History has a way of echoing itself. The war in Iran has shown that the guardrails America put up in the 1970s, after the last global energy crisis, to prevent another one, didn’t fully succeed. Those guardrails, though, may at last be getting fortified by the Department of Energy—and the timing couldn’t be better.
In 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), to protest American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, banned oil exports to America. The price of oil nearly quadrupled. The United States began experiencing a fuel shortage, and our energy grid came under serious strain. Then-President Richard Nixon resorted to desperate measures, such as an attempted—and ultimately unsuccessful—ban on gas stations being open on Sunday, limitations on commercial jet fuel, and even restrictions on Americans’ Christmas lights.
This moment of weakness led U.S. lawmakers to pass new laws aimed at preventing such a serious disruption to daily life from ever happening again. Less than one year later, in 1974, the Solar Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Act was passed, creating the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) under the auspices of the Department of Energy (DOE). With minimal solar research and development at the time, it was reasonable for the United States government to explore these new technologies.
In its first year, SERI’s director and distinguished solar researcher, Paul Rappaport, urged U.S. officials to prioritize renewable energy and warned that the world should not be dependent on fossil fuels. Rappaport wrote, “A major national commitment could lead to solar energy’s accounting for 10 to 20 percent of our total energy demand by the end of the century.” This proved to be an unattainable goal. Over 50 years later, solar accounts for about 6% of net-electricity generation in 2026.
With a budget estimated to be larger than the combined spending of all other nations on renewable energy at the time, America should have cracked the code on renewable energy. By the year 1980, SERI’s annual budget reached $130 million—a figure, adjusted for inflation, of over half a billion dollars.
However, the energy transition theory of the 1970s and 1980s remained just a theory. And the 1990s proved no different. By 2000, solar and photovoltaic energy accounted for a mere less than 0.001% of America’s total energy generation, according to government figures.
SERI was renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 1991. Yet the institute’s core mission of fostering renewable energy sources remained. By then, though, many realized that solar wasn’t the silver bullet answer to America’s power generation they had hoped. And with time, more and more Americans are waking up to this reality, too. Over 70% of Americans, according to a Pew Research Center poll, oppose phasing out fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy sources.
Yet some politicians haven’t gotten the memo. They remain fixated on the idea that more money and time will produce the renewable energy solution that has proven elusive. For example, President Joe Biden said in 2020, “No one is going to build another oil or gas-fired electric plant. They’re going to build one that is fired by renewable energy. We have to invest billions of dollars in [that].”
To this day, renewable energy remains a political obsession for some. Yet fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—still account for over 70% of energy generation in the United States. Additionally, the majority of AI data centers rely primarily on natural gas as their foremost power source.
The DOE, fortunately, is waking up to this reality. The agency is adapting to meet today’s energy-intensive needs, and it is dispensing with the unfounded predictions of the past. In December 2025, NREL was rebranded to the National Lab of the Rockies (NLR), removing the words “renewable energy” from its name. In explaining the laboratory’s name change, Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson stated, “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources” based on politics. Instead, the NLR is now, as a formal policy, focusing its research efforts on meeting the needs of everyday Americans with reliable, cost-effective energy and a strong U.S. manufacturing base.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently shared that the DOE plans to build data centers at national labs, including NREL. This could be the perfect opportunity to use the lab’s resources to study the best means for electricity generation and energy efficiency. By 2028, the DOE expects domestic energy usage to double or triple. To meet this demand, we need affordable, reliable, and abundant energy. Natural gas is expected to be the energy source of choice.
The United States cannot afford unreliable and part-time energy sources like solar to meet an energy boom. The energy race today is an infrastructure race, as I wrote previously here at Independent Women. Corporations know this and are acting accordingly. Microsoft announced it will build an off-grid data center in West Virginia powered 100% by natural gas, which is unsurprising. Data centers demand a staggering amount of electricity. Intermittent energy sources like wind and solar are unfit to power family homes, let alone thousands of high-power AI processing servers.
Wind and solar policies stifle American energy independence, with government intervention forcibly retiring, whether intentionally or as a byproduct of ill-conceived policies, fossil fuel plants that provide a reliable baseline power. Therefore, NLR should reconfigure its priorities to focus on AI energy efficiency to meet growing electricity demand. If NLR research can help America in powering AI data centers to meet AI electricity demand, we can be superior to our adversaries in the race for world energy dominance.
The DOE runs 17 national labs, and many have redundant operations in alternative energy. In 2025, NLR received over $589 million in funding. This funding should be used to explore ways to help ordinary Americans lower their energy bills. Refocusing NLR on AI would bring the lab back to its original purpose: achieving energy dominance.