Whether they be on the left, right, or in the center, one of the frustrations of journalists everywhere is people who only read the headline, or the tweet, for a given article. On Tuesday, PolitiFact deputy editor Louis Jacobson did just that when he labeled the Department of Energy’s X account “false” for a claim about solar and wind energy that, if he had only read the article, he would have known the department wasn’t making.
The post in question read, “Wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing.”
In the “if your time is short” section, Jacobson tried to rebut, “Wind energy infrastructure doesn’t produce power if the air isn’t moving, and solar doesn’t generate power if the sun’s not out. But that doesn’t mean that either source of energy is "worthless" during those periods.”
He also wrote, “Once produced, energy generated from wind and solar can be stored in batteries or in larger pieces of infrastructure such as reservoirs.”
Much of the rest of the article focused on expanding on that point. The problem for Jacobson is that the Energy Department’s post linked to an interview Secretary Chris Wright did with The Washington Examiner and in that article, energy and environment reporter Callie Patteson wrote, “The secretary claimed that, without proper battery technology, wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially ‘worthless’ when it is dark and when the wind isn’t blowing [emphasis added].”
On Friday, Wright spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, and during the Q&A session, he was asked about this very question. Wright answered:
I’m about the numbers. If you take all the batteries in the United States, including all the batteries in the electric cars, you can store our electric grid energy production for five minutes. So when you get a cold front, like when 200 people died for Storm Uri in Texas, that was three or four days of massively elevated demand. So the road from five minutes to seventy-two hours to a hundred hours is a very long road.
So we need more affordable energy storage. Today, the cost of energy storage makes firming, or making wind and solar firm meaning twenty-four hours a day, increases their cost five- to fifteenfold. So we don’t have a practical way to firm wind and solar today, but it would be awesome if we did.
In his piece, Jacobson paints a different picture, ‘“We now have increasingly widespread and affordable battery storage at the home and the utility scale,’ said Christopher R. Knittel, professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. ‘That allows renewable energy produced during the day to be stored and used at night or during demand spikes.’”
If Wright and Knittel want to debate each other on the merits of battery storage in 2025, they can and should, but Jacobson should refrain from throwing around “false” labels based off tweets linking to articles that he didn’t read.
