Is Trump’s Energy Czar Lying About Work Experience in Solar?
Donald Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright, has repeatedly claimed that he has past experience working in the solar energy sector. But there’s no evidence that Wright ever studied, invested in, or worked in solar.
President Donald Trump holds an executive orders on American energy production during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8, 2025, in Washington, DC. Trump was joined by (left to right) EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, interior secretary Doug Bergum, and energy secretary Chris Wright. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
During Chris Wright’s January 2025 confirmation hearing as secretary of energy, his home state senator, John Hickenlooper (D-CO), expressed concern about the pace of climate change. Wright agreed that climate change was a serious issue, citing his twenty-year career in diverse energy sectors, including renewables.
“The solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he told Hickenlooper. “I’ve worked on that most — all of my career, again in nuclear and solar, and geothermal and new battery storage technology now.”
This is far from the first time Wright has noted he’s worked in solar. Wright — the former founder, chief executive, and chair of Colorado-based Liberty Energy, one of the country’s top fracking companies — has claimed in public appearances, organizational biographies, on his LinkedIn profile, and even formal testimony before Congress that he spent parts of his career working in solar energy.
But despite such claims, there’s no evidence that Wright ever studied, invested in, or worked in solar energy, according to a Lever investigation of Wright’s school records, corporate disclosures, and several close followers of his career and companies.
In fact, the entire notion that Wright has ever worked in solar energy exclusively stems from vague public claims he’s made on the matter. The one time he elaborated on this notion, he submitted a résumé with what appears to be false information about his solar experience to Congress, the Lever found.
In response to requests for comment from Wright and the Department of Energy, an agency spokesperson noted in an email, “During his decades-long career working in the energy sector, Wright worked with and advised on a variety of different energy sources and technologies, including oil, natural gas, nuclear (including [small modular reactors]), solar, and geothermal.”
The spokesperson did not respond to repeated follow-up requests for evidence supporting Wright’s claims that he studied and worked in solar energy.
One expert says Wright’s allegedly false claims about his experience in solar energy suggest an insincere interest in using the Energy Department to support, or even treat fairly, the country’s $70.3 billion solar energy industry.
Now as secretary of energy, Wright will be responsible for overseeing solar energy research and development, solar energy tax credits, and the Energy Department’s clean energy loan program, which has included solar projects. All of these programs are under threat from Wright and the Trump administration’s vague and far-reaching emergency powers, as well as Congress’ proposed “Big Beautiful Budget” bill.
These developments come as scientists urge the United States to quickly transition its energy system away from fossil fuels and toward renewables like solar — or else face existential, ecological threats.
“Wind and solar are seen as being primarily promoted by Democrats and entities that support Democrats, and Trump is attacking all policies that he perceives as supporting his political opponents,” said Tyson Slocum, energy program director at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “This is just crass politics.”
Nothing but Hot Air?
Wright studied undergraduate mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1981 to 1985, according to the school. He enrolled at MIT as an undergraduate student “specifically to work on [nuclear] fusion energy,” Wright testified before the Democrat-led House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in 2019.
His undergraduate thesis focused on the use of semiviscous materials to dampen vibrations of stiff, constrained materials. This work could have applications in spacecraft, Wright argued in the thesis. After he graduated, Wright pivoted to study electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, school records state.
“As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Chris Wright developed regulating charging circuits to connect batteries to solar in order to power remote instruments,” a Department of Energy spokesperson told the Lever over email, but failed to provide evidence supporting the claim.
In fall 1985, Wright enrolled for just one semester at Berkeley. Berkeley did not maintain records of Wright’s academic coursework, research, or the classes he taught; the school could only confirm he was employed as a teaching assistant that semester in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Like any electrical engineering student, Wright could have spent a week learning about solar or teaching it in a single class, but absent hard evidence, there is no way to be sure.
In February 1986, Wright returned to MIT, where he would remain until January 1988 before dropping out, the school confirmed. A 1991 paper he copublished with other researchers focused on electrical engineering, but it made no mention of applications for solar energy.
More than forty academics who were enrolled in or taught graduate school at either Berkeley or MIT in those years either did not respond or denied recalling Wright, much less what classes he took or what he researched.
According to a 2019 résumé Wright submitted to Congress, he published fifty-seven research articles between 1989 and 2019, most of which were presented at fossil fuel industry conferences, symposia, and meetings. Besides his first two articles on spacecraft and power converters, all other research has been directly related to fossil fuel extraction.
According to his 2019 résumé, from 1985 to 1989, Wright worked at Hunter Geophysics, a company based in California’s Bay Area, while he was still enrolled at MIT for graduate work on the other side of the country. It is unclear, and a spokesperson for the Energy Department declined to comment on, how Wright accomplished both decades before the remote-work era.
On the Case
Wright’s known career consists entirely of working in or leading fracking companies. The few recent investments that he or his companies have made in alternative energy sources like advanced nuclear, geothermal, and battery power have been widely publicized, but none of them are related to solar energy.
In August 2019, Wright suggested otherwise when he appeared before a now-dismantled House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in a hearing focused on renewable energy solutions in Colorado. At the hearing, he submitted a résumé claiming that immediately after ending his graduate work at Berkeley, he joined Hunter Geophysics. At that firm, Wright claimed that he “designed charging circuits for solar panels to remotely and continuously power electronic monitoring equipment.”
But Hunter Geophysics never did any work related to solar energy, according to Bruce Braden, the now-defunct company’s chief financial officer. Instead, the Mountain View, California–based company was an early pioneer in fracking technology.
Not every congressional hearing is under oath, but Wright filled out a standard “Truth in Testimony” disclosure before his appearance asking about any potential conflict of interest (he didn’t list any). Even if congressional witnesses aren’t under oath, “they are supposed to be truthful when they give comments, because that could be considered lying to Congress,” noted a staffer for the now-defunct climate committee’s chair, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL). It is unclear whether Wright was under oath during that 2019 hearing, and the staffer did not respond to additional questions.
Wright and Braden would go on to cofound two fracking companies together, Pinnacle Technologies and Stroud Energy, Braden said. Both were sold in 2006. Braden isn’t aware of any solar energy work that Wright has ever done.
In 2010, Wright started Denver-based Liberty Resources, and in 2011, he started Denver-based Liberty Oilfield Services. Both are types of fracking companies; Liberty Resources, like ExxonMobil or Chevron, is an exploration and drilling company, while Liberty Oilfield Services, like Halliburton, fracks, pumps, and transports the oil and gas. Other companies Wright worked for or helmed — Resources Engineering Systems and Liberty Midstream Solutions — were also fracking companies with no involvement in solar.
Liberty Oilfield Services went public in 2018, and in 2022, the company changed its name to Liberty Energy.
In July 2022, Liberty Energy invested $10 million in Fervo Energy, a geothermal energy company. In September 2022, the company invested in Natron Energy, a sodium-ion battery manufacturer. In January 2024, Liberty announced an investment in Oklo, an alternative nuclear-fission company that until recently had Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as its chairman.
Wright joined Oklo’s board and bought company shares in July 2024 before becoming energy secretary. Wright has not submitted a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure noting he has sold those shares, even as his office recently maintained a $575 million loan in the small modular nuclear reactor industry while cutting loans to other carbon-cutting sectors.
Prior to joining the government, Wright also owned shares in EMX Royalties, which acquires mineral mining royalties, including for precious, battery, and base minerals, according to his executive branch ethics disclosure form. Wright was also a director of Urban Solution Group, a private company that creates physical barriers, processes permitting, and provides public relations help for oil and gas drilling companies seeking to work near residential areas, according to his executive branch financial disclosures. Neither of these companies work in the solar energy industry.
On his executive branch disclosure, Wright also listed many nonprofits, foundations, and trade groups for which he serves as a board member, including fossil fuel advocacy organizations like Western Energy Alliance and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance as well as dark money-funded free-market think tanks like Property and Environmental Research Center and the Pacific Research Institute. None of these organizations are involved in solar energy.
In January 2024, Wright’s fracking company Liberty Energy announced the creation of the Bettering Human Lives Foundation with a $1 million seed donation, which lists Wright as its principal officer and Anne Hyre, Wright’s sister-in-law, as its executive director and sole employee. So far, the new and small nonprofit exclusively “supports” liquid petroleum gas nonprofits and “social enterprise” companies in Ghana and Kenya.
Wright also serves as the managing member of four holding companies, his executive branch disclosure stated. Three are used as holding companies for his shares in other endeavors: an oil and gas production company called Urban Solutions Group, and an IPO shell company. But it is unclear what the fourth shell company, Sol 2 LLC, is for. Wright has held “one unreportable asset” in the LLC since May 2021 and is a comanaging member of the Cherry Hills, Colorado, company. Does “Sol” stand for solar? The Energy Department spokesperson would not say.
On the now-scrubbed corporate biographies of Wright at Liberty Energy and EMX Royalty Corporation, both publicly traded companies, Wright’s biographies do not mention him working in solar energy. Public companies that state false information could be liable for securities fraud.
Three entities affiliated with Wright — the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, Liberty Energy, and Nomad Proppant, LLC — are party to a battle-royale federal lawsuit to kill a Biden-era rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose some of their climate risks and greenhouse gas emissions. The rule would make greenwashing or other false statements about climate change a securities law violation. The rule and the litigation have both been paused but not thrown out — even as the Trump SEC has exited the litigation — because blue-state attorneys general intervened, asking the court to reject arguments that the rule exceeded SEC authority.
Why Lie?
Wright has been a pioneer in fracking technology. He has worked in oil and gas as far back as 1985, started over half a dozen fracking companies, and has authored dozens of papers and presentations on oil and gas industry research. However, the solar endeavor he described to Congress in 2019, Hunter Geophysics, appears to be a fabrication.
Even if he took a class on solar at Berkeley, or Sol 2 LLC represents a minimal investment in solar, for him to at times give such circumstances equal billing as his four decades of investment in oil and gas is, at a minimum, deeply misleading.
Why would a fossil fuel mogul like Wright fabricate experience in solar? Possibly because Wright likes to fashion himself as not just another fossil fuel executive. According to his LinkedIn bio, Wright is a “tech nerd turned entrepreneur,” a black turtleneck on an oil rig. Chris Wright doesn’t mention solar when he needs to green wash his career; he mentions it when he needs to green wash himself.
“Secretary Wright has been sharply critical of renewable energy and solar, specifically that it is unreliable and that it is not an advantageous energy source in comparison to fossil fuels,” said Slocum at Public Citizen. None of these criticisms are factual, Slocum added.
Solar energy’s benefits are myriad, according to the Department of Energy’s own website: In addition to lowering energy bills, solar energy is plentiful, clean, raises home values, and reduces water usage and greenhouse gas emissions. It can also serve as a useful way to get energy to remote communities and places with expensive electric grids, the agency has asserted.
The Department of Energy currently oversees an energy loan portfolio that includes eleven solar energy projects with issued loans worth $10 billion and one conditional commitment worth $62 million, according to its website. Five of the project loans total over $1 billion.
On climate and energy policy, Wright’s approach is no different from any past Republican Secretary of Energy, said Slocum: manipulate all possible regulatory authority to artificially prop up fossil fuels.
Wright, for example, has reportedly lobbied Congress to extend Inflation Reduction Act clean energy tax credits for nuclear and geothermal, but not for wind and solar.
Wright’s greenwashing of his own career appears to have paid political dividends: The Senate confirmed Wright, 59-38. No Republican voted against him, and seven Democrats and one Democratic-affiliated independent voted for him, including both of Colorado’s Democratic senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet.
Neither Hickenlooper nor Bennet responded to multiple requests for comment.
Wright left Liberty Energy on February 3, 2025, so he could become the secretary of energy. A month after Wright left, on March 5, 2025, Liberty Energy acquired IMG Energy Solutions, a diverse energy company that provides “microgrids,” which are on-site, modular natural gas plants accompanied by grids of solar arrays. The Pittsburgh International Airport is currently powered by an IMG hybrid gas/solar grid.
This marked Liberty Energy’s first-ever foray into solar energy, according to Tom Curran, a senior securities analyst who covers Liberty Energy at Seaport Research Partners. Two days later, Wright sold the last of his shares in Liberty Energy.