Might good come from the NREL name change?

Maybe, but also plentiful skepticism about scrubbing of ‘renewable energy’ from name of laboratory by Trump’s team

by Allen Best

Changing a name is simple enough, if somewhat expensive and time-consuming, at least in the case of businesses.

But what to make of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new name? Is the change all bad for the laboratory and for its mission of the last 34 years?

It became National Laboratory of the Rockies as of Monday. It had been known as NREL since 1991 and before that had been the Solar Energy Research Institute since its founding in 1977 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

The laboratory has become one of the nation’s — and perhaps the world’s — seminal institutions devoted to engineering an energy transition. As of October, it had 3,717 employees after a reduction of 114 during May.

“Clearly an effort is underway (by President Donald Trump)‚ to downplay renewable energy as a premier, viable energy source in the United States. So it is hard to separate the politics from this given the timing,” said David Renee, who worked at the laboratory from 1991 until his recent retirement.

Renee said that in part he was very disappointed to see the words “renewable energy” deleted from the name but does see the new name allowing the institution to broaden its mission to reflect needs of the ever-more-complex electrical grid.

“I can see some good, long-term benefits from this. It gives the laboratory flexibility to have a broader scope,” he said. “A lot of the work is not exclusively related to renewable energy but more related to grid reliability and expansion, of which renewables play an important part. So one could argue that the name change was overdue anyway in order to be consistent with other national laboratories, which are mostly named for their locations and not the technology.”

The United States has 17 national laboratories engaged in energy and other research, and most are named for their local geographies. New Mexico, for example, has the Sandia and Los Alamos labs, the former named for a mountain range and the latter a town. Renee arrived in Golden from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and retired after running the solar resource assessment program.

Ron Larson, one of the earliest employees of the solar institute who arrived in 1977, a time when solar was 100 times more expensive than it is now, also tends toward a charitable view of the name change.

A possible reason, and a valid one, he said, could be that other national labs wanted more to do on renewable energy topics and are qualified to do so. “Too, maybe some at NREL have wanted to expand into other sectors, including fossil fuels and nuclear.”

See: “Jimmy Carter’s overlooked Colorado nexus” Big Pivots, Jan. 2, 2025.

Peter Lilienthal, an NREL employee from 1990 to 2007, when he formed an energy-related business, was less charitable. He was incensed by a statement from Audrey Robertson, the assistant secretary of energy, in Monday’s announcement.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Robertson said. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”

Lilienthal called that statement gaslighting. “That is just not true,” he said of Robertson’s assertion about no longer picking energy sources. He points to the promises of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and elsewhere to restore fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. This, he said, will slow the energy transition away from fossil fuels, he believes.

Jud Virden, the director of the renamed laboratory since October, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all.”

That statement clearly fits in with the narrative of Chris Wright, the Colorado-born director of the Department of Energy. A graduate of Cherry Creek High School, in south Denver, Wright was a rock climber and skier before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering, first mechanical and then electrical. He also later studied at the University of California at Berkeley.

In April, Wright returned to Colorado to tour NREL. Afterward, he met with reporters, where he said that he had worked on solar energy during graduate school and then geothermal. Only later, needing a paycheck, did he begin work in the oil and gas industry. In Denver, he founded Liberty, an oil and gas field services company, in 2011.

In his remarks, Wright did not dismiss renewable energy, but he did — as he had done before — dismiss “climate alarmism.” He said the science does not support the perception of risk that has, in part, driven the work to make renewable energy affordable and integrated into the electrical grid.

Wright sees the need for more energy being paramount and climate change worries a hindrance to archiving that plentitude that will result in higher standards of living.

“The biggest barrier to energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” he claimed.

He went on to cite 3 million people dying every year because they don’t have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don’t have sufficient food as well as the disconnect notices to American consumers for non-payment.

“If you call climate change a crisis and you don’t look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything.

Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.

In an essay published in The Economist in July, Wright said much the same thing. See: “Climate change is a product of progress, not an existential crisis.”

Wright also talked about the need to deliver plentiful energy and lowering energy prices. He talked about the drive to integrate artificial intelligence data centers into the U.S. economy.

“Artificial Intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on.”

And again, he talked about the need to expand electrical production as necessary to support artificial intelligence. Even without strong demand for data centers, he said, electricity prices have been rising.

“We’ve seen 20 to 25% rise in the price of electricity over the last four years. Americans are mad and angry and upset about that, which is why they’re all worried about AI — ‘No, we don’t want new demand on our grid that’s just going to make our prices more expensive.’ — We need to show them we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to grow our electricity production capacity without raising the prices to consumers, and we’ve got to keep our grid stable, not just the complicated system stable, but the increasing cyber threats of people that want to do us harm on our grid.”

Chuck Kutscher took a broad view of the change. A mechanical engineer by training, he began working at NREL in the 1980s before retiring in 2018.

“NREL is widely viewed as the leading renewable energy laboratory in the world. In the U.S. and throughout the world, solar and wind dominate the new electricity generation being deployed because they are now the lowest in cost and are also the fastest to deploy, in addition to avoiding air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China is clearly the world leader in renewable energy development and deployment, but NREL has played a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive,” he said in a statement.

“As a Department of Energy lab, NREL takes direction from DOE. The current administration made it clear in the last election that it would support fossil fuels. DOE does have a lab that focuses primarily on fossil fuels, the National Energy Technology Lab, so continuing to have a lab that performs R&D on renewables makes perfect sense, especially given the transition to renewable energy happening around the world. I’m sure the new lab director is working hard to preserve NREL’s tremendous expertise and important work in renewable energy while at the same time being responsive to DOE directives to strengthen the lab’s portfolio in areas such as AI and data centers.”