Wright vows to tackle loan office conflicts as he touts experience

• The loan office's potential troubles don't disappear with the incoming Trump administration, which could change rules for applications or end loans.

Driving the news: "Nothing is more important than the integrity of the loan process," Wright told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday at his confirmation hearing. "I'm aware of the [IG's] report and will dive into that issue immediately."

Context: LPO has yet to finalize conditional loan commitments and had 182 active applications requesting $279 billion from the office as of December.

Zoom out: Wright — a fracking executive who many observers predict will be easily confirmed — steered clear of partisanship in his testimony.

• He talked up his research into energy and climate issues and backing of nuclear, geothermal, solar, transmission, and energy storage technologies.
• "There isn't dirty energy and clean energy — all energies are different, and they have different tradeoffs," Wright said.
• Sen. John Hickenlooper, who introduced Wright as a fellow Coloradan, called him a "scientist who is open to discussion" and praised his caring about energy poverty and his backing of a variety of energy technologies.

Friction point: In the hearing's most testy moment, Wright traded barbs with California Sen. Alex Padilla over old social media posts that called wildfires "just hype" to justify "bad government policies."

• Wright said he stood by those past comments amid the devastating California wildfires.
• "Tell that to the families of the more than two dozen lost in these fires and counting," Padilla said.
• In addition, Ranking Member Martin Heinrich repeated his complaint that the committee broke precedent by holding the hearing without enough time to review financial disclosure and ethics documents.
• That led Chair Mike Lee to retort that the documents arrived at 5:40pm yesterday and that the committee office was open until 6pm.

State of play: Wright was sometimes vague in answering how he'd push back on pressure from Trump officials to close the spigot of DOE grants and loans.

• Heinrich pressed Wright to commit to fund grid programs in the face of Project 2025's proposals to defund offices like the Grid Deployment Office.
• "I'm aligned with you and will seek to find the best ways to improve our transmission on grid, including expansion in new lines," Wright responded.
• Wright said it's "too early" to speak about the new administration's hydrogen plans.

In the hearing's testiest moment, Wright traded barbs with California Sen. Alex Padilla over old social media posts that called wildfires "just hype" to justify "bad government policies."

• Wright said he stood by those past comments amid the devastating California wildfires.

• "Tell that to the families of the more than dozen lost in these fires and counting," Padilla said.

Between the lines: Wright described himself as a "nerdy guy who reads and studies data" and promised to lean on DOE's 17 national labs, a major priority for Heinrich.

• Wright also said Sen. Bill Cassidy's foreign pollution fee is a "creative idea" to address a "destructive habit of [countries] just moving their energy intensive manufacturing out of their countries."
• Nuclear can provide both energy and heat for manufacturing, he said, and geothermal "is early on but has just significant running room to become a meaningful source of energy," Wright said.
• He promised to "find solutions from long-term disposal of nuclear waste" and said there's a "clear record that Nevada's opposed" to the mothballed Yucca Mountain project.

The other side: Environmental groups have cast Wright as a climate change denier who would only double down on fossil fuels.

• Climate protestors five times disrupted Wright's responses to the committee and were escorted out.
• He said that climate change is a "global issue, it's a real issue, it's a challenging issue — and the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system."
• Wright acknowledged he attended a Trump fundraising dinner with other fossil fuel executives at Mar-a-Lago in April, but said it was "quite a bit different" from what news reports described at the time.

What's next: Lee told reporters he hopes Wright can be confirmed by the end of January.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Sen. Alex Padilla said more than two dozen people (not a dozen) died in the California fires.