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Wright Joins the AI and Energy Panel at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, Mar. 11, 2026

March 11, 2026 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:28:04

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

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined an AI and energy sector panel at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the March 11, 2026 session, alongside NextEra Energy Chairman and CEO John Ketchum and Alphabet and Google President and CIO Ruth Porat. Asked what people fail to appreciate about scaling AI, Wright said his mission in Washington is “to make it easier to build big things again in our country,” arguing that permitting regimes like NEPA have made it easy to stop projects and hard to build them.

Wright said winning at AI requires massively growing U.S. electricity production, which he noted has grown only a few percent in 20 years while oil production tripled and natural gas production doubled — his home state of Colorado, he said, produces 0.4 percent more electricity than it did eight years ago, as he stated the figure. The goal, he said, must be secure, reliable, affordable electricity delivered at scale, built in the United States rather than outsourced. Porat, citing Wright, added that done right, data-center additions can add resilience to the grid and protect affordability, as the panel presented the industry’s approach.

Why it matters

The BlackRock panel puts Wright’s electricity argument in front of the infrastructure investors who would finance the build-out: permitting reform and generation growth framed not as environmental politics but as the precondition for the United States winning the AI race.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: Secretary Wright’s electricity figures at the BlackRock summit, March 11, 2026 — U.S. electricity production up only a few percent in 20 years against tripled oil and doubled gas output, as he stated them. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Joins AI & Energy Sector Panel at BlackRock Infrastructure Summit - March 11, 2026” (official upload, embedded above; panel remarks as delivered by Secretary Wright and the panelists).