During his confirmation hearing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright tried to convince senators he wasn’t your typical fracking executive.

Wright—the CEO of $3 billion methane gas company Liberty Energy—promised to support all types of energy production, including solar and wind.”The solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he said. “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”

But, after his confirmation, Wright walked back that promise, claiming renewable technologies are inherently unreliable. “There is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” he claimed at a fossil fuel industry conference this month.

Wright is wrong. There is a physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace gas for electricity generation: long-duration energy storage systems. These are essentially big battery facilities that can take cheap wind and solar generation and make it available for extended periods when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

But Wright may be planning to sabotage the future of long-duration energy storage systems, according to a “hit list” of DOE clean energy projects obtained by HEATED and Popular Information.

The existence of the “hit list” was first reported by E&E News on Friday. The "hit list" is a collection of clean energy projects already awarded billions of dollars in grants and loans under the Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law, and annual appropriations. The DOE is now seeking to cancel these projects. The list will be submitted to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Office of Management and Budget, according to two people familiar with the plan.

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