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Lowering the bar? Put it wherever you want so long as i can drink at it
Holy shit.
At this point I feel ashamed admitting I find this astonishing. Everyone come point and laugh because I'm somehow still not jaded enough.
Usually before I write something stupid I go back and proof read it. Apparently the DOE doesn't do that.
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.
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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Well, there are solar condensator setups which will focus sunlight on a central tower to melt some kind of salt which is then used to generate power in the more traditional way (heating water into steam that then goes through a steam turbine).
These will keep generating during the night as long as there's enough heat left in the reservoir of molten salt which was filled during the day.
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.
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.
I’m sorry, buddy. It’s real.
Damn it. I think that was the last little bit of faith in humanity I had left.
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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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Honestly, it's impressive that they still managed 138MW after sunset.
Some of them positioned under bright streetlights or something?
Maybe it was a full moon?
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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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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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Wait until they hear about my car when it has no gas.
99% of cars fail without gas in the tank. Obviously the car must be the problem.
not gonna have to wait long the way things are going in the Gulf
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.
This. Thiiiiiiisssssss. Afajswhakfhid.
Sun Sets
Republicans: Huddle nervously in the darkness uncertain if the magic sky fire will ever return.
I'm wondering how that 1% remained operating?
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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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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