Posted on 11/21/2025 8:57:40 AM PST by Signalman
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright might possibly be the biggest unsung hero in the Trump 2.0 Cabinet. While his fellow Cabinet secretaries like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth regularly get the big headlines, Wright flies a bit under the radar. But, that doesn't mean he's not busy taking bold, common sense actions to push America toward policies that prioritize affordable, reliable, and secure energy sources.
Regular readers of RedState will know that Wright has been taking bold action to undo burdensome regulations and policies implemented by the Biden administration. Our own Ward Clark has done a masterful job of logging Wright's accomplishments, including the restoration of our nation's depleted oil reserves, returning to the U.S. Treasury $13 billion in climate boondoggles, and embracing natural gas as an affordable energy source.
Wright is also busy undoing the administrative bloat that was added to his department during the Biden administration. A new organization chart released Thursday by the Department of Energy (DOE) shows a slew of "clean energy" offices added during the last administration following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have now gone the way of the dodo bird. Poof, they're gone.
The agency released a new organizational chart Thursday that no longer includes the offices devoted to clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and energy assistance for states and communities. The office of manufacturing and supply chains has also been removed, as has the office devoted to expanding the nation’s electric grid infrastructure.
That's not all: "The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — the beating heart of the Biden administration’s climate efforts — will be folded into a new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, a current DOE employee told NOTUS."
U.S. Energy Dominance Advances With Epic Alaska LNG Partnership
It's also being reported that DOE employees who worked in the area of "environmental justice" have been laid off as part of the Trump administration's reductions in force efforts.
While Secretary Wright has not commented publicly on the reorganization, he did tweet out Thursday his vision for the DOE.
November has actually been a pretty busy month for Wright and the DOE. As Ward reported last week, Wright told CNBC that his department was taking steps to refill the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, half of which had been drained by the Biden administration.
And earlier this week, the Trump administration announced that nuclear power plants, including the infamous Three Mile Island, will be getting the bulk of DOE loan money going forward. Secretary Wright commented, "When we leave office three years and three months from now, I want to see hopefully dozens of nuclear plants under construction."
Sounds like the next three years could be transformational for American energy policy — and it looks like Secretary Wright is just getting started.
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Fantastic news.
Bigger picture, I wish nobody was making electricity from natural gas. It is FAR FAR more valuable as a feedstock for petrochemical products, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer. You can burn coal to make power (and use a little bit of gas for peaking). But you can’t use coal to make petrochemical products (at least without massive investment in the Fischer–Tropsch process to liquify coal).
The Germans ran their WW II war machine on coal liquefaction. Sasol in South Africa was formed in 1950 to liquify coal using Fischer-Tropsch that German chemists and engineers first developed in the early 1900s.
In a sane world, hydrocarbons would be stacked according to their highest value application:
1. Coal for power.
2. Petroleum for transportation.
3. Natural Gas for feedstocks.
How much of this purge will last if we get a Democrat in charge?
I want to salt the earth so it’s difficult to get it up and running.
The crazies forced two local coal-fired power plants closed,and my electric bill SKYROCKETED JUST AS OBAMA PROMISED!
It is now $40 monthly just for access to electricity which makes my modest usage actually cost $3+ daily for a few LED bulbs and non-continous use of a 700 watt electric heater.
Homestead wind and solar are beginning to look viable.
I’m sorry, but he can’t do that without the consent and permission of an Obama or Biden appointed Judge.
Bkmk
Another Laundry bites the dust.
It doesn't matter. To fix DOE you first need to clear out HR and the Office of Management which describes itself thusly:
The Office of Management (MA) delivers corporate support, leadership, and oversight at the Department of Energy for a wide range of management, procurement, and administrative functions. Key areas of responsibility include contract and financial assistance management; property; corporate policies and authorities; sustainability; and aviation. MA also ensures the smooth operation of the DOE Headquarters through essential administrative, facility, and employee services. Additionally, MA leaders fulfill the statutory duties of the Chief Acquisition Officer and serve as the Senior Procurement Executive, Senior Real Property Officer, Chief Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Officer, and Chief Sustainability Officer for the Department.
It is important to note that according to Grok over 90% of DOE's total budget ultimately supports or passes through to DOE-owned and -operated laboratories and facilities. In other words their is a huge procurement organization that procures very little of DOE's program effort, but piles on with almost worthless and very expensive contract terms that bloat the administrative costs of these DOE owned facilities.
And at the DOE a small fraction of personnel are technical experts in the areas to be overseen. Most are auditors, administrators, contract specialists, etc.
They are in the middle of installing the stupid solar panels and wind generators here in central TX. Hundreds of acres of farmland turned into useless area. Those solar panels will not last as long as promised and when the useless wind generators topple there will be no one to remove the concrete blocks weighing hundreds of tons each from the earth.
When the cash flow stops the lunatic ride will end.
Awsome!
Just imagine if our feckless, impotent GOP congress members had just 0.01% of this guy’s balls...
The even bigger picture is that we can use thorium (found in coal) to power reactors, and use some of the heat produced in the reactors to liquify coal using the Fischer–Tropsch process. The thorium in coal has something like a dozen times the amount of energy (if burned in a reactor) as burning the coal itself, and the best part is that we basically throw away the thorium right now. We operated a thorium plant using molten salt to transfer the heat, in the 1960s, and it worked fine then (in fact, they shut the reactor down on Friday afternoons, and started it back up on Monday mornings, that’s how reliable it is). Further, because of the nature of thorium reactions, it is virtually impossible to build nuclear weapons from the products that the reactor makes, so it is as safe as could be from that standpoint. With 60+ years of technological progress, it would work at least as well right now. Oh, yeah, and we have so much coal that we could literally provide for all of our electrical power needs, and our liquid petroleum needs, just from this one source for hundreds of years into the future. That’s just with known coal reserves, without any new discoveries, without traditional nuclear and without oil or natural gas, let alone anything from solar or wind or geothermal.
Read the following blog piece from nearly 15 years ago to see a detailed explanation of what we could do, and the amount of energy that we have, just in coal: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667
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