Donald Trump has railed against clean energy technology for years, and when targeting solar and wind power, the president has routinely repeated a familiar mistake: After sundown or when the wind isn’t blowing, those energy sources are practically useless.
He’s not, however, the only Republican who’s expressed confusion about this. The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, George W. Bush’s former chief speechwriter and a Fox News contributor, told a national television audience last week, “Just so people understand, wind and solar only work when there is wind and sun. We don’t have technology to store the energy from wind and solar.”
A week later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum pushed similar rhetoric during an on-air Fox Business interview.
“Of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called ‘sunset’ and there’s no solar energy produced,” the Cabinet secretary claimed, “and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable and expensive.”
For casual viewers watching these interviews, that rhetoric might seem compelling. Solar panels generate energy from the sun; and turbines generate energy from the wind; so perhaps it’s logical to conclude that clean energy technology is pointless at night and during calm skies.
There’s just one problem: Battery technology exists. As MSNBC host Catherine Rampell explained in a Washington Post column last year:
Growth in clean-electricity generation is a longer-term trend driven largely by technological improvements that have improved solar’s and wind’s cost-competitiveness. But recent policy changes, such Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, have also accelerated development. The same forces are boosting battery development, which is helping solve intermittency problems caused by relying on wind or solar when the weather doesn’t cooperate. The Energy Information Administration recently forecast that U.S. battery storage capacity will nearly double [in 2024] alone.
If the GOP response is that battery storage technology is still in the process of advancing, that’s fine. I’ll gladly concede the point.
But as some Republicans seem inclined to pretend that batteries don’t exist at all, I came across an FAQ that the right should find interesting.
The U.S. power grid consists of a huge number of interconnected transmission lines that connect a variety of generation sources to loads. The wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine, which creates additional variability and uncertainty (as nobody can perfectly forecast wind or solar output). But power grid operators have always had to deal with variability. Many forms of power generation can unexpectedly trip offline without notice and some only produce power at certain times. There is also uncertainty due to ever-changing loads (energy demand) that cannot be perfectly predicted.
The same online document added, “Grid operators use the interconnected power system to access other forms of generation when contingencies occur and continually turn generators on and off when needed to meet the overall grid demand. Integrating variable renewable power to the grid does not change how this process of balancing electricity supply and demand works.”
Who published this? The Trump administration’s Department of Energy.