Reliability is the buzzword in Republican energy policy today. While the White House and its allies tout ‘energy dominance,’ they engage in energy subtraction. MAGA supporters argue that America needs ‘secure’ or ‘reliable’ energy that operates “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright blames Biden’s “radical green agenda” for causing “power outages” and “threatening America’s energy security.” Representative Randy Weber, a Texas Republican and vice chairman of Energy and Commerce, warns of an “energy crisis” unless we quickly develop “dispatchable, dependable, reliable energy.” Additionally, Trump often makes unfounded claims about what he calls “the worst form of energy,” wind.
These claims conflict with decades of grid research. Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank, conducted a meta-analysis of 11 clean energy policy studies and found that renewables, paired with battery storage and expanded transmission, can provide a reliable grid with 80 percent clean electricity. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reached the same conclusion in a two-decade review of renewables’ impact on grid reliability. A grid with 80 percent or more of clean power can maintain reliability through greater flexibility, a diverse mix of renewables with storage and clean firm sources like nuclear and geothermal, full use of frequency-stabilizing technology, and expanded transmission. (Alas, the Department of Energy is laying off hundreds of NREL staff.)
Attacks on renewables are an attempt to reframe the coming affordability crisis as a reliability crisis. The gutting of renewable subsidies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ensures that less energy gets connected to the grid at the exact moment that energy demand is rising due to the rapid buildout of AI datacenters. By kneecapping wind and solar production, an ideologically driven energy agenda guarantees higher energy prices. Americans are already starting to feel the pinch.
The Worst Forms of Energy?
Not only are wind and solar the fastest and cheapest energy sources to deploy, accounting for over 92 percent of all capacity additions to the grid in 2025, but they can also make the grid more reliable. In recent years, the Texas grid has added nearly 1,000 percent more solar and 700 percent more battery storage, lowering its blackout risk from 12 percent to just .03 percent.
In other words, renewables are naturally strengthening the grid just as the Trump administration is waging an all-out war against them. This month, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order that effectively bans wind and solar projects on federal lands, under the specious reasoning that “gargantuan, unreliable, intermittent energy projects hold America back from achieving U.S. Energy Dominance.”
With electricity demand rising for the first time in decades, the administration and its allies deliberately spread a misleading narrative about grid reliability. They want to shift the blame for rising energy costs from their own disastrous policies to renewables.
But a modern, smart grid with diverse clean energy can provide everyone with reliable, affordable, and abundant power.
How Grid Reliability Actually Works
The real obstacle to clean energy isn’t technology—it’s politics. Increasing solar and wind penetration and improving grid reliability can, and often do, go hand in hand, but only if we let them. To understand why, look at how the grid works.
The grid is a vast, interconnected network that spans the continent. Power plants (coal, solar, nuclear, etc.) generate electricity. High-voltage transmission lines—the interstate highways of electrons—carry this energy over long distances. Local substations and transformers convert this electricity to safe voltages and distribute it to your home via local utility lines.
Unlike other industries, electricity cannot be stored. Supply must always match demand across the grid. Grid operators constantly balance electricity production to respond to fluctuations in daily demand and ensure safe operations. If grid voltage or frequency drops too low or spikes too quickly, the system can fail—sometimes suddenly and dramatically, as in the Northeast blackout of 2003, which left over 50 million people without power in Canada and the U.S.
No grid operator can predict when you plug in your phone, run your dishwasher, or turn up your speakers. But on a system-wide level, consumption patterns emerge—from spikes in the early morning when people wake up to seasonal trends like midsummer heatwaves when air conditioners are blasting.
Renewables fit neatly into this system. Solar and wind power show similar predictable patterns. Solar peaks during the afternoon and summer, while wind increases at night and blows more consistently in winter. The variability also decreases as renewables grow, helping to smooth out supply fluctuations.
U.S. grids already demonstrate this capacity. Last year, renewables supplied 100 percent of California’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours a day over nearly 100 days from late winter to early summer. Texas produces more energy from wind and solar than California, with over 40 percent of net utility-scale electricity coming from renewables in the past year. Combined with battery storage, both Texas and California have been able to store excess solar power generated during the day and discharge it when the sun sets and lights turn on. Texas broke a record last month by discharging over 7,000 megawatts of electricity from large-scale batteries, enough to power 1.4 million homes.
The technology to run a reliable, high-renewables grid is already in some of the country’s largest and most complex energy markets. The only barrier is political.
Renewables Are Reliable
True grid reliability—the ability to supply the right amount of power when needed—depends on flexibility, coordination, and planning. Conservatives often equate reliability only with nonintermittent energy sources because it’s an easy talking point (What if the sun doesn’t shine?) that favors always-on ‘baseload’ power fueled by coal.
But baseload’s role shrinks as renewables scale. Since renewables don’t require fuel, their marginal cost for each additional kilowatt-hour is zero. Even the cheapest baseload power cannot compete with a solar farm on a sunny California afternoon. In fact, the Golden State produces more energy than it can use. Battery storage, increasingly cheap and widespread, absorbs that surplus and delivers it at peak demand.
Where energy experts express concern about renewables and reliability, it’s less about intermittency and more about what they don’t supply: inertia and reactive power. These two features are vital for grid stability and are naturally provided by spinning coal or gas turbines. Their kinetic energy smooths out sudden frequency shifts, giving grid operators a buffer to respond. They also generate reactive power—the passive current that sustains the grid’s electric and magnetic fields, keeping voltage stable.
By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines generate direct current that must be inverted into alternating current. That difference changes how they interact with the grid and creates new advantages. Modern electronic inverters can deliver fast frequency response far quicker than traditional turbines. And newer ‘smart’ inverters can now manage reactive power actively—some even let solar panels supply it at night.
Meanwhile, retiring coal and gas plants don’t need to be scrapped; their turbines can be repurposed into synchronous condensers that provide inertia and reactive power without burning fuel, making them perfect complements to renewable-heavy grids.
And when solar and wind fall short for longer stretches, a toolbox of solutions exists. From simple yet efficient pumped storage hydropower—pumping water uphill during low demand and releasing it through turbines when needed—to advanced 100-hour ‘iron-air’ batteries, long-duration energy storage technologies can cover days-long gaps in wind and solar output. Additionally, newer ‘clean firm’ technologies like molten-salt nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal can provide reliable, clean baseload and dispatchable power to keep the grid stable.
Put together, these technologies prove the point: The U.S. can build a grid with 100 percent clean energy. But the administration would rather cling to 19th-century energy sources.
The MAGA Rearguard Action on Electricity Prices
MAGA accusations—like many of their bugbears—are confessions. It is Trump and the GOP’s irrational energy agenda that is actively undermining the stability of the U.S. grid.
A key to grid reliability is resource adequacy, which involves long-term planning to ensure supply meets growth. Yet, according to the Energy Department’s own (flawed) assessment, the U.S. will face a significant shortfall in electricity generation by 2030. The Department arrives at this conclusion—contradicting the assessments of grid operators and utilities—by largely ignoring the contributions of solar and wind projects. The Trump administration’s policies could bring about the DOE’s apocalyptic energy scenario.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repeals tax credits for wind and solar, guaranteeing higher costs. Trump’s tariffs raise prices from solar panels to gas pipelines. His administrative agencies impose permitting roadblocks to end wind and solar expansion. A recent Interior Department order could effectively stop every American wind project by withholding Federal Aviation Administration permits for turbine height clearances. The move would strand $317 billion of investment and prevent 213 Gigawatts of wind energy from coming online.
Critics who blame renewables for rising electricity prices ignore the real culprits—natural gas price volatility, uneconomic coal plants, and increasingly severe extreme weather. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, for example, claimed a 40 percent price increase in Texas over the past seven years was due to renewables. This charge confuses correlation with causation. Adjusted for inflation, Texas prices have remained stable, and while electricity costs have risen nationwide, Texas has seen smaller increases than most states. The economics of renewables are simply too good.
Despite the president’s best efforts, the world is transitioning into the Age of Electricity. A clean, affordable, and reliable grid isn’t just possible. We’re building it.
The post The Republicans’ Reliability Ruse appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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