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Secretary Chris Wright Discusses Appliance Rule Repeal at Georgia Water Heater Plant

May 2, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:04:05

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Fox Business reported the Senate had just voted to repeal a Biden-era energy rule on appliances, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright at the Rinnai manufacturing facility in Griffin, Georgia, which makes tankless water heaters. Wright said the three-year-old facility encapsulates American ingenuity, hard work, and manufacturing — yet the day after Christmas at the end of the Biden administration, a rule was passed that would have made the factory shut down because its product would be illegal: Americans could no longer buy a low-cost water heater, only fancier, more expensive ones, he said. He called that downright un-American, said hundreds of jobs in Georgia would have been lost and millions of Americans would have lost the choice of a low-cost water heater, and said President Trump was elected to get rid of the nonsense and bring back common sense, according to the interview.

On unleashing American energy, Wright said the long-term strategy is to get barriers out of the way. He noted the second-largest U.S. export today is liquefied natural gas, the fastest-growing energy source on the planet, and that Biden had paused and stopped permitting new natural gas export terminals, leaving Europeans terrified about supply. In President Trump’s first 100 days, Wright said, the administration approved export terminals with capacity roughly equal to the second- and third-largest exporters of natural gas in the world combined, as he stated it.

Why it matters

The Rinnai stop is the administration’s appliance-standards argument in miniature — a specific plant and product line it says a Biden rule would have killed — joined to its claim of a first-100-days LNG permitting surge.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: Wright’s statement that first-100-days LNG export terminal approvals roughly equal the capacity of the world’s second- and third-largest exporters combined, as he stated it, is a checkable claim flagged for the scoreboard editor.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Joins Fox Business - May 2, 2025”, 2025-05-02 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-05-02). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.