Burgum: Yes to US Power Supply, Reliability; No on Sage Grouse

U.S. Department of Interior secretary nominee Doug Burgum checked the pro-energy boxes in a Senate confirmation hearing Jan. 16 that ranged from sage grouse protections to U.S. power reliability—and holding federal lease sales as scheduled.

On the sage grouse, the bird is “neither on the endangered or the threatened list,” Burgum said.

On power supply, the U.S. is short.

And federal leases will be held as scheduled, Burgum told Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee members.

In addition to leading the Interior, the former North Dakota governor is expected to lead president-elect Donald Trump’s new National Energy Council, which Trump said post-election “will consist of all departments and agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation [and] transportation of all forms of American energy.”

Its task will be to achieve U.S. energy dominance, Trump said, “by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the economy and by focusing on innovation over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”

‘Tipped a little too far’

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told Burgum he is concerned Trump will discourage wind development offshore Maine. Trump said in a press conference earlier this month that wind turbines are “driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

King asked Burgum to “convince your boss that wind power isn't all bad.”

Burgum said his own concern with wind—including in North Dakota where 35% of its electricity is from wind now—is that too much non-dispatchable power has come onto the grid.

“We have to have the right balance and we may have tipped a little too far in one direction.”

He added that “we need an all-the-above strategy … The thing we're short of most right now is baseload.” U.S. baseload supply is primarily from natural gas, nuclear, coal and hydro generation.

Trump is concerned “the significant amount” of tax incentives toward wind and solar “have helped exacerbate this imbalance that we're seeing right now today,” Burgum said.

“Electricity is at the brink. Our grid is at a point where it could go completely unstable.”

Cyberwar

In addition to powering the economy, Burgum said the U.S. is in the midst of shoring its security in the “AI arms race.”

“… If we don't manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company and every industry.”

U.S. law and policy has “stacked the deck where we are creating roadblocks for people that want to do baseload” power, he said. The current Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s queue is 95% for intermittent power sources “and only 5% baseload,” he said.

The balance “is out of whack and we have to bring it back in line.”

Concerning the generative AI battle that is underway, particularly with China, “people don’t understand,” Burgum said. China permitted more than two coal plants a week in the first half of 2023.

“And this is how we lose the Cold War to them. We’ve got to get going. We’ve got to cut red tape.”

On critical minerals needed in tech and how that will work under tariffs on China, Burgum told Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), “the key there is allies.

“We have to have a security network of people who are truly our allies.”

Clean Energy Act

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) noted he wrote the Clean Energy Act of America, which was adopted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

Burgum said the problem is “these things may have been so successful as it relates to the electrical grid that we have a significant imbalance in the amount of projects that are intermittent and not persistent.”

“… We have to get back to making sure that we have the appropriate amount of baseload … If the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing and we don't have baseload; we have brownouts and blackouts.”

“… So we just have to make sure we have the balance. We need it all.”

Wyden said it’s a transmission issue.

Wind advocate King returned to the topic in a round of follow-up questions. Burgum assured he wasn’t saying “no” to renewables. Rather, “it’s just physics. If we don’t have enough baseload, intermittent doesn’t even have a life.”

(In short, there is no power grid without both, based on the February 2021 winter storm event in Texas that resulted in a nearly weeklong blackout.)

King said North Dakota has uninterrupted power although its load is 35% solar. “Your grid works.”

Burgum said, though, that “it’s super-stressed as it is around the country.”

Transmission

Besides not having enough reliable power, adding pipelines, transmission and other needs “takes too long in our country,” Burgum said.

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“It’s one thing to be able to generate electricity, but if you don't have the ability to transmit it to the places where it's needed, that's going to be a problem.”

Battery storage is still a long way from providing meaningful reliability to U.S. power supply, he added.

“We’re short of electricity in this country.” And adding more baseload power—in addition to sufficient transmission capacity—can’t wait for batteries.

Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) asked for incentives for the battery-storage research or “we’re never going to get there.”

Natural gas

Burgum said the extraction of oil and gas from U.S. shale “has been a miracle.” And “if America hadn’t come to Europe’s rescue with LNG,” the Russia-Ukraine war “could have escalated more.”

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pennsylvania) asked that Burgum champion building LNG export plants on the East Coast.

Burgum agreed and said the northeastern U.S. itself needs more natural gas. In Maine, 80% of homes are heated with heating oil. “We can’t get a pipeline.” Russia supplies barrels of heating oil to New England at Boston Harbor.

The U.S. shouldn’t have “supply chains that depend on our adversaries. We have the resources here. We need to develop them,” Burgum said.