Snow and ice boulders at the Forest Glen Metro stop in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Jan. 29, 2026, days after Winter Storm Fern hit the region. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

A focus on addressing climate change, including by producing wind and solar energy, has not helped Americans keep their electricity and heat on during winter storms, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Friday.

Ahead of another major cold snap on the East Coast, Wright briefed reporters at the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., on the importance of maintaining electricity and heat supply during winter storms and advocated for a national energy strategy that focuses more on grid resilience and less on reducing carbon emissions. 

His statements continued a Trump administration stress on fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas that contribute to global climate change.

Americans elected President Donald Trump to move away from a focus on climate, Wright said.

“Today, the policies that get in the way of reasonable energy development and mess up the math are things focused around climate change,” he said. “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 in the name of climate change.”

Electricity grids and peak demand 

Electricity grids must be designed for peak demand, such as during winter storms or summer heat waves, Wright said. Efforts to increase generation capacity with renewable sources are misguided, as the United States electricity grid produces hundreds of excess gigawatts of power during normal conditions, he said.

During President Joe Biden’s administration, Democrats enacted a law providing massive tax credits for wind and solar production. Without naming that law or specific officials, Wright said those efforts were not useful.

“When I hear politicians say, ‘We just need more electrons on the grid,’ no, we don’t,” he said. “When the sun shines or the wind blows, (it) doesn’t add anything to the capacity of our electricity grid. It just means we send subsidy checks to those generators, and we tell the other generators, turn down.”

During the winter storm that gripped much of the country last month, wind energy provided 40% less electricity than it had on the same days in 2025, Wright said. Solar provided only 2% of energy to affected areas, according to a pie chart shown at the briefing.

By contrast, coal provided 25% more power than usual and natural gas produced 47% more, he said. Nuclear energy was about the same.

Renewables strengthen grid, climate group says

The clean energy group Climate Power said in a Tuesday statement that renewable sources helped fortify energy supply during peak demand times. Solar energy produced 300% more in a 2024 Texas storm than it had in a storm three years earlier. And during last month’s cold streak, areas that relied on wind saw lower prices, according to the group.

Climate Power also said natural gas infrastructure was “prone to freezes and mechanical failure.”

“As back-to-back winter storms pummeled communities across the country in January, the facts about Donald Trump’s reckless energy policies have come into focus: fossil fuels have proved less reliable and more expensive as families struggle to keep the power on,” the statement read.

Wright favors natural gas

But while Democrats and climate activists have said the U.S. should move away from oil, coal and gas because of the climate-warming emissions they release and toward renewables, Wright suggested natural gas should be emphasized instead to substitute for oil, which is more expensive and produces more air pollution.

The proposed Constitution Pipeline, which would carry natural gas from New York state to Pennsylvania, should have been approved years ago, Wright said, but was held up by a “bad political decision.”

Planners abandoned the controversial project in 2020 in the face of regulatory difficulties in New York, but revived it last year. Its federal reviews are pending.

Wright said producing more energy would also be needed for another Trump administration priority: leading in artificial intelligence development. The industry needs massive energy sources to run the data centers AI relies on. 

A Massachusetts university is developing technology that aims to use lasers to drastically cut emissions and energy use from Maine’s paper and pulp industry. 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute recently received a $2.75 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to help ready the industrial drying technology for commercial use.

“We are all excited about this — this is potentially a groundbreaking technology,” said Jamal Yagoobi, founding director of the institute’s Center for Advanced Research in Drying.

In Maine, the paper and pulp business generates about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, roughly half of the state’s industrial emissions. Much of these emissions come from the process of drying mashed, pressed, and rolled wood pulp to yield paper products. The emissions come mainly from three major operations across the state; three additional facilities contribute smaller amounts.

These plants’ emissions will need to be addressed if Maine is to reach its goal of going carbon neutral by 2045. Furthermore, each of these plants is located in an area with an above-average population of low-income residents, according to data assembled by Industrious Labs, an environmental organization focused on the impact of industry. And two are located in areas with a higher-than-average risk of cancer from air toxins, suggesting a correlation between their operations and the incidence of cancer in the area. 

At the same, the paper and pulp industry remains economically important to Maine, said Matt Cannon, state conservation and energy director for the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club. 

“It’s got real union jobs — the paper industry is still very important to our community,” he said. 

Worcester Polytechnic’s drying research center has been working on ways to dry paper, pulp, and other materials using the concentrated energy found in lasers. The lasers Yagoobi’s team is using are not the lasers of the public imagination, like a red beam zapping at alien enemies. Though the lasers are quite strong — they can melt metal, Yagoobi says — they are dispersed over a larger area, spreading out the energy to evenly and gently dry the target material. 

Testing on food products has shown that the technology can work. Now, researchers need to learn more about how the laser energy affects different materials to make sure the product quality is not compromised during the drying process. 

“For paper, it’s important to make sure the tensile strength is not degrading,” Yagoobi said. “For food products, you want to make sure the color and sensory qualities do not degrade.”

Therefore, before the system is ready for a commercial pilot, the team has to gather a lot more data about how much laser energy is incident on different parts of the surface and how deeply the energy penetrates different materials. Once gathered, this data will be used to determine what system sizes and operating conditions are best for different materials, and to design laser modules for each intended use. 

Once these details are worked out, the laser technology can be installed in new commercial-scale drying equipment or existing systems. “This particular technology will be easy to retrofit,” Yagoobi said. 

Industrial sources were responsible for about 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2023, about 28% of the country’s overall emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Heating processes, often powered by natural gas or other fossil fuels, are responsible for about half of those emissions, said Evan Gillespie, one of the co-founders of Industrious Labs. Many industrial drying processes require high temperatures that have traditionally been hard to reach without fossil fuels, giving the sector a reputation as hard to decarbonize, Gillespie said.

“The key challenge here is: How do you remove natural gas as a heating source inside industrial facilities?” said Richard Hart, industry director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “The scale of what is happening in industry is enormous, and the potential for change is very powerful.”

To make the new technology effective, industry leaders and policymakers will need to commit to reinvesting in old facilities, Gillespie noted. And doing so will be well worth it by strengthening an economically important industry, keeping jobs in place, and creating important environmental benefits, he added.

“There’s often this old story of tensions between climate and jobs,” Gillespie said. “But what we’re trying to do is modernize these facilities and stabilize them so they’ll be around for decades to come.”

Paper and pulp mills produce half of Maine’s industrial CO2 emissions. Could lasers help slash their climate impact?    is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.