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Wright Holds a Press Conference at NREL, Apr. 3, 2025

April 3, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:18:59

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

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright held a press conference at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the April 3, 2025 session that followed his address to the laboratory’s employees the same day. Laboratory director Martin Keller introduced Wright, and Wright said he had spent the day touring what he called exciting scientific and engineering work at the lab, with artificial intelligence and the electricity grid particularly critical, as he put it, for national security and the country’s economic future.

Wright said electricity costs nationally had risen well over 20% in the previous four years with very little growth in electricity demand, and that the department needed to produce more electricity and stop the price rises at the same time demand was meaningfully rising. He described two recent department actions: within about two weeks of being sworn in, he said, he had called all the national laboratory directors to Washington and asked what was holding them back, and the department had acted on their answers with what he described as its own permitting reform for building at the labs; and that morning, he said, the department had sent out a request for information covering the 17 national laboratories and other department properties, inviting interest in building a data center and colocated power on laboratory land. Keller told the press the permitting changes were already visibly accelerating construction of the lab’s newest facility.

In questions, Wright defended his past climate statements, saying the hype he opposed was climate alarmism and attributing western wildfire risk, as he framed it, to decades of forest-management choices rather than to climate change alone. Asked about department staffing, he said headcount at the department had grown 20% in the previous four years and that the department was working through, in his words, how to deliver services at least as good at lower cost. On the data-center plan, he said the builders would be private companies under commercial arrangements, and that a builder needing 100 units of electricity should build 110, so the project would be additive to the grid. On tariffs, he described the reciprocal approach as intended to drive other countries to lower theirs, citing Israel’s announced reductions, as he stated them.

Why it matters

The press conference is Wright’s early governing method in one session: the laboratories treated as the department’s engine, their land offered to private data-center builders to meet AI load, and the price of electricity — not climate targets — stated as the test every policy has to pass.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the request for information on building privately financed data centers with colocated power on Energy Department and national-laboratory land, announced by Secretary Wright at NREL on April 3, 2025. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Press Conference with Secretary Wright at NREL - April 3rd, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; proceedings as delivered at the session, including remarks by Secretary Wright and NREL director Martin Keller).