Last Friday, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright held a press conference to talk about how the power grid didn’t collapse during late January’s Winter Storm Fern.

Some of the things he said were true. Others weren’t. It’s important to know the difference — especially as the Trump administration routinely uses misleading statements to justify decisions that make the power system dirtier, more expensive, and ultimately less reliable.

Wright, a former fossil gas–industry executive who has overseen the administration’s hard turn against clean energy, praised the efforts of utility workers who rallied from across the country and worked around the clock to restore power to more than 1 million people after ice and falling trees took out grid lines. That’s true, and good.

But the centerpiece of Wright’s nearly hourlong presentation was a series of charts, propped up on an easel, that served as a launchpad for the same kind of half-truths and obfuscations that have typified his approach to the job.

His pie charts showed the mix of electricity generation at the peak of wintertime demand across the eastern U.S. and in New England. There was a lot of fossil gas, a big slice of coal and of nuclear, and, in New England, a lot of oil — a key source of emergency generation in wintertime. Meanwhile, wind and solar power, the resources Wright called the ​“darlings” of the climate movement, were represented by very small slices.

In Wright’s view, these charts tell a story of waste and excess. People had to pay for the construction of all that renewable energy, and the poles and wires required to carry it, only for that power to disappear when the grid needed it most.

Here’s how he put it: ​“If you can add reliable power at peak demand time, you’re additive to the grid. If you can’t, you’re just … a cost center. You’re not actually helpful for the grid.”

This is a gross oversimplification of the complex ways that different types of power add value to the grid. As Wright well knows, people don’t need electricity on just the hottest or coldest days. They need it every day, all 8,760 hours of the year. And how that power is generated on a daily basis matters just as much as how it gets produced in extreme circumstances — for people’s wallets, their health, and the planet.

The vast majority of the time, wind and solar — and energy storage — reliably provide electricity to the grid. During the first 10 months of 2025, the U.S. got nearly one-fifth of its electricity from these sources.

Why is that? Because the electricity that renewables provide is cheap and plentiful. Nowadays, it is often less expensive than gas-fired power. And renewables are certainly much cheaper than coal power, even as Wright’s Department of Energy has spent the last year propping up the dirty fossil fuel at great cost to consumers.

For the past two years, solar, wind, and storage have made up more than 90% of the new electricity capacity being added in the U.S. — and around the world. And we will need to keep up that pace for the U.S. to meet growing power demand from data centers and electrification without causing already rising electricity costs to soar further.

But Wright casts cheap, clean power as mere empty calories that steal market share from coal, gas, and nuclear power. Energy supplied only when ​“the weather is mild, when the sun shines or the wind blows, doesn’t add anything to the capacity of our electricity grid,” he said. ​“It just means we send subsidy checks to those generators, and we tell the other generators, ​‘Turn down.’”

Here, Wright mischaracterizes how utilities and grid operators dispatch power plants. Wind and solar often ​“turn down” when they’re generating more power than the grid needs. But fossil-fueled power plants stop generating when their power is too expensive to compete with what wind and solar generators are offering — market forces in action.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that utilities and grid operators are well aware that wind and solar are weather-dependent and don’t produce all the time. These experts constantly assess the availability of all resources — not just renewables — and plan accordingly.

Wright also neglected to say that fossil fuels themselves can fail during winter storms — and often in less predictable and more harmful ways than when the sun sets or the wind dies down.

That’s what happened during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. That storm swept over the U.S. Southeast — and in particular, Texas — bringing subzero temperatures that froze wellheads and restricted the flow of gas to power plants, which were suffering their own weather-related failures. The result was catastrophic: More than 200 people died and roughly 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power. Similar gas-system freeze-ups drove winter blackouts across the Southeast in 2022 and during the 2014 ​“polar vortex” in the Northeast.

During Winter Storm Fern, it was a different story: Generator failures did not force utilities and grid operators to shut off power. One likely reason is that, in the years since Uri, regulators have imposed winterization requirements on owners of gas power plants in Texas and other parts of the country, though just how effective those interventions were is not yet clear.

Another probable factor contributing to the grid’s resilience this time around was having a better overall mix of resources. Energy experts agree that portfolios of mutually reinforcing resources are the key to grid reliability. In the Lone Star State, solar and battery storage have surged in recent years. Texas’ grid weathered this January’s cold snap, experts say, because it had an array of fuel sources on hand.

But of course, Wright didn’t acknowledge any of that. He simply railed against renewables, painting them as leeches on the power system.

Fossil-fueled power plants remain vital to the U.S. grid, whether they’re designed to run around the clock or only during emergencies, as is the case for New England’s oil-burning generators — one of the grid’s costliest resources, precisely because they run so infrequently. But renewables are vital, too. In New England, the gigawatts of offshore wind being built from Connecticut to Maine that have been under attack since the first day of the second Trump administration are also one of the most valuable winter resources for the region.

The DOE’s job is not to take a snapshot of the worst 15 minutes of the year and use it to justify policies that freeze in place that exact mix of grid resources. Instead, it’s to assess and manage the grid’s evolving technical, economic, environmental, and climatic realities, and to foster newer, better resources to replace those that aren’t keeping up.

The more Wright pretends otherwise, and uses half-truths to force fossil fuels onto a system that would be better served by cheaper and cleaner alternatives, the worse off we’ll all be.

Jeff St. John

is chief reporter and policy specialist at Canary Media. He covers innovative grid technologies, rooftop solar and batteries, clean hydrogen, EV charging, and more.