Please tell me this isn't a real thing someone published. It really needs to be a joke. My opinion of humanity is so very low, and I don't think I can handle lowering it any further.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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I’m sorry, buddy. It’s real.
By sunset, despite still high temps, 99% of solar power also failed.
They think high temps is what generates the electricity.
For some of them it actually is, not all are photoelectric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
They have trade offs, like every power solution. One perk is that they generally cleaner to produce, since shiny metal is simpler than modern complex solar panels.
That being said, I have little faith in any report issued under the current administration.
That still requires sunlight to work…
It requires sunlight to charge, not to produce electricity. Because liquid salt doesn't cool the moment it goes dark the plant can continue to use it to boil water to spin a turbine for a fair bit of time without sunlight. I believe one implementation only produces power at night, and spends the day collecting heat.
But yes, solar power does require sunlight at some point.
It's kinda moot however, because having now read the original post I was correct to assume they (the doe) was being disingenuous. The heat they seemed to be referring to was "the weather". As in "despite the high temperature, the sun still went down causing solar generation to ebb in a predictable fashion that grid operators were unsurprised by. This is why it's good we forced them to keep 150 year old coal plants burning".
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Damn it. I think that was the last little bit of faith in humanity I had left.
I should buy a bulldozer
Seems like the official DoE account on LinkedIn posted it;
Remember when the DoE used to be all boring engineers and physicists, not adeptus mechanicus?
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Incidentally, this is why I'm heavily invested in battery technology.
Kinda looks like a sunrise 🌅
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Solar
Sunset
If those kids could read meme
Sometimes I wonder if my whole worldview is incorrect. Perhaps I am in an insulated leftist echo chamber. Maybe these people who I have vilified have reasonable positions that I cannot comprehend.
Then I see the Department of Energy lamenting how solar panels failed because they don't work at night.
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The 1% of solar producing power at night scares me
Moonlight and starlight is indirect and distant solar power, respectively.
Could also be as simple as them using the wrong cutoff time for when the Sun goes down
That light has way less than 1% of the intensity of sunlight.
Edit: from here you get that the brightness of moonlight is 0.05 - 0.3 lux whilst that of direct sunlight is 32,000–100,000 lux
Our eyes deceive us (our pupils dilate or contract and we have different more sensitive cells in our retina for seeing in low light conditions) and make it seem brighter than it actually is whilst making sunshine during the day seem less bright than it actually is.
You can use any light of the right frequencies on a solar panel to produce electricity, but the amount of current you can get on a solar panel from moonlight and starlight is minuscule.
My bet is that the 1% comes from things like molten salt solar power plants which during the day use sunlight to heat up some kind of salt (which is used to produce steam that powers a steam turbine), some of which will only be used to actually generate power during the night.
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Honestly, it's impressive that they still managed 138MW after sunset.
Some of them positioned under bright streetlights or something?
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Sun Sets
Republicans: Huddle nervously in the darkness uncertain if the magic sky fire will ever return.
As a point of comparison, here's a press release from PRC's government on the same day: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202607/23/content_WS6a617ed3c6d00ca5f9a0c5e8.html
China is building yet another 300 GW of renewables by 2030, meanwhile the US is struggling to understand the word "solar" in "solar panel".
China is basically the only major economy that invested into making a transition off fossil fuels actually possible.
The point is to focus on the future. Fossil fuels don't disappear, but new energy sources can replace them in pieces, small or large. Also, equally importantly, personal solar is a life changing tool for millions of people around the world already.
For sure, I expect once the process will accelerate now with Gulf energy exports collapsing making it a necessity for a lot of countries. And Pakistan is a great example where people took initiative themselves to start importing the panels, and now there's large scale solar available. This kind of stuff does make me cautiously optimistic.
Growing up in the American education system I met a number of intelligent and decent people. None of them that stayed in this country are doing particularly well professionally. I also met a number of trust fund brats and amoral monsters. They are doing quite well for themselves. This is America.
The lack of morality is a feature.
I'm wondering how that 1% remained operating?
Moonlight
138 MW generated from moonlight is insane to me.
I’m investing in lunar power now
Best guess, sunset is being defined as a specific time. Sunset isn't necessarily the point at which all sunlight is gone, and even then, the time the sun goes down varies depending on where you are within a given time zone. If they just used an arbitrary time or an almanac listing for twilight for each day, they could easily end up including slivers of daylight in their post sunset data.
Which is really pointless since this is just the same old "BuT sOlAr DoEsN't WoRk At NiGhT" argument that idiots have been making for decades. But I suppose you gotta at least pretend to use real world data to make it look sciencey.
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US education
4th Grade School Textbook
That's from a private religious education textbook. It is not representative of the U.S. education system.
Yes, but a big part of the population in the US are in school with this and similar. I remember an interview with a passerby in Alabama, I think, asking him about climate change caused by pollution. Answer: It Is a big lie that man can change anything in God's Creation.
The US Bubble
Autoritarian govs only can work with ignorant citizens, religion is always usefull for it. Search: List of Banned Books in US Schools.
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If you kill all the Nazis this will stop being a problem.
Anything can be true when words have no meaning.
Is this real? Is this really as dumb as it seems?
yup it's real and it's exactly as dumb as it looks
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Maybe that’s why they’re allowing that company to build space mirrors; so they can point the sun at the solar panels 24/7.
~/s in case it’s not obvious.~
I know you aren't serious, but I am now curious how much night time solar relaying it would take to pay off launching one of those satellites. I need to find numbers...
Edit- Here it is- with updated math
Looking around I first needed to see how much energy generation nets. This is time and location dependant. I am in Texas. Out grid is run by ERCOT and they have their wholesale grid prices listed.
If I were to be buying reflected solar, it would obviously be at night, during the unfortunately lower priced off peak times. Looking at the grid avg we get about $40 per MWh.
But we now have the question of how big is the solar farm? And this size is now limited to the reflected beam size. According to reflect orbital their first satellite, Eärendil-1, has a beam diameter of approximately 5 square Km. But we have to factor in some beam dissipation near the edges, so let's be safe and call it a circle with a diameter of 4 square Km of usable reflected solar. This number also easily convers to about 1000 acres of land.
Utility Scale solar farms output 1 MW per 5-10 acres. Of we took the middle (7.5 acres per MW) our hypothetical reflected beam sized solar farm would output 150 MW.
At $40 per MW and 150 MW we are generating $6000 per hour. And with our twilight window of 6 hours we can generate $36,000 per night.
But how much does the satellite cost? The rented cost is one thing, but only peasants rent the sun. We are talking about owning it. The satellite is Reported to cost $2 million. But the mass produced they are claiming will cost closer to $300k. Let's pretend this becomes a viable buisness strategy to own these satellites and beam them to a reflected solar farm and use the $300k.
So our cheap satellite should take about 8.3 nights to pay off. The expensive one should take about 55.5 nights to pay off.
This also does not factor in lower luminosity, night time clouds, solar build cost, or launch cost. This is also factoring in today's energy prices that continue to trend downward with the adoption of more renewables. This also ignores the giant issue of their orbital height only giving 4 minutes of sun per pass per satellite. I don't even want to know how many centuries it would then take to pay off a $2 million satellite in 4 minute increments...
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