Secretary Chris Wright Delivers Welcome Remarks to DOE Staff

Thank you so much. I’m a downgrade from Ingrid [Kolb], but you’re stuck with me for a while. 

I am honored and humbled to be here. When I walked in the building this morning and saw all of you, so many faces, down there, so much energy, I not only felt so welcomed, but I saw the enthusiasm in the faces I see right now, which is key to me.  

You get how important what you do every day is. You help make our country a better place. You help make our world a better place. And look, I am honored to be here with you and be a part of that. 

And I’ve got to start by thanking President Trump. I wouldn’t be here without that.  

I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve never lived in Washington, D.C. Now I’ve been here a few weeks, I’m still figuring the place out. I had to get a whole new wardrobe. I took the tie off so that my mom would recognize me on the [livestream]. But thrilled to be here.  

I met President Trump a year ago, and look, he shared a passion, [for] energy. He had a simple vision: that energy was good, and that we need more energy—and in particular, more American energy. That the growth of American energy was great for our country, great for our citizens, great for our geopolitical situation. And let's get more energy, of all kinds, that will add to affordable, reliable, secure energy. And that's the message I've preached my whole life.  

And so, we just connected, and he asked me, “Would you be Secretary of Energy?” And I said, “Boy, if I'm asked to serve my country, I don't have to think about that one. There's only one answer to that question. Of course I would.” 

And in this crazy, dreamy world, here I am. Here I am. And I'm at—not only in our national government, here in Washington, DC—but what I would maintain is the most fabulous agency, the most fabulous institution, as part of our federal government.  

Incredible assets. More important, these unbelievable humans that are in the room today, that are across our National Labs, in our cleanup facilities, in our offices around the country, like this [is] a gem. This is the gem of the American government, and it’s got to put up with me for four years.  

[Laughter] 

Look, I think of the history. As a kid, I love science and the wonder of it. I started with astronomy. Like, what are those things in the sky, and how far away are they? And if it's trillions of miles away, how come I can see it without binoculars?  

That started my love of science. And I think of, I go back to 1938: Otto Hahn, first splitting the uranium atom. And one of his colleagues, Lise Meitner, says this is fission of a uranium atom. You know, the world changed at that moment.  

And just a few years later, during the war in 1942, we launched the Manhattan Project, led by Leslie Groves from the military and J. Robert Oppenheimer on the science side. And an amazing thing happened in three years, from 1942 to the summer of ‘45, the world's greatest scientists’ [and] engineers’ energy and spirit of cooperation led to the creation of nuclear weapons. A new physical phenomenon gets created into an incredibly complex machine that made sure the United States won the war, and that made sure we kept the peace after in the Cold War, and won the Cold War.  

This development of nuclear technology and the weapons at Los Alamos, at Oak Ridge, at Hanford, Lawrence Livermore, at these incredible institutions that got created at the time. I think of Hyman Rickover, also one of our ancestors of this organization, creating the first nuclear powered machines in a submarine. Unbelievable.  

Developed these engines, still built, designed by this Department, that have operated [for] 70 years now without a single incident. This is unbelievable science and engineering and achievements.  

And fast forward to today: Where are we learning more about high energy physics, the basic essence of nature? In our National Labs. Where is some of the basic science behind quantum computing? Behind AI?  

And ultimately, I hope in the next four years, we're going to see the fusion of scalable quantum computing and AI, and we're going to have a different world with different possibilities. And that's going to happen in the next few years, if all of us keep that passion I've seen this morning, and I've seen as I walk in this room today.  

We can do simply tremendous things together. And I am excited to be here and to do that with you.  

Look, my life has been on energy, and our Department is named for energy. Energy is this basic force that enables absolutely everything humans do. We wouldn't have complex life without mitochondria, this little species that lives inside us, thats job is to produce energy and energize our bodies and allow us to live these incredible, magical lives.  

But if I look at the human condition throughout time, before the invention of agriculture, life expectancy at birth: around 30 years. Then we had a huge- what I call the second energy transition. The first is the invention of fire, where we could expand the calories we could consume.  

Then the invention of agriculture, an explosion in the available energy we can produce on Earth. Food is just the energy that powers the human machine. We had a lot more energy through the efficiency of agriculture, but it didn't change the lot in life of the average person. We still had roughly 30-year global life expectancy at birth. It made a few people live great lives and have power and control and live long, healthy lives, but the average person's life expectancy at birth: about 30 years. 200 years ago, after the birth of our country.  

And then we've seen just two, I think, transformative forces: the growth of human liberty, making everyone free and everyone empowered, enfranchising women, ending slavery. That was all across the country. This growth of human liberty together. 

And they evolved together with the explosion in additional energy sources, first from coal and peat, and then later oil and natural gas, and then all these great derivative energy sources we can make now, since we have hydrocarbons. We can make nuclear and hydro and wind and fusion and solar, and we can develop new energy sources. But these things changed our world.  

In a few generations, we went from 30-year life expectancy at birth to 73 years today, globally. That's energy. None of that happens without the growth of available energy.  

Today, we have about a billion people that live lives remotely recognizable to us. We wear fancy clothes, made with and out of energy products. We heat our homes and our buildings in the wintertime and we cool them in the summertime. We use motorized transport to visit our families. We live these awesome lives. 

About 7 billion people don't have the fully energized lives that we have. They consume less than a quarter, on average, of the energy that we consume.  

What do they want? Well, I haven't talked to all 7 billion of them, but all that I have spoken to, all of them, of course, want to live lives like us. And of course, they shall, and they will. But that's impossible without a surge of available energy for them to enjoy the trappings that we have.  

Even in our own country, about 10% of Americans in the last 12 months have got a utility disconnection notice. Think about that. Think about that. Think about your life. When the utilities are not there, you don't have heat, you don't have electricity, you don't come home. That's not the same life that you have today.  

One of our missions is [to] shrink that number, with the target of zero. And to do that, we've got to make electricity more abundant and more affordable.  

But we have the people, we have the energy, in this room and across this country, working in this Department, to do that. That's [why] I'm here. That's a simple summary of what I want to do in the next four years.  

I want to better energize our country, strengthen our country, advance science, advance the cause of basic science, and get the politics out of all of this. Energy is not political. It's the basic infrastructure that allows us to live great lives, to allow whatever our dream is, whatever our vision is.  

We all have different dreams, we all have different visions, but we have to have energy and resources to realize whatever that is. We don't want to put energy- we don't want to put politics in energy. And there's no such thing as clean energy and dirty energy. That's just nonsense.  

Energy is a large, scalable physical quantity, and every way we produce energy has positive things for human lives and has negative impacts. It takes materials. It takes land. It creates pollutants. It uses- it creates things we have to clean up. It takes energy to build the machines that produce energy.  

There's no free lunch. It's just like everything else in life. It's about trade offs. If something's positives are much bigger than its negatives, that's great. We're for that. Let's grow that one. And every energy source, if we can grow its positives—meaning increase its abundance, shrink the impacts it might have on the world, and lower the cost to create more of it—that's positive. That's the kind of work we want to do here.  

And the energy dialogue, I would say, has been altered, I would say corrupted, because of climate change. Climate change is a real thing. I've studied, spoken, written on it for 25 years. It is a very real thing.  

But there's climate change, the physical science and our understanding, and then there's the words “climate change” used politically, to pursue agendas that may or may not be at all related to what we actually know about climate change. 

And I won't go into detail here, but just in summary, we have roughly 50% more atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than we had 100 or 200 years ago. 280 parts per million [to] about 420 parts per million. That 50% increase comes dominantly from the combustion of hydrocarbons, which is the dominant source of energy that's lifted us out of poverty and extended our lives. That is a downside—or that is an impact—of burning hydrocarbons, and it continues to rise, and it will continue to rise for the foreseeable future.  

So, the general principle: Look, can we get all these benefits of energy and not increase atmospheric CO2 concentration? It could be an admirable goal.  

And of course, there are huge transformations that the rise of shale gas, outcompeting coal when it's delivered by pipeline, that has lowered the greenhouse gas intensity of energy production. The rise of nuclear could meaningfully lower the greenhouse gas intensity of our energy production system.  

And over generations, we will change this. We will advance it, but we tried to put it into a brief time period, and when we politicize it, it means it's not really about the math anymore. I think we've gotten way off track. And I could talk for hours about this. Fortunately for you, I will not. 

[Laughter] 

But let me give you one example. I started with Otto Hahn and the first splitting of the atom in Berlin. You know, Germany [is] just an amazing technological and industrial powerhouse of a country. Has been historically, has been through my lifetime. Look at what Germany did, and this is politics.  

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. The Energiewende. The energy revolution. 

They've spent about a half a trillion dollars. That's 1/10^th our economy, that's as if we spent $5 trillion. Think of how much poorer we would be, or what else you could do with $5 trillion. 

And what did Germany get for that $5 trillion? Well, you can't drive around Germany today without seeing wind turbines, because there's almost no place where they're not visible from- at some point. So, they've plowed, they’re onshore, offshore. They put solar panels all over this place. Northern Europe, cloudy and cold in the wintertime, paved with solar panels.  

But what's been the overall impact of that? $500 trillion. They've roughly tripled the price of electricity.  

Think about that. If you live in that country, right, you've got to pay your heating bill. You've got to pay for everything you do. And that price, of that basic enabling commodity, is tripled now what it was 15 years ago, and well more than double what it is in the United States.  

It went from a little bit over 100 gigawatts of electric generating capacity in 2010 to 240 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity. That takes a lot of money, not just to build the generating capacity, but the infrastructure and a bunch of other systems around it.  

So they more than doubled their stated capacity, but yet, how much electricity do they produce today versus 15 years ago? Amazingly, 20% less. Three times more expensive, and the whole system produces 20% less.  

So what does that mean? It's a coincidence, it's not directly one to one, but the industrial production in Germany has dropped roughly 20%. This industrial powerhouse of the world is losing its industry. Its petrochemical industry first moved from Germany to the United States and to Asia.  

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. 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.  

They've had two years of no economic growth, over the last two years. The AI revolution. How much of that revolution do you think is going to happen in Germany? You know, almost none, despite the intellectual horsepower there.  

And what was the change that they wanted to do? They wanted to change their energy system from one dominated by hydrocarbons to new energy technologies. Well, in 2010, Germany got 80% of their total primary energy from hydrocarbons. Today, half a trillion dollars, triple an energy price, impoverishment of the population, shrinking industry, they've shrunk from 80% all the way down to 74%. 

Like that shows you how hard it is to change an energy system. It's hard, and if your model is: make it expensive, unreliable and export your jobs, guess what? No one's going to follow that model.  

We don't want to repeat that experiment in the United States. 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.  

We can do that, but only if we do that, is that energy system going to grow and make people's lives better, and ultimately, that model, that technology, be adopted around the world.  

But I'll tell you who are going to be the most important people in making these transformations as they go, of increasing the supply of affordable, reliable, secure energy? It's going to be- there's going to be a lot of people involved in that. But the 100,000 people that make up the Department of Energy are going to be right at the front of that transformation, right at the front of that innovation. 

And we're going to do it for science and to better lives, not for politics, not for some other agenda, not to make our names as campaigners. We want to be humble servants of our country and of our population.  

[Applause] 

So, a little bit about me, the nerdy guy at the front of the room. The downgrade from Ingrid. 

I grew up in Colorado, Denver area, and people say I speak too fast to really be from Colorado. I was born in New Jersey [and] I learned to speak there. Alex [Fitzsimmons] is from New Jersey too. You know, we don't speak slowly.  

But I moved to Colorado when I was six. I'm the youngest of four kids, and we were all really close, less than four years apart. We were all in high school together. We were all in college together. I grew up in what was sort of the edge of town at that time in Colorado, went elementary school through high school on the same campus, big public school system in southeast Denver. 

And super lucky, super lucky. My brother and I love sports. We love to compete, and we love science. I love science fiction. It taught me about, you know, what's possible in the future. What ideas are there?  

And I loved history. I love to read about, how is it different in different times in our own country? How are different countries of the world. How have they evolved? How do they interact? Where do they go?  

Now, I had, mostly, I would say, a very fortunate life. But my dad, the cross he's had to bear, my dad was an alcoholic when I was born, and he's an alcoholic today. His entire life, functioning alcoholic. Went to work, went to job. Tragically, his mom was an alcoholic. Look, he worked his whole career. He functioned, but it made life a little different for the four kids in my family and for my mom.  

My mom is a saint, and without the tie on, she's going to know this is her son speaking.  

[Laughter] 

But she raised four kids, and we all were impacted by that very differently. For me, it was a motivator, like, I want to be independent. I want to control my own destiny.  

I wanted to skateboard as a kid, and, you know, my dad didn't like skateboards, so I started picking weeds and babysitting when I was nine and 10 years old, and saved up enough money at 10 to buy a skateboard, thrilled to have that. Work and making money, to me, was freedom, was empowerment. I wanted to be able to take care of my mom at the youngest possible age.  

And that also motivated me in school. I went to college a year young. I went to college in three years, so that I would be financially independent from my family. My last family support, I was 19. 

And I went to college, originally in pursuit of an energy dream. I mentioned my love of the stars and the sun and understanding like, “How can I see something that's quadrillions of miles away with my naked eye?” So I started to read, you know, “That is a badass candle—what is it burning?” And it turns out it was burning hydrogen and combining it into helium. It was fusion.  

So I was exposed to fusion at this young age, which got me interested about, well, this is fusing atoms, and then, of course, I learned about splitting atoms. At like 13, 14 years old, I bought a nuclear engineering textbook early on in my high school career. [That] definitely made me popular with the gals. I'll tell you that. I still have that nuclear engineering textbook. 

But we had a speaker come from CU Boulder, who talked about the state of the world at that time, and maybe a little different mania then—and a mania meaning everyone believes something passionately, mainly because everyone else believes something passionately. And the mania at that time was that the world was running out of resources. We were running out of land, the ability to produce food. We were running out of energy.  

He came and gave this talk of, we don't know if it's 1995 or 2000—at the latest, it's 2005—industrial civilization will collapse, because we've run out of the energy resources that it takes to make and do everything.  

Man, as an optimistic young kid who wanted to climb mountains and see the world, that was alarming. So I'm gonna work on that problem. I'm gonna work on that problem.  

I'm in Colorado now. We had fled the East Coast. I did not plan to come to college back East. And I went to MIT for only one reason. They had these two tokamaks, Alcator A and C, that looked like a promising path to fusion energy.  

So I came as a 17-year-old kid to work on energy. I quickly realized I didn't have the patience for basic science. It's super cool. I love it, but I realized I'm an impatient guy.  

And I had a summer job at Honeywell, right when thermal printers were coming out as a potentially competing technology to laser printers. I got to work on a small team to design a manufacture old prototype, super exciting. And at the end of it, I looked at, there [were] nine of us that worked on this team, and like, two guys really did most everything that was in the final printer. And I realized, wow, there's really a wide range of talents and skills and abilities and all different things. But these two guys were just all in.  

And that made me realize, now I know what I want to do. I want to be an entrepreneur, because you could have only people that were all in on whatever it was, all different skills, that were all in. Maybe I could make some neat things happen. And the last boss I really had, I was 19, nVent Schroff at Honeywell.  

And since then, I went on to graduate school, briefly, mostly because I was young and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I went to graduate school, first at UC Berkeley, and then back at MIT. I worked in solar energy a bit at that time, I worked in geothermal energy right after. 

I met a gal sitting next to me in the front row when I was 18 years old, kind of a- a little bit of a wild kid. I came home from meeting her after my freshman year of college, when I got back to Denver, and I told my sister, “I met a gal today. I could marry her.”  

My daughter would say, “Well, I took it long enough, Dad.” 

[Laughter] 

But I knew where I was going. And so my wife, Liz, and we introduced her up front. We have two wonderful kids. We have a grandchild, eight-month-old grandchild, so super proud and super excited about that. Two sisters, a brother, both of my parents live in Denver area.  

Look, I am thrilled and happy to be here. I'm excited to be in my totally different role. So please help me along the way. Don't be shy with any input. 

But I did throw together a draft Secretarial Order. I know, I know Ingrid did a lot of them, so I got a lot of catching up to do. But we're going to issue one today, and it's really just to put out some markers, some goals, some targets, for what we want to see this great family in the Department of Energy do over the next few years.  

And [so], I'm just going to read them off. There's nine of them. You'll all get it in an email later. So don't, don't take notes, and there's a few more words in the letter.  

Number one, what is our goal? Our goal is to advance energy addition, not subtraction. More energy. More energy means better lives.  

We want to unleash American innovation broadly and American energy innovation.  

Number three, we want to return to regular order on LNG exports. The fastest growing energy source on the planet over the last 50 years, over the last 10 years, is natural gas. 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. This is technology here—technology which the DOE played a role [in], as well as myself and several others, in the late ‘90s, to help start the shale revolution.  

Number four, we want to promote affordability and consumer choice in home appliances. What is the goal of energy? What is the goal of appliances? It's to make our lives better, to make our lives more convenient, to have more time with our kids, to do more things with our families.  

Number five, refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It's there in the event of crisis, [so] that we have an energy store beyond our production. Our need of it, maybe, is a little bit less today, because of our abundant production. But things happen in life, and you've got to be prepared for the worst. That's what our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is for. 

Modernize America's nuclear stockpile. I started talking about the Manhattan Project. Our nuclear weapons, this is the ultimate guarantor of the sovereignty of our nation. And what else have they been? They've been a huge deterrent for war among major nations. We had a smaller percent of people die in military conflicts, since the advent of nuclear weapons in the last 70 years, than any time in human history that we know of. They're terrifying, frightening weapons, but they've had, in the big picture, very much a peace-generating impact. But it's up to us, in this family, to maintain that stockpile of our weapons, of our engine powerhouses for submarines and aircraft carriers, and also to monitor and be careful about the deployment of nuclear technology around the world. We're not going to take our eye off that ball.  

In the same thread, unleash commercial nuclear power, nuclear energy in the country. Now, this “nuclear renaissance” has been talked about for years. Yeah, there's things that have been tripping it up. We got to get beyond that. We've got to get nuclear energy going again. Nuclear energy was 6% of global energy in the year 2000. Today, it's 4%. It's actually shrinking, because the demand for energy overall is growing faster than new energy we're getting from nuclear.  

One of the other things I love about nuclear today, it all goes to the electricity grid. That's awesome, but the biggest use of energy is manufacturing things. Almost 50% of energy is used to make things. We think of planes, trains, and automobiles, and cars, and buildings, and houses. Those are all great uses of energy, but you can't build a plane, or a train, or an automobile, or an internet, or an electrical grid without metals and materials. Manufacturing of materials is the biggest use of energy. Most of its process heat, high-temperature process heat. Today, it comes almost exclusively from combustion, mostly of coal, natural gas, oil and wood. Nuclear could provide, not just electricity, but high-temperature process heat to make some of the materials that go into making a nuclear power plant and everything else we live with.  

We need to strengthen the grid reliability and security. We've had 20, 25 years of only very modest growth in electricity demand, only very modest growth. Yet even in those conditions, unfortunately, we've seen the price of electricity growing going up and the stability of our grid going down. This is the infection of politics into our energy system. We need to reverse that. We need to make our grid more stable. We need to stop the rise in electricity prices and, ultimately, do everything we can to get electricity prices to go down.  

And we have the further challenge of—not the very modest demand growth of the last 25 years—we're about to see rapid demand growth again, all for great reasons. For the rise of AI, for reshoring some energy intensive manufacturing in our country again, including semiconductors. So we're going to see rising demand for electricity, like we did in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, as everybody got air conditioning, one of the great, life-changing technologies that allowed our cities in the South to become major cities in this country.  

I've lived in only one house in my life that has electricity—I mean that has air conditioning. Don't quote me on that one, they've all had electricity! Only one had air conditioning, our current house in Denver. 

[Laughter] 

And then I'll end with the last point, which is more broad. When I was a kid, I traveled in Europe with a backpack, and saw spectacularly beautiful art and science and history. And I thought, wow, Europe is spectacular. 

But there didn't seem to be a lot new going on. It was almost a museum to its past. And I said, “Thank God, I'm American. I'm going back to America. I'm going to be an entrepreneur.” 

America is a country where we do things, we build big things, we change things. And we've gotten to a place today in America where it's very hard to build something. It's very easy to stop something. How can we build big, great things? If it's so easy for a few people, a few protesters, a few processes to stop, how are we going to build next-generation quantum computing? How are we going to deploy fusion energy, and next generation fission energy, or next generation geothermal? How are we going to do those things, if it's so hard to build things in this country?  

This President is very passionate about unleashing American, not just energy, but entrepreneurship spirits, to build things in our country. Again, I'm super excited about that. So all of us have to work together. How can we stop barriers?  

Most of this building, of course, is not going to be done by the government. It's going to be done by businesses and innovators and risk takers. But we're going to be critical technology partners and sometimes regulatory partners and all that stuff.  

Let's use our efforts, our passion, to figure out, how can we enable more things to happen? And not, how can we stop things from happening, which too often has been the role of the government and certainly has been a major role of the government over the last four years.  

I'll end with saying, again, I thank you all so much for being part of this incredible institution that is the United States Department of Energy. I plan this year, in 2025, to get to all 17 of our incredible National Labs. Sorry about that, but I'm coming your way.  

I want to go out and see the incredible cleanup sites we have as well. Building those weapons during the war, and right after, we did it rushed. We did it quick because we had to. There was fallout from that. There were tradeoffs from that, and it's our responsibility to clean up those that waste and it's widespread, and it's all over. Biggest of all at Hanford, where we built two thirds of the United States plutonium. That was part of our national sovereignty, part of our technology advancement. And we have been working on it for decades. We need to finish cleaning up all of these sites. 

And we got to continue the very proud legacy of this Department. Thank you for the warm welcome this morning. Thank you for the warm welcome in this auditorium today. Thank you for being my partner in the coming years, I could not be more excited to be your partner.  

Thank you all. Let's unleash American energy and make our country great. Appreciate you all.