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By Canary Media
By Canary Media
Canary Media
Yesterday, the Department of Energy took to social media to try and make a scandal out of a well-known fact: Solar panels do not generate power at night.
It’s an old and lazy swipe that critics of renewable energy love to take, even though the people who operate our power grids know that this is the case and plan around the advantages and constraints it presents. That this argument is coming from the cabinet agency overseeing America’s energy system is unnerving but at this point unsurprising. It’s not the first time Energy Secretary Chris Wright has twisted basic facts about renewables.
During the early-July heat wave, “99% of solar power” in the mid-Atlantic “failed after sunset,” according to the graphic Wright’s Energy Department shared on X.
Putting aside the misleading and deceptively provocative language (“failed”? really?), the post completely ignores, you know, the rest of the day. When the sun is shining.
As Wright and others at the DOE well know, solar may not work at night — but it excels in the day. And that matters a lot.
I’ll use one very recent example to make the case. Texas experienced a heat wave this week, and its residents did what you’d expect to get through it: They cranked up their air conditioners. AC is a lifesaver but also an electricity guzzler, and so all that cooling pushed the Texas grid to new highs. On Tuesday the state’s main power grid broke its all-time electricity-demand record. That superlative didn’t stand for long: On Wednesday it set a new record with over 91 gigawatts of peak demand.
Despite this unprecedented strain on the grid, the lights stayed on and the ACs kept humming along. Solar, which Texas has built tons of in recent years, played a major role in that outcome.
On Tuesday, for nearly five hours, solar provided more electricity than natural gas did. On Wednesday, from just before 9 a.m. until just before 5 p.m. — the duration of a full workday — solar provided more than one-third of all electricity in Texas. At times each day, it topped 40% of electricity supply. Solar also helped charge up enough batteries that the Lone Star State set a new record for battery output Wednesday evening when the sun set and demand remained high.
Pretending that solar does nothing to stabilize the grid during periods of extreme stress is disingenuous at best, but it also discounts another key fact. In moments like this past week in Texas, solar can — and did — keep energy prices from spiking.
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Perhaps the administration put out this post to troll people like myself. If so, then congrats — consider me trolled and triggered.
I wish we could just categorize it as inane and laugh it off. But it’s coming from a once-authoritative source and cloaked in a faux-authoritative tone and premised on figures that are technically accurate, if completely misleading. And stuff that sounds reasonable and comes from ostensibly trustworthy sources has a way of spreading around online.
Already, Google’s AI overview is promoting this DOE post as a reputable source and pointing out that solar “output dropped significantly by sunset” during the July heat wave in the mid-Atlantic.
And, of course, the DOE’s message is part of a much more serious and directly damaging trend: The Trump administration’s war on solar and other forms of renewable energy.
Trump has ripped away tax credits for both large-scale solar projects and rooftop installations, crushed a program meant to help low-income Americans afford photovoltaic panels of their own, slow-rolled permitting for projects, and froze a longstanding federal effort to help farmers put solar on their land. I could, unfortunately, keep the examples coming.
But the administration can’t change the fact that solar is the cheapest, cleanest, and easiest form of energy to build — or that we are in the midst of an unprecedented boom in electricity use. People’s utility bills are soaring because supply is lagging behind demand.
It’s undeniable that solar is valuable to our energy system, even if it can’t anchor a grid on its own. Yes, of course, its value is mostly during the daylight hours, though batteries are making it possible to shift more and more of that power to evenings. And in any case, we do not live on a cold, shadowy planet condemned to long, dark days. In New York, where I am writing this, we’ll have 14 hours and 34 minutes of daylight today. If only we had even more solar panels installed here to soak it all up.
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Dan McCarthy is a senior editor at Canary Media.
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