Energy Secretary Chris Wright faced a swift fact-check on X after asserting that covering the entire planet with solar panels would still generate only 20% of the world's energy.
Community Note Rebuts Chris Wright's Viral Solar Claim
Wright took to X to state, "Even if you wrapped the entire planet in a solar panel, you would only be producing 20% of global energy. One of the biggest mistakes politicians can make is equating the ELECTRICITY with ENERGY!"
Within hours, readers attached a Community Note challenging the math, pointing to analyses that the world's electricity needs could, in theory, be met by a solar farm covering a small fraction of the Sahara Desert. The note argued Wright's 20% figure dramatically understates the sun's available energy, and it linked background material on land-area estimates.
Researchers And IEA Data Negate Wright’s 20% Assertion
Energy researchers at MIT note that Earth receives on the order of 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continuously, orders of magnitude more than humanity's total energy use, highlighting that the constraint is not raw solar resource but economics, siting, transmission and storage.
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Global solar already supplies a rising share of electricity and is projected to keep growing through 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
Earlier Claims And Policy Views Draw Scrutiny
This is not the first time Wright has been corrected by X's crowd-sourced fact-checking system. A prior post in which he said adding wind and solar requires "maintaining two grids," which he argued is "always more expensive," also drew a Community Note.
Experts countered that renewables interconnect to the same grid alongside storage, demand response and firm power. The Department of Energy's own social post amplifying Wright's remarks was flagged, too.
Wright, founder and former CEO of Liberty Energy Inc. (NYSE:LBRT), a publicly traded oil-and-gas services company, was confirmed as energy secretary earlier this year.
According to a States Newsroom report, during a visit to the Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory in mid-August, he said he supports research and development in clean energy, while also arguing that scaling back some federal supports for wind and solar "came at the right time."
Photo Courtesy: Nguyen Quang Ngoc Tonkin on Shutterstock.com
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