← Videos · Energy & Permitting

Wright Delivers Remarks at the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, Mar. 18, 2025

March 18, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:17:53

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright delivered remarks at the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the March 18, 2025 address to the agency’s innovators and investors. Wright opened with his standing account of energy and human progress: life expectancy at birth was about 30 years for almost all of human history and is 73 years today, a transformation he tied to advances in energy, and while about one billion people live a lifestyle recognizable to the room, he said, seven billion others want what they have — which, in his framing, requires massively more energy. He noted that half the world’s people still hand-wash their clothes and a little over two billion cook with wood, charcoal, or agricultural waste, which he put at over two million easily preventable deaths a year, as he stated the figure.

Wright described his own path — in the short biography he said he wrote for himself, a science geek turned tech nerd turned energy entrepreneur — through nuclear, solar, and an early geothermal project, and named the technologies he said excited him now: fission and its waste and small-modular-reactor work, fusion, where he said significant advancements in the next few years would put commercialization in view, and energy storage. He closed on artificial intelligence, calling the AI contest the next Manhattan Project, saying the applications run from drug discovery and materials science to national defense, and that because AI turns electricity into intelligence, leading in AI requires leading in growing energy supply. He thanked the room for its partnership with ARPA-E and said innovation advances through ambitious people challenging each other rather than through top-down control.

Why it matters

At ARPA-E — the department’s high-risk innovation arm — Wright made the innovator’s version of his case: the summit’s portfolio, from fusion to clean cooking, is presented not as climate policy but as the route to the energy abundance he says the other seven billion people are waiting for.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Delivers Remarks at the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit” (official upload, embedded above; address as delivered by Secretary Wright).