In early 2017, when Rick Perry went before the Senate for his energy secretary nomination hearing, the Texas governor’s message aligned with that of the first Trump campaign and administration.
An “America First” posture, Perry explained, meant energy independence and promoting “stable, reliable, affordable, and secure sources of American energy.” He went on to frame climate change as a potential challenge to economic growth, citing concerns around jobs and energy affordability.
In the years since his first term, Donald Trump’s stated energy policy priorities haven’t changed much. In fact, Trump plans to sign an executive order in the hours after his inauguration, declaring a national emergency in order to accelerate fossil fuel and mineral production.
But the power sector Trump is inheriting today is dramatically different from that of eight years ago. For one thing, load growth back then was stagnant. Today, he’s returning to office at a time when U.S. power demand is reaching record highs thanks to the artificial intelligence boom, manufacturing growth, and electrification.
And the grid itself looks vastly different. The intervening years have seen hundreds of gigawatts of renewable power come online, and renewables make up a larger portion of the energy mix than ever before. Terawatts of power are stuck in interconnection queues. And of course, utilities are facing rising pressures from extreme weather events, on top of massive predicted near-term load growth.
At last week’s Senate hearings, Trump’s nominees unveiled a rebrand of the “America First” agenda, one for the load growth era. The potential heads of the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy both framed investment in oil and gas around a new watch word: baseload power.
The word “baseload” came up 30 times at prospective Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources. And prospective Energy Secretary Chris Wright called protecting reliable and affordable baseload sources of power his “top goal.”
“For our country to be successful in the near term, we’ve got to get back to making sure that we’ve got the appropriate amount of baseload power,” Burgum told the senators. Wright spoke of keeping the grid “stable” for critical support of rapidly growing industries like AI, and committed to ensuring “that reliable and affordable baseload sources of power are protected.”
The push for baseload
The nominees shied away from dismissing renewable energy outright. Instead, both positioned traditional firm power sources — oil, gas, and even coal — as essential partners for clean energy in the face of incoming load growth.
Last week, a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that there are a whopping 1,570 gigawatts of generator capacity currently in the interconnection queue — more than double the installed capacity currently available in the country. The vast majority (95%) of the queue is from solar, storage, and wind projects.
In his response to questions from senators during his nomination hearing, Burgum pointed to those stats, giving them a slightly different framing.
“Electricity is at the brink,” the former North Dakota governor said. “The queue in FERC is 95% intermittent sources and only 5% baseload. We need baseload to be able to allow the renewables to be part of the system. We’ve got to have the balance between those two or the grid, which is like a giant machine, just doesn’t work.”
Biden-era energy policies, he added, have essentially thrown things out of whack.
“We’ve stacked the deck where we are creating roadblocks for people that want to do baseload, and we’ve got massive tax incentives for people that want to do intermittent and unreliable [generation],” he said, adding that rebalancing the country’s energy system is essential for the “AI arms race” and domestic manufacturing — and generally outmaneuvering America’s adversaries.
For our country to be successful in the near term, we’ve got to get back to making sure that we’ve got the appropriate amount of baseload power.
In another striking departure from Trump’s first-term nominees, both Wright and Burgum frankly acknowledged the real threat of climate change — and that it’s related to the burning of fossil fuels. But that acknowledgement too was framed in the context of load growth and the need for baseload.
Wright, for instance, framed the decision as to whether to build more renewables versus fossil fuel generation, as one between having enough power, and solving climate change. “Tradeoffs between those two are the decisions politicians make and they’re the decisions that will impact the future of our world and our quality of life,” he said.
While the Biden administration’s approach to that “tradeoff” was to push policies that have made it cheaper and easier to build clean energy generation, Wright and Burgum both expressed a desire to address climate change at the periphery. In other words, attach carbon capture to fossil fuel generation, including for “clean coal.”
The outlook for clean energy
The push for baseload power also informed the two men’s posture on various forms of clean energy. They spoke glowingly of those that provide clean firm power, like nuclear and geothermal. Meanwhile, both dismissed solar and wind as “intermittent,” and accordingly unreliable.
Nuclear has experienced a bit of a revival in the last few months, in part due to tech companies hunting for clean firm resources to power AI data centers. Wright and Burgum are both in support of growing the country’s nuclear resources (and in fact, Wright is on the board of advanced nuclear fission startup Oklo).
Wright in particular called for revitalizing uranium enrichment in the U.S., which has been all but nonexistent since 2019. He also called for rebuilding domestic plutonium pit production, which aligns with the existing National Nuclear Security Administration goal.
But Wright and Burgum didn’t just talk about nuclear as a valuable power source in this new era of load growth. They both linked it to national security, and the country’s ability to compete with China specifically. Wright also emphasized nuclear’s potential beyond energy, including for high-temperature process heat for manufacturing.
Meanwhile, both expressed enthusiasm about geothermal as well. Geothermal has been used for power for over a century, but “next-generation” approaches introduce new infrastructure to access it in more locations, regardless of the land’s natural permeability.
Wright’s company Liberty Energy is actually an investor in enhanced geothermal company Fervo Energy. Accordingly, in the wake of his nomination, many in the industry expressed optimism about having a potential ally in the executive branch.
Wright described geothermal as an “enormous abundant energy resource below everyone’s feet” with “tremendous potential.” And Burgum highlighted geothermal as a key part of the energy mix in North Dakota.
Questions about grid-scale storage, however, didn’t enjoy the same warm response, even though storage is of course one way to mitigate the problem of renewables’ intermittency.
Burgum downplayed the near-term potential of lithium-ion batteries for grid applications, saying “batteries get better at about 2% a year. And that’s what it’s been for 30 or 40 years and there’s no breakthrough that’s coming.”
(While he didn’t define what he means by “better,” lithium-ion battery energy density at least has improved by far more than that, especially in recent years.)
Of course, solar, wind, and storage at the utility-scale are already commercialized. Today, it’s the clean firm power sources touted by both Wright and Burgum in their hearings — like geothermal, and nuclear — that stand to benefit most from federal intervention in the form of loans and subsidies.
Overall, both hearings were amicable, and both nominees are assumed to be on a glide path to the nomination. But the reframing of Trump’s fossil fuel agenda was met with at least some skepticism, including from Maine Senator Angus King (D).
“When I hear “baseload” used in these contexts, it sometimes sounds like no more renewables,” he told Burgum. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable path for this country and it’s certainly not a way of meeting the challenge of climate change, which you’ve acknowledged is a serious one.”
