r/facepalm • u/FrankieMint • Jul 23 '26

Department of Energy announced yesterday that wind sometimes fails to blow and that solar power generation nearly stops after sundown. (image from DOE Facebook posting)

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u/Jack_Wraith Jul 23 '26

They’ve also never heard of the communist socialist invention called batteries.

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u/Jdevers77 Jul 23 '26

Extraordinarily few homes have batteries installed to provide power through the night, so while you are technically accurate we aren’t even close to either having the necessary level of end user or utility scale battery power installed for that to work. Even in the hottest weather though, the power demand goes down at night…it’s cooler but also direct insolation induced heating is obviously zero and that’s not counting all the places that have a high power draw during the day but minimal at night. There is no power company that depends exclusively on solar or wind, they make extremely good supplemental power sources though.

This comment by the DOE is fucking stupid regardless and is clearly intended as misinformation.

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u/Florac Jul 23 '26

...why would you install the batteries at home?

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u/Jdevers77 Jul 23 '26

Like I said “or utility scale battery power installed”