Join food and agriculture associations in applauding U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s recent Secretarial Order titled “Unleash the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance,” which takes significant and practical steps towards enhancing energy accessibility and modernizing infrastructure.  The letter emphasizes the critical role of reliable and affordable energy in sustaining agriculture, food manufacturing, and rural industries. It also highlights the risks posed by outdated energy systems, rising demand, and extreme weather events, urging swift action to prevent blackouts, streamline permitting, and ensure a resilient energy network that supports U.S. agricultural competitiveness.

This coalition letter is open to all food and agriculture associations including national, state, and regional associations.

The opportunity to sign-on to the letter will close COB Monday, March 24, 2025.

Please contact Jamaica Gayle ([email protected]) with any questions.

Dear Secretary Wright:

The undersigned food and agriculture associations write to congratulate you on your Secretarial Order titled “Unleash the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance,” which takes significant and practical steps towards securing energy accessibility for American agriculture and related industry. We support an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy production and targeted initiatives to modernize America’s energy infrastructure—specifically those that impact the food and agriculture industry—ensuring reliable and affordable energy for our sector.

Agriculture and its related industries make up 18.7% of the American economy, including 2.28 million manufacturing jobs. Efficiency in the agricultural sector is fundamental to President Trump’s goal of restraining food price inflation. Reliable and affordable energy, coupled with President Trump’s focus on evidence-based benefit cost analysis in regulatory policy, are keys to achieving that goal. With the United States becoming a net food importer for the first time in history in 2023, our industries recognize that access to reliable and affordable energy is critical to restoring global competitiveness and safeguarding American agriculture.

Strong policy moves are needed to mitigate the substantial risk of rolling blackouts in the next four years and the economic damage they would cause. As a start, we commend your drive for robust energy production. Especially important, we support your efforts to modernize energy infrastructure so energy production may be put to use. The order’s focus on innovation and grid reliability works to secure power delivery from shocks to the grid system, ensuring America’s businesses and households have the electricity necessary to keep the lights on. Lastly, streamlining permitting will address one of the biggest barriers to the innovative solutions needed to modernize the energy system.

FERC projects over 138 GW of additional energy demand in the next five years, while US utilities currently expect over 83 GW of power plants to be retired in the next ten. To compound this problem, almost three quarters of the US transmission system is over 25 years old and needs replacing. Without swift action to modernize infrastructure and expand capacity, these retirements will exacerbate vulnerabilities, creating a deficit that endangers the reliable energy supply essential to agriculture and related industries.

The highly perishable and fragile character of America’s agriculture-related industry highlights the vulnerability of our economy to even brief electric power Interruptions. Beyond the obvious importance of refrigeration to food safety, a very brief interruption in electric power supply can leave a food manufacturing facility “digging out” for a day or more as food safety imperatives require disposal of large volumes of product. These downtimes have a significant impact on supply chains, adversely affecting market access for farmers, workhours for food manufacturing workers, retailers who strive to provide abundant choice, and consumers who bear the cost of inefficiencies in the system.

Furthermore, extreme weather events have increasingly disrupted agricultural energy needs, with weather-related power outages rising nearly 70% since 2000. Events like Winter Storm Uri (2021) and the Maria Fire (2019) exposed vulnerabilities in rural energy infrastructure, causing significant agricultural losses – $600 million in Texas alone and $2 million in California. These disruptions affected livestock, crops, irrigation, and supply chains, emphasizing the urgent need for a resilient energy network to safeguard agricultural operations against future disasters.

The undersigned food and agriculture associations applaud the steps DOE has taken to address the nation’s urgent power needs and stand ready to be a resource for you. We urge DOE to consider the unique needs and capability of rural America and agriculture-related industry in this challenge. Examples include the fact that one segment of food manufacturing was the nation’s first industry to join the ENERGY STAR Industrial Management Program. Also, respectful treatment of private land rights is critical to timely construction of new transmission infrastructure. We are eager to work with you to help solve the problem.

Sincerely,

Corn Refiners Association

emPower Rural America

Independent Bakers Association

International Food Additives Council

Kansas Farm Bureau

National Pasta Association

Plant Based Products Council

United Egg Producers