New DOE Sec Chris Wright is Wrong – Again

No coincidence that the new Secretary of Energy is a Fracking executive.
No coincidence that his climate non-denial denial is state of the art.
No coincidence that Mr Wright, (who I have already taken to task in a video) has a twisted and self serving take on the energy transition.

Dan Gearino in Inside Climate News:

In his speech, he touched on his views of climate change and his belief in the importance of increasing U.S. energy production. He is a skilled communicator, weaving his personal story of growing up in Colorado and taking an early interest in the science of energy with larger themes about the role of government.

“The energy dialogue, I would say, has been altered, I would say corrupted, because of climate change,” he said. “Climate change is a real thing. I’ve studied, spoken, written on it for 25 years. It is a very real thing.”

The corruption, he said, occurs when the idea of climate change is used “to pursue agendas that may or may not be at all related to what we actually know about climate change.”

He used this idea as a frame for his thoughts on Germany.

“German people are smart, enterprising and hard-working and wonderful, but they decided about 15 years ago that they were just going to change their energy system,” he said.

As he tells it, Germany has grossly overpaid for its shift to wind and solar and now is being crushed by high energy costs that have helped hollow out its industrial economy, while the visual landscape is marred by a glut of wind turbines.

“If your energy is expensive and it’s unreliable, everyone lives a little bit of a poorer life and it’s harder to manufacture things in your country,” he said. “So guess what happens? That manufacturing, it just moves somewhere else. Doesn’t go away, it’s just not built in Germany anymore. It’s built in Asia, United States, and loaded on a ship and shipped back to Germany.”

He went on to explain how this is relevant to his job.

“We don’t want to repeat that experiment in the United States,” he said. “The only way we’re really going to change our energy system is if we have energy sources that are affordable, that are reliable, that are secure, and that make people’s lives better. And we can do that.”

He listed several priorities for the agency, including an emphasis on increasing exports of liquified natural gas.

“The fastest growing energy source on the planet over the last 50 years, over the last 10 years, is natural gas,” he said. “The United States, 20 years ago, was the largest importer of natural gas on the planet. And in less than 20 years, today, we are the largest net exporter of natural gas on the planet. This is abundance.”

I contacted Benjamin Wehrmann, a staff correspondent for Clean Energy Wire, a Berlin-based nonprofit that reports on the energy transition in Europe, to ask what he made of Wright’s comments about Germany. 

He had one immediate fact-check, which is that Wright is incorrect to say that Germany has only embraced an energy transition in the past 15 years. It’s occurred over a much longer period. One of the landmark moments was the passage of a law in 2000 under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder that increased incentives for renewable energy projects.

Thanks to this law and several subsequent updates, Germany has gone from heavy reliance on fossil fuels such as coal to getting 58 percent of its electricity from renewable sources last year, which is more than double the share in the United States. But its successes have been undercut at times by higher energy bills for households.

Wehrmann also disagreed with Wright’s statement that wind turbines are everywhere in Germany.

“This is absolutely untrue, as there are many regions that still have little or no wind power production at all, especially in southern Germany,” he said. “While there’s a clustering and larger quantities in certain areas, particularly near the coasts and in rural parts of eastern Germany, the total land area planned to be designated for the use of wind power is 2 percent of the country’s area.”

He said Wright’s characterization of Germany’s alleged failures would not be recognizable to many leaders in the country’s business community. For example, he cited a September report from BDI, an industry trade group, that said the energy transition is an opportunity for Germany to remain an industrial leader.

Also, Germany’s grid is reliable, with an average disruption of 12.8 minutesper customer per year in 2023, which was in line with average for the previous decade.

Gernot Wagner, an economist at Columbia University, had two big problems with Wright’s speech. Wagner is a native of Austria and I spoke with him while he was getting on a plane to present at an energy conference in Berlin.

The first problem: Wright characterized the German government’s investment in its energy transition as a waste of money, which gives short shrift to the role governments have to play in putting money into the economy to support economic sectors that are important to the future.

The second problem: Wright criticized Germany for producing less electricity than it did 15 years ago, which misses the larger point that the country has become much more efficient in its use of energy. Efficiency is good.

“The German economy hasn’t been growing quite as fast as it should for all sorts of other reasons, but the fact that efficiency goes up … that means productivity went up, so the economy is now more productive, doing more with less inputs, and that is progress,” Wagner said.

Greg Nemet, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor, told me that Wright is leaving out some important details that help to explain the ups and downs of Germany’s energy transition. Nemet has done research in Germany and written about the country’s role in helping to make solar power more affordable for the world.

He noted that Wright doesn’t mention one of the main reasons that energy prices have risen so much in Germany in recent years: the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Germany and others in the European Union have reduced or cut off purchases of natural gas from Russia as a way to show disapproval of Russia’s aggression. With less Russian gas, prices rose for gas from other sources, contributing to an increase in consumer bills in much of Europe.

Germany’s choice, made decades ago, to rely on Russian gas “has blown up in their face,” Nemet said.

But that’s not a justification for saying that Germany’s energy transition has failed, he said.

“There are real costs for the energy transition that are high costs—investing in transmission infrastructure, subsidizing renewables—but those are tiny compared to what [Germany has] paid for getting gas from Russia, and then, increasingly, from importing gas from the U.S. and Middle East,” he said.

He thinks that using Germany’s example to argue for reliance on fossil fuels in the United States will do much more harm than good.

“If you’re going to bet on fossil fuels, you’re going to bet on volatility, you’re going to bet on really high prices sometimes, and really low prices sometimes,” he said.

And this is before accounting for climate change and the immense costs the burning of fossil fuels have on the environment and human health that aren’t included in consumer prices.

I asked Nemet what he thinks Wright’s comments about Germany say about Wright’s worldview.

“I see someone who is completely convinced that fossil fuels, and especially natural gas, is the way forward,” he said.