Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior has warned the US could lose the “AI arms race” to China unless it boosts generation of energy from fossil fuels and stabilises its electricity grid.
Doug Burgum, a billionaire businessman and former governor of North Dakota, told senators at his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the US had an “electricity crisis” due to weaknesses in the electricity grid and “roadblocks” blocking companies producing baseload power, a steady supply of power that’s generated around the clock.
He added that the Trump administration would allocate more public land to drilling for oil and slash regulations favouring renewables companies that produce “intermittent and unreliable power”.
“The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” he said, adding that the balance was “out of whack”.
Demand for electricity is growing at unprecedented rates in the US, driven by soaring demand from data centres for artificial intelligence processing — which the Department of Energy predicts will triple in the next three years.
“Without baseload, we’re going to lose the AI arms race to China, and if we lose the AI arm race to China, then that’s got direct impacts on our national security,” Burgum said.
“Right now, we’ve stacked a deck, where we are creating roadblocks for people who want to do baseload, and we’ve got massive tax incentives for people who want to do intermittent and unreliable.”
Burgum, who endorsed Trump after ending his own 2024 presidential bid, is also tipped to lead the National Energy Council. If confirmed as Trump’s “energy tsar”, he will have sweeping powers to push through the president-elect’s vision to “drill, baby, drill”.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to open up federal land for AI infrastructure with the proviso that power would be drawn from clean electricity sources.
Burgum said new technologies such as carbon capture storage could eliminate the emissions produced by fossil fuels — although there are questions around the commercial and technical feasibility of the technology.
The billionaire added that restricting US fossil fuel production would not produce any environmental benefit, as less scrupulous governments would fill the energy supply gap.
“America produces energy cleaner, smarter and safer than anywhere in the world,” he said. “When energy production is restricted in America, it doesn’t reduce demand, it just shifts production to countries like Russia, Venezuela and Iran — whose autocratic leaders don’t care about the environment.”
The US is already poised for a boom in natural gas-fired power plants to boost baseload power, with as many as 80 facilities expected to come online by 2030, according to Enverus.
Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, tied offshore oil and gas lease sales to new offshore wind leases. When asked whether he would protect offshore wind projects in development, Burgum declined to comment.
Trump has vowed to end offshore wind projects on “day one”.
