Over a two-day tour around the Tri-Cities, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright boasted about the low cost of energy in the Northwest, noting prices are largely helped by the region’s hydropower system.
At a press conference on Thursday, Wright stood on a bluff overlooking Ice Harbor Dam, one of the controversial Lower Snake River dams. Fish advocates have pushed to remove the four dams as part of an effort to save endangered salmon and steelhead.
Supporters of the dams, including Wright, said dams like Ice Harbor provide low-cost energy to the region.
“It can deliver (electricity) when you need it, but it's not flooding onto the grid when you don't need the electricity,” Wright said.
According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Lower Snake River dams are known as “run of the river” dams. That means these dams aren’t used to store water for when energy is needed. Instead, water moves through the dams as it flows downriver.
Wright said the Trump administration “ wants to do everything we can” to keep energy prices low. That would likely include stopping any effort to remove the four Lower Snake River dams.
“ When we arrived in office, those four dams were going be closed and taken offline,” Wright said later in the day.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration put a stop to a Biden-era deal aimed at protecting endangered salmon. Fish advocates saw the deal as a path toward dam removal. The end of the deal sent the decades-long issue back to federal courts.
“So much of the environmental agenda has been hijacked by just climate craziness,” Wright said. “People that don't understand climate change and that don't understand the energy system have hijacked all the energy and all the resources away from real environmental issues and have gone in an unproductive direction. We're trying to bring common sense back.”
He noted the environment, wilderness and wildlife were “central to our agenda.”
That irked fish advocates like attorney Amanda Goodin, who is with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.
“ Their actions on the ground seem to indicate that they're going out of their way to deprioritize salmon and wildlife,” Goodin said, in response to Wright’s statements.
Later on Thursday, Wright toured Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he helped commission a new technology that scientists said will help biologists quickly study new biotechnologies.
The Anaerobic Microbial Phenotyping Platform, or AMP2, will use artificial intelligence to make new discoveries with fungi and bacteria. Those microbes can be used to make chemicals, energy, fuels and biomaterials, according to PNNL.
The AMP2 fills a small room. It’s made up of what look like large metal boxes. Each “box” has multiple robotic arms encased behind glass with all sorts of scientific equipment. The chambers are air-free, a notoriously difficult environment for scientists to study.
The robotic arms will conduct the experiments. Then, artificial intelligence can adjust experiments along the way, said Jason Kelly, the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, which builds these “autonomous labs.”
“ If you imagine the AI model, it could look and (say), ‘OK, I see the results from this, and based on what I saw with that, I think we should adjust the experiment in this way.’ It could do that all within the system on its own,” Kelly said.
The AMP2 is part of the administration’s Genesis Mission, which aims to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific discoveries.
“ Autonomy and AI are rapidly changing and reshaping the way that science is done, amping up the throughput in laboratories and allowing investigators to accomplish in days what normally would take weeks, months, and oftentimes years,” said Douglas Mans, interim director of Earth and Biological Sciences at PNNL.
The AMP2 is a prototype of a larger $47 million system to be built on PNNL’s campus.
After his remarks, Wright signed the side of the AMP2, joking about his handwriting. He then pushed a button on a laptop to start the technology.
These sorts of technologies are “ going to change the game in our understanding of biology,” Wright said.
