Energy policy was front and center at the confirmation hearing for President Trump’s Interior Secretary nominee.
Former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum discussed the balance between renewable energy and maintaining reliable power. Burgum emphasized the need for a stable energy grid, highlighting challenges with intermittent renewables, like solar and wind, especially without large-scale storage solutions.
“I would say that the benefit to every American is if we have a base load that’s reliable, that works, that’s part of how we have affordability. I mean every American today is paying more for their electricity than they were before, so the current policy is hurting every American. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming soon: more and more brownouts and blackouts, because we aren’t going to have the balance in the grid, and I think every senator and every governor is going to be hearing from every consumer. And so this is something we have to work on together as a priority to make sure that we restore a balance to the grid and that means that, like I said, when you take a look at a fir cue that’s got 95% intermittent and unreliable, that probably tells us we’re a little bit above out of balance and we’ve got to bring it back and then keep moving forward.”
Burgum expressed concerns about the dependency on critical minerals for electric vehicles, saying 85 percent of those minerals are controlled by China. Trump did recently pledge to revoke what he called the ‘Biden Administration’s Electric Vehicle Mandate.’
