Al Gore’s worst nightmare, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg TV hosts on Tuesday that coal-fired power plants will remain the backbone of President Trump’s reindustrialization of America. Wright emphasized that coal plants will be restarted to ensure affordable and reliable electricity for decades.
“What’s been the big issues for this president that he ran on, you know, the economic well-being of Americans and the National Security of our country. And our citizens, so we’ve had 20-plus years of sort of deindustrializing the United States and letting our heavy industry flow overseas. This president is passionate about increasing National Security, and that means we have to have the ability to build heavy steel-intensive and aluminum-intensive material systems in our country again. So this is an attempt, I believe, by our president to incentivize the reindustrialization of America,” Wright told Bloomberg hosts.
When asked about energy security and coal’s role, Wright responded: “Coal has been essential to the United States’ energy system for over 100 years. It’s been the largest source of global electricity for nearly 100 years, and it will be for decades to come, so we need to be realistic about that – now with coal, are we going to see a renaissance in surging coal production in the US – not likely – but we’re on a path to continually shrink the electricity we generate from coal – that’s made electricity more expensive and our grid less stable. So I think the best we can hope for in the short term is to stop the closure of coal power plants no one has won by that action.”
He continued: “The goal is just affordable, reliable, secure energy from wherever that comes from obviously, there’s going to be roles in the long run for solar energy. There are places where it makes tons of sense where the natural resources are there and the infrastructure is benefited by adding more solar to the grid, but I will say one thing for sure: we’re not going to go down the road of Germany – you know they spent a half a trillion dollars – they more than doubled their price of electricity – they actually shrunk the total amount of electricity the country produces by about 20% – and their industry is fleeing the country – that’s the path the United States was starting to go down, but that’s the wrong path.”
The coal discussion starts around the four-minute mark…
The latest data from Bloomberg shows coal accounts for about 20.5% of power generation today.