Donald Trump has railed against clean energy technology for years, and when targeting solar and wind power, the president has routinely repeated a familiar mistake: After sundown or when the wind isn’t blowing, those energy sources are practically useless.

Unfortunately, he’s not the only Republican who’s expressed confusion about this. The New Republic reported:

The secretary of the interior should presumably know how solar power generation works. On Wednesday, Doug Burgum showed that he does not.

Burgum was testifying before the House Natural Resources Committee, and exposed himself under questioning from Democratic Representative Jared Huffman, who brought up energy projects in Nevada.

The Cabinet secretary, toeing the GOP line, told Huffman that solar arrays “produce zero electricity” after sundown.

“Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery,” the California Democrat replied. “China’s figured it out. That’s why they’re cleaning our clock on clean energy.”

The exchange was clearly embarrassing for Burgum — or at least it should have been. Later in the same congressional hearing, the interior secretary proceeded to tell Rep. Seth Magaziner, “When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, [solar and wind] produce nothing.”

The Rhode Island Democrat quickly reminded the witness, “We have these things called ‘batteries.’”

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Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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• On renewable energy, Interior’s Burgum offers a case study in willful ignorance