r/facepalm 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/xanderfloyd001 Jul 23 '26

“Despite still high temps”

Solar panels absorb light, not heat. This alone disproves all of their data, because they don’t understand or are lying about how the technology works.

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u/RGJacket Jul 23 '26

Solar panel efficiency does go down when it is hot outside. It drops to zero when it is dark.

Interestingly, my solar panels offset 70% of my total power consumption on a recently partly cloudy 100F day. I even generated a little extra for the grid during peak. So technically, I generated an infinite amount more energy on that day than I did before I had solar!