US energy secretary tours Lower Snake River dams after Trump nixed deal

ICE HARBOR DAM, Wash. — U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright arrived in the Tri-Cities this week on a tour of some of Washington state’s energy infrastructure, including a dam on the Lower Snake River.

The visit comes on the heels of President Donald Trump exploding a hard-fought deal this summer over river operations that could have led to dam removal to help struggling salmon runs.

Wright underscored the administration’s position, and reinforced a series of contradictions rife within the administration’s energy policies.

This country needs more electricity, Wright said on a gray and rainy morning overlooking the Ice Harbor Dam outside of Burbank, Walla Walla County: affordable and dispatchable energy, and these dams represent both.

“Everything we can do to lower the price of electricity, lower the price of gasoline, lower the price of energy of all kinds,” Wright said. “That’s what makes people’s lives better. That’s what makes businesses and opportunities thrive in our country.”

Wright inflated the importance of the Lower Snake River dams to the electrical grid but sidestepped the environmental consequences, moves likely taken as salt in the wound by those who fought for the 2023 Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement, which provided a path to remove the four dams on the Lower Snake River.

The federal government, under the Biden administration, committed $1 billion to the work, which would have included boosting clean-energy production led by tribal nations and replacing other services of the dams, like transportation and irrigation infrastructure.

President Donald Trump in June clawed back the agreement.

The four dams offer 3,000 megawatts of electricity, Wright said. He called the Biden-era decision to lay a path for their removal “crazy.”

“That’s an energy subtraction policy and the Trump administration, we’re about energy addition,” Wright said.

In reality, the four dams generate perhaps a third that much electricity every year, even less during droughts, which are becoming more common in our region as the planet warms. And while the administration has backed some types of energy projects (largely fossil fuel and nuclear), it has repeatedly attacked renewable power sources like wind, solar and battery storage while rejecting the growing body of scientific evidence warning of climate change.

Wright’s tour covered a series of facilities left reeling this year by federal budget cuts and layoffs. Now they’re hiring again, Wright said.

The administration wants American energy dominance, but is undercutting a wide range of once-booming electrical projects.

The country badly needs more energy and affordable energy. But not just any type of energy, federal policies show. Wind and solar don’t much qualify, and Wright downplayed the ability of battery storage, which can be paired with renewables to make power available when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

“Today we’ve got less than 10 minutes of storage from batteries across the country,” Wright said.

As of last year, the country’s grid had about 26 gigawatt hours of battery storage in use, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That figure is expected to perhaps triple by the end of the decade, Canary Media reported this fall.

For context, energy demand for all of Seattle City Light’s customers peaked at around 2 gigawatt hours.

Should the country invest in these growing battery storage technologies? Not at the expense of government subsidies, Wright said.

The Trump administration slashed billions of dollars in renewable energy subsidies this summer. Washington alone stands to lose an estimated $8.7 billion in clean-energy investment funding.

Instead, the administration is now doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels. Wright, himself a former fracking executive, downplayed the significance of that shift, however.

“There are no meaningful subsidies on fossil fuels,” he said.

For years the federal government has subsidized the fossil fuel industry, to the tune of an estimated $34 billion each year. And Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill looks to add an additional $4 billion in subsidies annually over the next decade, for a total of $40 billion more from the federal government.

Energy projects should compete on a level playing field, Wright said Thursday morning.

The federal government has been aggressively fighting wind and solar energy projects, even blocking permits for many projects, especially offshore wind. At the same time the administration is pushing to keep fossil fuel plants open longer.

State law in Washington requires the closure of all coal plants by the end of the year, and requires the state to free its electrical grid of greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. The federal government’s repeated attacks on new renewable projects is making it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to build new sources of electricity.

Federal officials say they’re pursuing affordable energy and working to bring prices down. During the campaign, Trump promised to halve electricity rates within the year.

But electrical prices have risen since the president took office, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows. Some estimates say utility prices are up as much as 11%.