🔋 Live with Energy Secretary Chris Wright

The Wright Man For The Job

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has the vision. He understands the stakes. He knows America needs massive baseload power expansion to win the AI arms race and fuel our industrial resurgence. Wright's boldest move came early: scrapping Biden's decarbonization targets and rewriting DOE's mission statement around "energy abundance."  

Energy Expansion

Wright has moved decisively on LNG exports—approving CP2, Port Arthur II, and promising to clear the non-FTA permit backlog. He's coordinating with the National Energy Dominance Council to revive stalled gas pipelines.

Grid Reliability Crunch

AI-driven data center and electrification demand is increasing the need for new generation—roughly equivalent to adding a new midsize state every year. Wright has issued 202(c) orders keeping aging coal and oil units online, while promising faster small modular reactor and high-voltage line licensing.

New Energy

As we wrote about a few weeks back, Wright is at the tip of the spear of several executive orders to jump start the development and deployment of advanced nuclear energy projects.

At the same time, he is straddling a delicate line when it comes to needed new energy technologies and budget and tax constraints for programs that are intended to support such capital intensive projects. For instance, the Loan Programs Office (LPO) is a powerful mechanism to support small modular reactors (SMRs), critical mineral refining, and even gas infrastructure—with $750 million in credit subsidy penciled in. But how the LPO and other tax incentives fare in the Big, Beautiful Bill will determine how big a carrot this program can provide to energy sources of the future.

The Road Ahead

Wright has the right vision for American energy dominance. He understands that without abundant, reliable power, we lose the AI arms race to China. He grasps that energy abundance drives technological sovereignty.

DOE is a highly technical agency and the intense interest and investment in energy projects and technologies requires an agency that can work quickly and buck the bureaucratic delays of the past. The grid-demand curve Wright warns about isn't waiting for Washington to figure this out.

We understand the threat of bloated government bureaucracies. But it’s also important to examine each agency and mission independently. As we have stated from day one: energy is the single most important input in determining our technological superiority. We simply need more of it. On this, examining the tools the agency has is not a red vs. blue exercise, it’s about America first.

Wildfire Tech

The area of technological innovation that has particularly captured our attention is agriculture and resources resiliency. A big part of that is wildfire prevention.

So when AI-powered wildfire detection startup, Pano AI announced a $44 million raise (bringing its total capital raise to $89 million) it caught our attention.

In a Wall Street Journal piece, co-founder Sonia Kastner said the “technology looks for smoke [during the day] and at night attempts to detect heat.”

With over $100 million in contracts to customers that include governments and utilities, Pano AI is the type of company that is providing cutting edge tech to protect our communities that are most vulnerable to devastating wildfires.

State AI Regulatory Moratorium Marches On

When the House Energy and Commerce Committee released its reconciliation mark last month, ALFA was one of the first to highlight an important provision to establish a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulations.

With over 1,000 AI-related bills introduced so far at the state level, this moratorium would prevent the emergence of 50 different regulatory regimes with conflicting compliance requirements, making it impossible for startups to scale and enterprise companies to deploy nationwide solutions.

At the time we noted that surviving the Senate's ‘Byrd bath’ was up in the air, but it appears the Senate has addressed those concerns with revisions to the moratorium to comply with Byrd requirements by tying it to broadband funding. Specifically, states that enact or enforce AI regulations themselves risk losing federal broadband/BEAD funding, including ~$500 million in new FY 2025 BEAD allocations.

Though the final verdict is still pending, the Senate’s revisions appear to put this important legislation on firmer ground, providing the necessary runway for AI innovation.