Energy

‘Batsh*t Crazy’: Top Trump Official Rebukes Democrats After Coal Saves Lives In Winter Storm Fern

X/Energy Secretary Chris Wright

WASHINGTON—Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters Friday that the Trump administration’s energy policies helped save the grid during Winter Storm Fern.

The Department of Energy (DOE) under the Trump administration has issued numerous emergency orders to maintain coal plants operational capacity over grid security concerns. During Winter Storm Fern, Wright issued emergency orders to overrule environmental regulations and state law to keep coal plants online in affected regions, successfully meeting demand.

Wright said that the U.S. did not experience any outages during Winter Storm Fern related to a lack of electricity generation. The outages that occurred were due to icing on local distribution lines, Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly and Wright said.

“Beautiful, clean coal was the MVP of the huge cold snap we’re in right now. I can say with some confidence, hundreds of American lives have been saved because of President Trump’s actions saving America’s coal industry,” Wright said in a statement provided to reporters. Other dispatchable resources like oil, natural gas, and nuclear power provided reliable energy.

“President Trump got elected to bring the focus back to humans, about energy, about math, about facts — not silly and, unfortunately, innumerate climate politics,” Wright told reporters. “We’ve done almost nothing to change global greenhouse gas emissions, as close to nothing as you can get, from endless regulations on electricity that have just driven up prices and driven down reliability.”

During January’s Winter Storm Fern, fossil fuels anchored the American power grid. Wright noted that New England generated more electricity from burning oil than natural gas during the storm, which Wright described as “crazy,” given that the use of oil is shrinking and the region is failing to leverage vast natural gas resources.

“In New England, bad politics around energy has made it so that they don’t have enough capacity to bring natural gas in when it matters,” Wright told reporters.

Wright noted that though Winter Storm Fern was larger than the 2021 Winter Storm Uri, the impact was less devastating when it came to outages and loss of life. Wright stressed the need for reliable electricity, arguing that the U.S. “must keep the lights on and the heats running or people die. Hospitals shut down, [and] factories close. This is an enormous asset of a modern society. To have an electricity grid, you must design it for peak demand.”

The DOE argued Biden-era policies amounted to an “energy subtraction agenda.” Notably, one July DOE study projected that rolling blackouts could increase by a factor of 100 by 2030 if the U.S. continues to phase out reliable power supply without sufficient replacements.

Energy policy experts and top grid officials warned that Biden-era power plant restrictions could devastate the power grid. In contrast, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency on his first day back in the Oval Office and his administration has moved to roll back several draconian Biden-era energy rules.

“We will not allow reckless energy subtraction policies and bureaucratic red tape to put American lives at risk. These orders will mitigate blackouts and help restore affordable and reliable electricity, so American families thrive and America’s manufacturing industries can once again boom,” Wright said in a statement.

Additionally, Wright argued that New York’s building electrification mandate ideas are “batshit crazy,” and will result in higher costs and wasted heat. “The biggest source of decarbonization by far is natural gas,” Wright told reporters, noting that New York and New England’s moves to block natural gas are nonsensical.