U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright addresses employees and other visitors Wednesday at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown. (Photo by David Beard, Special to the News and Sentinel)

MORGANTOWN — U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright visited the National Energy Technology Laboratory campus Wednesday as part of his ongoing tour of all 17 Department of Energy labs.

Wright said the “One Big Beautiful Bill” budget reconciliation measure is “critical for the energy world that I work in.

“Energy is about humans,” he said. “We want to make people’s lives better.”

That means more energy, lower cost energy, jobs and winning the artificial intelligence “arms race,” Wright said. The bill’s reforms on subsidies and penalties are key to getting the system going in the right direction, according to Wright.

Wright toured the Morgantown facility — including the under-construction Computational Science and Engineering Center — met with researchers and learned about their projects.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is shown one of the projects underway at the National Energy Technology Laboratory during his trip to Morgantown on Wednesday. (Photo by David Beard, Special to the News and Sentinel)

NETL is devoted to fossil fuel research, and coal and natural gas are the two biggest sources of electricity worldwide, he said.

Keep coal king

“The things that are worked on here are big targets for big benefits to humanity,” Wright said.

In the 13-state PJM regional energy grid, many new service requests are for solar power generation projects, while none are for coal. However, Wright said the future for coal “is long and bright.”

It accounts for one-third of all the electricity generated on the planet — more than wind and solar combined — and it’s available day and night, the nation’s energy czar pointed out.

Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, was PJM’s peak winter demand day, and gas and coal supplied 70% of the power, wind and solar just 3%. On Monday, in the sun and heat, wind and solar made up just 8%.

One of Wright’s priorities in his Cabinet position is halting the continued closings of power plants. Some should be retired, he said, but many are still well within their expected lifespans and remain critical to a secure power grid.

Growing need for data centers for AI will increase the demand for electricity, he said.

“If you’re going to add a lot of new capacity, the first thing you should do is stop shrinking the capacity you have,” Wright said.

About 40 coal plants are slated for shutdown this year.

“Our biggest impact is going to stop the closure of most of those,” he said.

Sharing data space

Wright spoke about permitting hurdles and the need to make it easier to build AI and data centers.

The 17 national laboratories have a lot of land and are accepting proposals for data centers to be sited on those properties — possibly with cooperative agreements to allow the labs to tap into those centers’ computational powers, Wright pointed out.

“You will see data centers built on national lab property,” he said.

Future is bright

“I think the future of energy here in West Virginia is super exciting,” Wright concluded.

The state has been an energy powerhouse across its history, and natural gas, natural gas liquids, oil and coal are the fastest-growing power sources across the world. And West Virginia is a business-friendly state with cutting-edge industry such as Form Energy, an iron-air battery manufacturing facility in Weirton.

“I think the outlook for energy and industry in West Virginia is quite bright,” Wright said.