On clean energy, too many Republicans keep forgetting that batteries exist. 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. Trump has routinely repeated the same familiar mistake.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/clean-energy-many-republicans-keep-forgetting-batteries-exist-rcna230304
Posted by mafco
21 Comments
They know their audience. Their attention span is not long enough to think about batteries. Something about game controllers, right?
and in any time of the day the major portion of the earth has sun.
They also forget that air conditioning runs the most when the sun is out
And that power demand is not linear.
willful ignorance
And that wind power is built at an altitude where the wind almost never stops blowing. When you see a windmill stopped, look at the others nearby. They’re always moving. Only time I’ve ever seen them stop all at once is during off-peak hours when they aren’t needed.
It’s not a “mistake”.
They have been propped up by huge money from the fossil fuel industry–they’ll lie and grasp at any straw to put renewables down. The latest horseshit is that the offshore wind farm they shut down is at risk from “undersea drones”…I’ll give them points for wild imagination at least.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-executives-campaign-finance-00157131. They pay and Trump delivers. Finally, a promise kept.
Must watch Senator King (ME) https://youtu.be/NhBiYv-bTeg?si=HCO2_C4wWDvrd_de
They willfully ignore that batteries larger than AA’s exist.
Trump has totally captured the media and is “flooding the zone with sh*t” 24 x 7. It doesn’t matter what the facts are, whatever Trump and his ilk are braying is what Americans will hear.
It can be as simple as raising a weight
They are also ignoring the fact that (with the exception of Texas, Hawaii, and Alaska) there is a national energy grid and the concept of energy trading to make certain that everyone has power without regard to how it is primarily produced. The Republican scenario applies to someone in Appalachia who doesn’t want to be on the grid.
The arent forgetting, they want to burn shit
Why is storage for solar and wind always separated from the cost of generation? Oil and gas require storage as well, but it’s never a separate cost when comparing prices of different energy sources. I recognize oil&gas is extremely vertically integrated but fossil fuel incumbents, who have had a 100 year head start on wind and solar, have to store and transport their energy even more than wind and solar!
Not forget. Are stupid.
Trump is mentally retarded and this comes as no surprise.
The first railroad in China was built by an English consortium near Shanghai. The railroad was removed by Chinese authorities after a year of operation. It was widely cited at the time as an example of the backwardness of the Qing Dynasty.
With republicans we are not dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer! They believe if it pollutes it is good and it also makes them a lot of money from the oil and coal industry.
So how did Germany reach 65% renewable share before the battery boom and with the largest manufacturing sector in Europe? They know you can just turn the old plants back on during the time when there’s neither sun nor wind.
Wind power during winter was the reason why the Russian gas stoppage didn’t do even more damage
The interplay between wind and hydro is ignored as well. Wind supplies substantial electricity and Grand Coulee makes up the short fall. The water is stored kinetic energy. Pumped hydro is also a thing.
This is dangerous thinking. It’s not forgetfulness or dumbness. It’s intentional strategy to make money and keep power. Full stop.
And yes, they take advantage of lots of people’s ignorance and human nature. But that’s different than assuming they just don’t understand the economics of energy.