The environmental left spent yesterday mocking the government for pointing out that solar panels do not work in the dark. But after speaking with grid operators, I am terrified to report that the sun goes down every single evening.
I have watched with growing disgust as the so-called environmental left spent the last twenty-four hours mocking the Department of Energy. The Department’s crime? Posting a simple, chilling warning on social media: solar panels do not generate power at night. The response from the climate-purity crowd was immediate and juvenile. "Duh," they sneered. "We know." But do they? Do any of us, truly, understand the sheer scale of the deception being perpetrated by the renewable energy lobby?
Last month, over an admittedly excellent Chilean sea bass at a private climate summit in Davos, a senior grid operator pulled me aside. He looked exhausted, the kind of deep, bone-weary fatigue that comes from carrying the weight of the global transition on your shoulders while being lectured by college sophomores on TikTok. He leaned in and whispered a truth that the glossy corporate ESG reports conveniently leave out: every single day, right around dusk, the sun completely vanishes.
Let that sink in. For approximately twelve hours a day, depending on the season, the central engine of the utopian green revolution simply abandons its post. It does not throttle down. It does not enter a low-power standby mode to conserve its carbon footprint. It physically drops below the horizon, leaving the American power grid entirely at the mercy of whatever we have bothered to dig up and set on fire.
The fact that the Department of Energy had to take to the internet to remind the public of this nightly blackout event is a staggering indictment of our entire sustainability discourse. We have allowed a cabal of net-zero grifters to sell us a technology that is entirely dependent on clear skies and daylight, two things that any seasoned meteorologist will tell you are wildly intermittent.
It is deeply irresponsible to entrust the future of American industry to a celestial body that has a documented, billions-of-years-long history of leaving us in the dark just when prime-time television is starting.
The smug retweets from environmentalists completely miss the point. They point to battery storage as if lithium-ion is some magical panacea, willfully ignoring the hard, adult reality of baseload power. Coal does not set. Natural gas does not require a cloudless afternoon to keep the ventilators running at the local hospital. Fossil fuels are loyal. They are there for you at two in the morning, burning with a quiet, reliable dignity while your neighbor’s roof panels sit there doing absolutely nothing.
I tried to explain this very dynamic during a panel I moderated at COP28 last year. I looked out at a sea of earnest, lanyard-wearing NGO delegates and asked them a simple question: what is your plan for the moon? The silence was deafening. They have modeled scope-three emissions down to the decimal point, but they have absolutely no regulatory framework for the lunar cycle. They are building a global energy infrastructure based on the childish assumption that it is always noon somewhere.
The adults in the room, however, are finally waking up to the nocturnal threat. Grid operators are quietly acknowledging that the so-called transition is going to require a massive, permanent fleet of continuous combustion just to cover the massive, recurring failure of the sun. We are realizing, far too late, that the sky goes black on a daily basis.
The Department of Energy’s social media manager is not a fool; they are a whistleblower. They looked at the Emperor’s new solar farm and correctly identified that it disappears in the dark. We owe them an apology, and more importantly, we owe it to ourselves to stop pretending that a technology that refuses to work the night shift can ever truly power a serious nation. The next time you turn on a light switch after dinner, say a quiet thank you to the people brave enough to burn something heavy, because the sun certainly isn't going to help you.