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.
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.
