President Joe Biden's secretary of energy schooled a Fox News host on Sunday after he tried to teach her a lesson about how renewable energy works.
During a Sunday interview on Fox News, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told host Trace Gallagher that the administration was promoting renewable energy technologies like wind and solar.
"But they're unreliable!" Gallagher interrupted. "Secretary, they're unreliable!"
"They're not unreliable," Granholm insisted.
"They are unreliable on the grids because it takes a lot of energy -- electricity -- to get them into the grid or fossil fuels to get them onto the grid and if you don't have, at night time, we don't have the battery power to store it," Gallagher opined. "You have to use it or you lose it. And so it's unreliable in states like Texas they found out. And that's a problem because we need to come up with battery power to store that stuff."
Granholm responded by pointing out that Texas was one of the largest producers of both wind and solar energy in the country. The clip was posted on social media by Aaron Rupar.
"With respect to the intermittency, you say they are unreliable," she continued. "They are intermittent because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. But the battery technology that stores that. That is also incentivized in this Inflation Reduction Act. The technology is there. We just need to make sure that it's implemented."
"So the great thing is when you combine wind or solar with battery technology, that becomes like baseload power that is reliable, which is very exciting," the secretary added.
