Interior Secretary Doug Burgum thinks that solar energy is a bad idea because sometimes it’s night.
During an appearance on Fox Business Thursday morning, Burgum showcased his dim understanding about wind and solar energy while railing against green energy subsidies.
“We’ve had times where, in the last couple of days, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars this country has spent on wind, we only had like 1 percent, or 2 percent of electricity being generated by wind,” Burgum said. “And of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced, and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive.”
It was Burgum’s easy dismissal of the earth’s primary energy source as “intermittent” or “unreliable” that rang particularly ridiculous, leading some online to question whether the failed presidential candidate had forgotten about the existence of batteries.
In North Dakota, where Burgum previously served as governor, renewable energy, including wind and solar, account for more than 40 percent of the state’s electricity, according to recent data from the Energy Information Administration.
While Burgum backs Trump’s efforts to strip renewable energy projects as part of the path toward energy dominance, China has doubled down on its solar power investments.
Earlier this month, Trump issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects, directing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.” That order flew in the face of the president’s own behemoth budget bill, which included an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act until 2027. It’s tough luck trusting the president.
This week, the Interior Department announced that it would end “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” in accordance with Trump’s directives. The department would also conduct a “careful review of avian mortality rates,” following the president’s many rants that windmills kill birds, which they do, but no more than fossil fuel operations—or house cats. Earlier this week, the president also claimed that offshore windmills were driving whales “loco.”
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