to three million easily preventable deaths a year to switch out that wood burning and liberation of women with just a simple propane stove.

AI assessment note: “85% from hydrocarbons. Four percent from nuclear. Used to be six in year 2000.”

Q topic, like, what is the difference between our point of view, which they have, no carbon in the atmosphere, spend all the money to keep that from happening, and our point of view, and I just ask for, like, like, help level set a little bit on What's the point of view on where carbon goes in the atmosphere over time, and how important it is to, to mitigate that?

A So like everything else, it's about looking at the facts and the numbers and the data. It's, we, we don't want to be cute like China. We, and of course, I, 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%. Um, from, from burning hydrocarbons, from developing a modern world. It's a real thing. It absorbs infrared radiation. It's contributed to some warming. But if you look at the math and the economics of it, it's just not even close to top 10 problem in the world today. If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Economics Projections, to the end of this century, nobody knows what the world's going to look like in the end of the century, but think of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These are the people that are dedicating their lives To work on climate change. Their estimates range from 0.2 to maybe three, four percent reduction in per capita income at the end of this century. So that's in 75 years, we might lose a couple months, we might lose a year of economic growth in 75 years. That's a bummer. It's not nothing, but compared to two to three million people dying simply because they don't have a clean cooking stove, And, and of course, the, the political movement that's too fo…

AI assessment note: “it's just not even close to top 10 problem in the world today.”

Q Why does it take so long, and why does it then Cost billions of dollars, and, you know, when I can turn 12,000 bucks of fuel into four million dollars of electricity, what's going on in the structural challenges with scalability of nuclear, particularly in the United States, and, um, why is it not a real path to, kind of, scalable energy production in this country for us right now?

A I mean, 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, that's got running room. But nuclear involves something people can't see and they can't understand, and therefore it's easy to scare people about. So nuclear really has been a victim of fear in our world. It's the safest form of energy production we've ever seen, for amount of energy it's produced and the amount of negative impacts, but people think it's the scariest and the most dangerous. So if you make it very long, very bureaucratic to permit things, if you make it so that, ah, therefore you've gotta so over-design and so over-engineer everything, it's so hard to permit enrichment, so you make everything expensive, and you make everything move slow, 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, of something that's reliable. So we, meaning the government, Has killed nuclear over the last four generations, and 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.

AI assessment note: “if you make it very long, very bureaucratic to permit things”

Q Is that, is that why the utilities keep raising the prices? It's just the complexity of servicing all of this and building all of this?

A Because you're adding new sources on, and you have to build new transmission lines, and you've got to operate the traditional sources in a more complicated fashion. And when the wind blows, what happens when the wind blows? Nuclear power plants operate relatively steady, 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 four cents a kilowatt hour in a subsidy to pay it. That's straight from the federal government to the provider of that wind power. The utility pays something for that wind power. The, the avoided cost is when you burn a little bit less natural gas If you're in Texas, that's two cents for one kilowatt hours worth of gas. If you're in New England, that could be three or four cents of avoided cost. That's less than the government subsidy to produce that, let alone the utility or my former home state of Colorado where they, they, they have additional subsidies and mandates that we must get our electricity or some percent 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.

AI assessment note: “Because you're adding new sources on, and you have to build new transmission lines”

Q over the country that are doing peer research that create fundamental breakthroughs that ultimately lead to industrial success for America. This administration's published out of the OMB. Massive budget cuts to some of this research. How do you address that topic as the, uh, 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?

A Yeah, so the 17 national labs we have across the country, most of them 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'm passionate about their value for our country, for their value for the human spirit, what it means to try to probe to 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 five 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. We were collecting a dollar in taxes and spending a dollar 40 for every dollar in taxes. That is a train wreck. I am passionate about shrinking government expenditures. In the, in the one big beautiful bill, we cut over five hundred billion dollars of subsidies for energy technologies. I wanted to cut the full one trillion, all of them. Um, not successful in that, but, but this much smaller amount of money, around ten billio…

AI assessment note: “I've been a passionate defender to, to, To stop cuts to that.”

Q a second. So we know that there's this huge infrastructure investment happening. I think it's been estimated that we're going to need, I don't know, 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 A huge challenge. And David, this problem is going to keep getting worse. We saw retail electricity prices rose 25% during the Biden administration. Wholesale electricity prices rose far more than that, over 50%. So we, we, we have done great damage to our electricity grid in the dialogue we were just having. Not that I don't like those technologies, I don't like expensive electricity. Um, it's a challenge. In the, 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, uh, fastest. Of course, we have supply chain issues with turbines there, but people are ramping up capacity to build those. There's simpler things we can do. There's environmental regulations that peak our gas turbines. They're only allowed to run a certain number of hours, I mean, hours in a year. Oh, that's what they're permitted for. We could get, 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, because we had some climate regs that limited that. We can fix problems like that. We, 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. When you, we don't need more electrons. That's the, we need more elec…

AI assessment note: “the fastest solution we have to power data centers is natural gas”

Q logical bridge so that people really understand that this is all possible, that this is not going to destroy the earth, and that we can get this abundant energy, especially because, as you guys have said very well, if we don't do it and somebody else has marginal, costless energy, they will de facto win. So how, how do we frame the argument so that people can understand this better?

A Yeah, I've been writing and talking about that for 20 years, and you're a hundred percent right. And to me, it comes down to the same thing AI is focused on, which is on data and facts. We've increased atmospheric CO₂ by 50%, hundred percent, it absorbs infrared radiation, it's been a force for warming, that's all true. But if you look at the trade-offs on it, it's not in the top five problems the planet focuses. And what has been the biggest source of decarbonization, not just In the United States, but globally, has been market forces. Cheap natural gases displace coal. And, and what, what's, what's a lower carbon energy source? Nuclear, that's on all the time. So this administration all in to get the nuclear industry moving again. Natural gas is the fastest growing energy source on the planet. Get out of the way of that. Let natural gas grow. It's the cheapest source of electricity in the U.S. When you, when you. I'm pro solar as well. I just don't want taxpayers to pay for it. I want businesses to pay for it, but solar is going to keep growing. Solar is going to keep growing.

AI assessment note: “it comes down to the same thing AI is focused on, which is on data and facts”

Q There was a chart that, um, got a lot of distribution on X over the weekend, which was just the rise in electricity prices in the United States. And, um, can you sort of explain, you know, why that's happening and, um, How we get around it so that it doesn't sort of trigger inflation and other kind of like pernicious things that we don't want to see?

A It is a huge challenge. It's a meaningful part of the reason why President Trump got elected. Energy exists, it's the sector of the economy that enables everything else. If you get energy wrong, everything hurts, and particularly for low-income people. So look, the backbone of our electricity grid has been coal, And hydro. Those are the two electricity sources we started with. Then oil got added. We used to get a lot of electricity from oil, very little today, except in Puerto Rico or Hawaii, because oil is flexible and you can transport it more easily. Uh, today, so today, the back, I mean, the backbone of our electricity grid has been coal, hydro, natural gas, um, and nuclear. Today, 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 put it in hydro, they're about 83% of US electricity. And for a hundred years, we had a declining inflation-adjusted price of electricity. It's just an infrastructure for our country. It boomed in the sixties and seventies as people got air conditioning for the first time, drove up electricity demand a lot. And then about, Obama administration really launched it, but this sort of overwrought and I think irrational fear of climate change, it wasn't a rational, let's look at the math and the trade-offs, it was just sort of a, a…

AI assessment note: “we started to spend a huge amount of money to subsidize the building of”

Q nuclear expansion for 1:02. So, um, how do we actually build these things faster, have the capability and the, you know, the technical construction know-how so that these aren't 15 year projects, but also how do we incentivize the states to basically get out of the way, uh, or like, you know, these other organizations that can launch the frivolous lawsuits, slow it all down, How do we do that?

A So, a lot of regulatory firm things. One, we're working on FERC, right? FERC has this inefficient queue system that just gets gummed up with mostly stuff that's never gonna happen. FERC came out yesterday with a new system where you're gonna prioritize things that matter, they're gonna move through faster. Uh, you saw the Supreme Court decision on, on NEPA. We got to get NEPA back to where it was. A process check on the environment, not an avenue for lawfare to stop things and kill things. So there's structural changes. There's just common sense reforms. We're going to get rid of Clean Power Act two point O that says you're going to have to have carbon capture and storage, you know, 15 years out on any natural gas is what's going to power AI. Let's just be honest. What's going to be the main source of new electricity in the United States by far and away? Natural gas. Just because it's cheapest, fast, it's reliable and dependable. Solar is going to play a role. Nuclear is going to play a role. Hydro, geothermal, stop closing coal, lots of pieces, but it's dominantly going to be natural gas. It's the fastest growing energy source, not just in the U.S., but in the whole planet. There's a reason for it. It's cheap. It's massively abundant. It burns clean. The machinery lasts longer than machinery burning oil or coal or something else. Um, but it's a let businesses. Doug and I are n…

AI assessment note: “A process check on the environment, not an avenue for lawfare to stop things”