Dan Brouillette was sworn in as US secretary of energy in a White House ceremony and later issued a statement praising President Donald Trump’s energy policies, noting that America is the world’s second-largest generator of wind and solar power.

Those policies “have led to a historic era in American energy,” he said. Brouillette, who served as deputy to predecessor Rick Perry since 2017, was confirmed last week by the US Senate with a 70-15 vote.

Brouillette has been a key player in promoting the administration's so-called "energy dominance" agenda – a geopolitical strategy for achieving self-sufficiency in energy and to maximise the economic and technological benefits of doing so, while having ample surplus for export to friendly nations facing supply uncertainties.

Offshore wind is part of that agenda despite Trump’s public criticism of wind turbines as aesthetically ugly and his assertion that their noise causes cancer. His home state of New York leads the nation with a 9GW offshore wind capacity target by 2035.

Brouillette is not a political ideologue and has maintained a constructive dialogue with opposition Democrats in Congress on a range of energy issues. That should prove helpful as he has vowed to fight to preserve the Department of Energy’s (DOE) budget from administration cost-cutters including programmes that fund renewable energy research and development.

A big unknown is whether he will be under pressure from Trump to spearhead administration efforts, unsuccessful thus far, to somehow revitalise the declining coal industry. Trump is popular in coal producing states and he will need a strong showing there if he is to win re-election in November 2020.

Perry was the public face of a controversial push by the White House to allow generators with onsite fuel supplies, i.e. coal, in competitive markets to recover their costs regardless of the underlying economics of their plants. Regional grid operators and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have shown little enthusiasm for the idea.

Wind

Nod to US wind and solar boom as Brouillette takes charge at DoE