By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright sat down on stage at Douglas County Fairgrounds and told a Colorado crowd that the data centers many of their neighbors are fighting will help cure cancer.
Wright, the former Liberty Energy CEO turned 17th U.S. Secretary of Energy, joined Heidi Ganahl for an onstage interview at RMV Freedom Fest on June 27.
Most of the conversation covered familiar Wright territory: oil prices, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Iran.
But when Ganahl turned the conversation to data centers, Wright gave a more layered answer than the typical political pitch, one that conceded real tradeoffs while still landing firmly on the side of building.
The comments come as Colorado works through one of its more contested local fights of the past year, with cities and counties debating water use, electricity demand and where data centers should go.
Wright grew up in Colorado and attended what he described as the largest high school in the state.
He told Ganahl that in high school, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he sat through a presentation by a CU professor warning the world would run out of oil, gas and coal by the year 2000, triggering civilizational collapse.
“So that drove me, a kid who liked science and was interested in astronomy,” Wright said, the thought trailing into the path that eventually led him from fusion research at MIT into the oil and gas business.
He didn’t soften his view of how the state he grew up in handles energy policy now, drawing a line from Washington’s last administration to Denver’s current one.
“In so many places, certainly in D.C., in the last administration and in Colorado for too many years, energy’s not about humans. It’s not about math and making people’s lives better. It’s about politics and it’s been taken over by this climate cult,” Wright said. “We’ve really driven the energy system in Denver, in Colorado the wrong way. We’re making energy more expensive, less stable. Businesses don’t want to locate and expand in Colorado anymore. That’s terrible for jobs and opportunity, not just for us but for our kids and grandkids.”
The case for AI data centers
Wright led with an acknowledgment rather than a sales pitch.
“They are big construction facilities. So not everyone loves them. I get that. Not everyone probably should love them,” Wright said.
From there, he turned to the upside. Artificial intelligence, the technology these facilities run, will accelerate medical breakthroughs, he argued.
“They’re going to drive faster innovation. We’re going to get better, massive improvements in our healthcare. We’re going to cure cancer and so many other diseases that shorten our lives,” Wright said.
He also tied the issue to geopolitics, framing the choice as a race against China for dominance in artificial intelligence, one he said carries military consequences.
“If China became the dominant power in artificial intelligence, China will be the global superpower of the twenty-first century. And I don’t want to live in a world where China is the dominant power in the world,” Wright said.
On the economic side, Wright said, data center communities get something concrete: electricity agreements and new generation paid for by developers, not ratepayers.
“Communities where the data centers are developed will immediately get agreements that freeze their electricity price for years to come,” Wright said. “The more AI data centers we build, the lower we’ll be able to push down electricity prices because the people that are building those data centers will pay to build a lot of new generation onto our electrical grid.”
He described that new generation as a mix of natural gas, coal, nuclear and geothermal, paid upfront by developers.
Wright didn’t argue every community should want one. The decision belongs to the community itself, he said, and he separated the people who benefit from those who don’t.
“You live in a rural, bucolic community and you don’t want jobs or new industry in your community? They’re not a good thing. You won’t want them,” Wright said. But in a community looking for more jobs, a higher tax base and opportunities for young people, he said things look different.
Nuclear as the supply-side answer
If data centers are the demand side of Wright’s argument, nuclear power is the supply side. The country needs to scale up generation to meet that load, he said, and he’s betting on a nuclear restart.
Wright argued the U.S. has ceded ground in nuclear construction to Russia and China over the past two decades.
“Who’s built the most nuclear plants over the last 20 years? The Chinese and the Russians,” Wright said.
A new reactor, Wright said, ties a country to whoever builds it for generations.
“I don’t want my partner to be Russia. I don’t want my partner to be China. That’s what all these countries say as well,” Wright said. “Now they realize they can get ’em from America, and they want to partner with America.”
He pointed to a visit two days earlier to Idaho National Laboratory, which he called “the nuclear Woodstock,” as evidence of momentum behind new technology.
Wright toured the lab’s Materials and Fuels Complex on June 25 and spoke at a Department of Energy event celebrating the administration’s reactor pilot program, which aims to bring three advanced reactors critical by July 4.
“There’s very exciting new technologies with these small modular reactors,” Wright said. “You will see so much investment, so much jobs, so much innovation. And this will become one of the U.S.’s fastest growing exports, which is going to be to build these nuclear power plants by American companies with American technology.”
The fracking fluid
Wright spent nearly three decades in the fracking industry before joining the Trump administration, founding Pinnacle Technologies in 1992 and later Liberty Energy in 2011.
Near the end, Ganahl asked whether he had really once drunk fracking fluid.
“I did one of these shows on PBS in Greeley, debating the anti-frackers,” Wright said. “[The host] said, ‘Well, would you be willing to drink the fluid?’ I said yes. We can buy the ingredients to make frack fluid, all of them at Whole Foods… We bought it in Whole Foods, we made it in a blender… And then I took a shot of it.”
“Of course, there’s risks in everything we do, but America would still be getting around by horse and buggy. We’d all be quite poor if Americans didn’t lean in on innovation and change and advancement,” Wright said.
From there he returned to data centers for what he called his last comment on the subject, comparing the current public mood to the early years of the fracking debate.
“The fear mongers on data centers are winning. The majority of people are against data centers,” Wright said. “Remember 15 years ago in the frack wars, the majority of people were afraid of fracking and didn’t want fracking? The same organizations: it’s going to pollute your water, it’s going to use all your water, it’s going to ruin the planet, it’s going to destroy our country.”
He carried that same case through the shale boom. The United States went from the world’s largest importer of oil to its largest exporter today, he said, ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Twenty years ago, by his account, the country was also the largest importer of natural gas. Today it’s the largest exporter of that, too.
“The shale revolution has been just unbelievable economically, environmentally, and geopolitical standing of this country,” Wright said. “So new bold innovation. That’s what America is all about. That’s how we got here. That’s how we have the greatest nation in the history of the world. And we got to continue to believe in building big things, in innovating, in driving progress going forward.”
It’s the same case he makes for data centers.
Whether Colorado’s current data center fights end the way the fracking fights did is still being decided. City by city. County by county. State by state.