‘Stop the Bleeding’: Energy Secretary Counters Claim ‘Big, Beautiful’ Law Will Raise Energy Prices

The Republican spending bill signed into law on July 4 will “stop the bleeding” by ending federal subsidies for renewable energy, lowering prices for consumers, Energy Secretary Chris Wright says.

Critics of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act contend the spending package will increase prices for “dirtier” energy. But in an exclusive phone interview with The Daily Signal, Wright said ceasing to subsidize wind and solar capacity will stop an upward pressure on prices.

“There are places and scenarios where solar is helpful to the grid, but if it’s not subsidized, it’ll only be built when it’s helpful,” Wright said. “If it’s heavily subsidized in solar, a lot of times the government pays more than half of the total cost.”

Wright, an entrepreneur who founded Liberty Energy, wants to equip innovators to build businesses.

“Energy costs are a huge part about where you’re going to put your business,” he said. “If you’re a crypto miner, you’re going to go to where electricity is cheap, and a lot of times that’s overseas. We want people to build their technology company, their coffee roasters company. We want people to start businesses in the United States, and by having secure, affordable energy prices, we’re going to make it much easier for people to launch businesses and to keep their existing businesses opening, open, and profitable.”

The “one big, beautiful” law will makes it easier to produce oil, natural gas, and coal, lowering prices, according to Wright. Rules from the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden made it expensive to build new power plants, the secretary said.

“If you get more of it, you’ll get lower prices,” he said. “We’re going to make it easier in this bill to permit building new power plants. That’s what we need to do. We need to grow our energy-producing system.”

“The whole agenda is, make it easier to build energy-production capacity and stop subsidizing stuff that’s not been helpful,” he added.

However, Wright defended the continued subsidization of nuclear energy in the bill for the time being.

“We need some subsidies to get the industry going again, at least at the end of the day, when you build a nuclear power plant, even if it’s subsidized by the government,” he said.

Nuclear energy adds new capacity to the grid, enabling the building of a new semiconductor manufacturing plant or data center, which require large amounts of energy, Wright said.

One of the big obstacles to bringing investment into the domestic nuclear fuel industry is uncertainty about access to Russian nuclear fuel.

“For three years—really, three decades—we really dismantled the American nuclear industry, sadly, including our ability to enrich uranium, and Russia has been our biggest supplier of enriched uranium,” Wright said. “We found ourselves, and still find ourselves, in a bad place. Fortunately, we do have enrichment capacity being built in the United States, some by our European allies.”

Wright expects to see two American companies building enrichment facilities in the U.S. soon, he told The Daily Signal.

“This is part of that key supply chain that we need to stand up and get going,” he said. “There’s some money here, too, that was allocated by Congress that I will deploy with businesses that are looking to build capacity, to co-fund with them to build it faster and build it bigger, because we need to rapidly generate United States enrichment capacity so that we can get off any need for Russian enrichment.”

Now that the president has signed the “Big, Beautiful Bill” into law, Wright’s focus will be on implementing the energy items within it.

“We’ve got to do everything we can to help companies build uranium enrichment in this country,” Wright said. “Businesses are going to do it, but we need to help them on a regulatory front.”

The Energy Department is using its Idaho National Laboratory to let people test new reactors.

“That’s a step on the way to building new small, modular reactors in this country,” he said. “We’ve got to communicate to the industry that the government is no longer doing everything it can to stop the production of energy from hydrocarbons, which, by the way, are 82% of the energy for our country.”

“We want to see pipelines built across this country so that we get more energy at lower cost, to more Americans, to lower the cost of their bills and make it smart for overseas businesses to [reshore] and manufacture in the United States,” he said, “because we’re going to have available electricity, natural gas, oil, coal, whatever energy, nuclear, whatever energy source they want to build their businesses.”

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