On clean energy, too many Republicans keep forgetting that batteries exist

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Conservative critics of renewable energy keep claiming that solar and wind are useless at night and during calm skies. That’s not even close to being true.

Republican critics of renewable energy keep claiming that solar and wind are useless at night and during calm skies.

That’s not even close to being true. #BatteryTechnologyExists www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-09-10T16:51:00.753Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/clean-energy-many-republicans-keep-forgetting-batteries-exist-rcna230304

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.”

Burgum to CNBC: "The intermittent sources, the unreliable and expensive sources like solar and wind -- you don't know when the wind's gonna blow, we do know when the sun is gonna shine and it's not 24 hours a day."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-09T18:44:06.931Z

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.

Maria Bartiromo to Energy Secretary Chris Wright: "You've got all these projects which are not necessarily projects that you can rely on. I mean, is the wind blowing? Is the sun shining? And yet hundreds of millions of dollars were going at these projects."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-02T14:16:17.476Z

......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.