When politicians, journalists, or economists want to make a point, they sometimes discuss things that are, literally, impossible. Consider the national debt. “If you stack up 14.3 trillion dollar bills, the pile would stretch to the moon and back twice,” NPR wrote a few years ago, using hyperbole to make a point.

Nobody is stacking up dollar bills, but we take your point: it’s a big pile. Or several big piles.

This brings us to a recent Tweet by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. “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!”

He is using hyperbole. We couldn’t wrap a solar panel over the entire planet, obviously. Our world would be in perpetual shadow. There would be nowhere to mount it. It would have to be far enough off the ground to allow trucks to drive beneath it. And on and on and on.

But his critics use hyperbole in the other direction. “Covering just 1% of land with panels could—theoretically–power the planet,” they write in an attempt to “add context” to his Tweet. That’s a pretty large theory, because we would still need ways to transport all the electricity to the other 99% of the planet, ways to store it for use during the evening and overnight hours, ways to prevent overproduction on sunny days, and ways to ratchet the voltage up or down as needed. 

Besides, Wright’s point isn’t that policymakers should do the impossible and cover up Earth. His point is that we need more than one source of power. His Tweet is correct in two crucial ways.

First, electricity must be made from something, whether that’s solar panels or gas-fired generators. Electricity is a carrier of energy, a means of transferring it from one place to another. It is not actually energy itself.

Meanwhile, electricity represents only about one-fifth of total energy consumption globally. Underneath the global solar panel Wright was joking about, humans would still need oil wells, natural gas pipelines, nuclear power plants, and, of course, trillions of miles of power lines.

The U.S. already has a diverse resource portfolio of sources that generate electricity. Along with solar, we use natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal. Wright is correct that we should be finding ways to expand our portfolio. More solar panels? Of course (ideally made in America or allied countries, not China). However, we also need more wind turbines, more gas-fired plants, and certainly more nuclear plants.

The future of electricity could well be powered, in large part, by Small Modular Reactors. “SMRs are nothing truly new—nearly the entire developed world’s navies have been powering ships this way for decades—the development of new, highly efficient, incredibly safe fuels can take us from ‘great’ to ‘magnificent’ in energy advancement,” energy expert Bud Albright wrote. “They can be made small enough to transport on a road vehicle to a site where electricity has been interrupted or to military installations where power may not be needed permanently.” When it comes to electricity, our policy must be: “let’s have more.”

But electricity is not enough, and that brings us to the second part of Wright’s point. 

Consider transportation. Yes, electricity plays a growing role in this sector. At the end of last year, battery electric vehicles made up more than one-fifth of cars sold in the U.S. That means four-fifths ran on petroleum, the dominant source of energy in the American transportation sector and global transportation sectors. Biofuels, natural gas, and propane serve as minor sources as well. That isn’t going to change any time soon.

Throughout his career in the energy industry, Chris Wright was a patriotic American and was staunchly pro-free market. That makes sense, because we know that markets will deliver dependable energy while making environmental progress, as long as government policies and regulatory frameworks allow that. 

As Energy Secretary, Wright is putting his pro-growth ideas into action, working with this administration to open access to resource development and modernize regulations to encourage the development of more energy sources. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a framework for a better energy future.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.