During his latest appearance on CNBC, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stuck to familiar partisan talking points on clean energy: Solar and wind, the North Dakota Republican claimed, are “unreliable” in part because no one knows “when the wind’s gonna blow” and in part because the sun doesn’t shine “24 hours a day.”
Late last week, Donald Trump’s Department of Energy (which should probably know a little something about energy) published a similar social media message that read, “Wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing.”
That came on the heels of Energy Secretary Chris Wright pushing the same line during an appearance on Fox Business.
It’s bizarre how frequently this comes up. Indeed, the president himself has railed against clean energy technology for years, and when targeting solar and wind power, Trump has routinely repeated the same familiar mistake: After sundown or when the wind isn’t blowing, those energy sources are practically useless.
Other Republicans have stuck to the same script. The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, George W. Bush’s former chief speechwriter and a Fox News contributor, told a national television audience in July, “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.”
As we’ve discussed, I can appreciate why rhetoric like this might seem compelling to regular folks who don’t know better. 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, which is led by Burgum, who apparently didn’t read his own agency’s materials.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
