In September, the Energy Department's official account posted a verdict on most of the power the country is building: wind and solar are "essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing." [1] It is a strange thing for that department to publish, because its own statistics shop keeps reporting the opposite, in numbers, every month.
What the department's own numbers show
The Energy Information Administration sits inside the same Department of Energy. Its accounting for 2025 finds that solar at 32.5 gigawatts, battery storage at 18.2, and wind at 7.7 add up to 58.4 of the roughly 63 gigawatts of new utility-scale capacity coming online, about 93 percent of everything built. [2] Solar alone set a record of 30 gigawatts in 2024. [2] Looking ahead, EIA's planning data put renewables and storage at 99.2 percent of net new capacity in 2026. [3] This is not a fringe energy source struggling for relevance. It is nearly all of what the grid is adding.
Data
| Solar | 32.5 |
|---|---|
| Battery storage | 18.2 |
| Wind | 7.7 |
| All other sources | 4.6 |
The word the post left out
The "worthless after dark" line works only by pretending one technology does not exist: batteries. Daytime solar charges storage that discharges into the evening, and overnight wind covers the rest, which is the entire point of the buildout. Battery storage grew nearly 50 percent in a single year. [3] As University of California economist Severin Borenstein put it, calling that capacity worthless when the sun is down is "like saying that a commercial aircraft is worthless when it isn't flying." [1] The complaint describes a problem the industry already solved and is scaling fast.
It is not theoretical, either. Whole states already run on this mix: Texas draws about a third of its power from renewables, California just over half, and Iowa close to two-thirds. [1] Their lights are on.
THE BOTTOM LINE
- "Essentially worthless" wind and solar: False [1]
- About 93 percent of new U.S. capacity in 2025 is solar, wind, and storage, and 99 percent in 2026 [2][3]
- Storage serves the grid after dark; Texas, California, and Iowa already run heavily on renewables [1]
A government can argue about how fast to build clean power. What it cannot do honestly is call the thing it is overwhelmingly choosing to build worthless, while its own data agency reports that the choice is nearly unanimous and the storage that answers the obvious objection is the fastest-growing piece of all.
