The Dope at the DOE

Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a pseudo intellectual clown of the highest order. Perfect fit for this cabinet of fools.
I thought I was the only one noticing his continued meltdown on social media.
Rob Meyer is scratching his head at HeatMap, (below) but it’s really very simple. Wright is a devious deceptive shill for fossil fuels. He knows his audience is Fox-addled MAGA morons, and he’s out to make more money for himself and the oligarchs he seeks to emulate.

Rob Meyer on Heatmap:

Take this claim, from last week:

This is just not a very sophisticated thing to say. It is true that wind and solar pose a distinct reliability challenge for power grids, and that grid engineers have expended time and effort thinking about how to manage that challenge. It is even true that advocates sometimes downplay these challenges. But it is not true that these technologies — or the power they generate — are “essentially worthless.” Grid-scale batteries, for instance, exist; they can store energy during the day and then release it onto the grid at times of peak demand. Transmission lines — like the sizable Grain Belt Express project, which was due to receive a federal loan guarantee until Wright canceled the funding — can also help manage these resources.

But perhaps such errors are forgivable when they come from an official account. What’s odd is that the secretary’s own account has made even stranger errors:

I had to reread this post several times to make sure I understood it correctly. Even then, I didn’t believe I had the right interpretation until the internet energy pundit Alex Epstein clarified it.

At first, I thought Wright was making some technical argument about how solar panels will never be able to meet total global energy demand. This would not have been true, but at least it would have been sort of interesting. No, per Epstein, what Wright was trying to communicate is that if you coated the world in solar panels, you would only produce electricity. And since electricity makes up 20% of the world’s total energy use today, “you would” — as Wright says “only be producing 20% of global energy.”

Never mind that if you did cover the world with solar panels (which would, to be clear, be a very bad idea), you would in fact produce vastly more energy than the global economy consumes today. Never mind that if you even covered half or a quarter of the world with solar panels (still a bad idea), you would obviously shift the economics of electricity — so that you could then, for instance, use the excess power to synthesize liquid fuel replacements for use in cars, ships, planes, etc. Never mind that, by one estimate, a single solar farm the size of New Mexico would meet the world’s electricity demand. (Building this would also be a bad idea, but not nearly as bad as the others.)

No, Wright is not saying any of that. What Wright is saying is the far more inane thought that solar panels only generate electricity, and the global economy does not only run on electricity. Thank you for that insight, Mr. Secretary.

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Below, in a Pre DOE video, Wright and his team whip up some “fracking fluid” and make it sound like a refreshing remedy that MAGA would take for Covid-19/
Pro Tip. The fluid that people are worried about with fracking is the “produced water” that comes out of the hole, not so much the fluid that goes into it.
But thanks for making your deceit so explicit.