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Secretary Chris Wright Discusses Coal's Role and AI Power Demand on Bloomberg

April 24, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:03:39

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

What happened

At the Ham Institute for American Energy’s Powering AI global leadership summit in Oklahoma City, Bloomberg’s Alix Steel asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright about coal, AI, and tariffs. Wright said coal has politically fallen out of favor, which he attributed to too much politics in energy: coal has been the largest source of global electricity for a hundred years and will be for decades more, he said. In the United States, coal was outcompeted by natural gas, falling from over 50% of electricity to the teens, which he called market forces, according to the interview.

Wright said coal is still critical to the American grid — if all coal plants shut down today, electricity prices would skyrocket and the grid would destabilize — and that with modern scrubbers and pollution controls coal is a great source of electricity that is stored on location, adding that energy security requires diversity, as he stated it. He said coal’s market share probably will not grow because the economics are not there to build new coal plants, but the critical thing is to stop closing existing ones, according to Wright.

Wright said everything the hyperscalers do today is powered in part by coal, since coal is about a sixth of the grid, while new supply will come from nuclear, gas, wind, and solar. He said natural gas has been the fastest-growing source of U.S. electricity by far, is well over 40% of U.S. electricity and growing, and will probably hit 50% in the next bunch of years — which he called not politics but math and economics, as he put it.

Why it matters

Wright’s coal position is retention, not revival: keep existing plants running for grid stability while gas, nuclear, and renewables supply the growth — the balance the department’s permitting and plant decisions are judged against.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Joins Bloomberg’s Alix Steel - April 24, 2025”, 2025-04-24 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-04-24). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.