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On 13 April 2017, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona took part in a town hall meeting with some of his constituents that, like several other such events held by U.S. Congress members in the early part of the year, proved to be something of a contentious one for the Republican U.S. senator: During that town hall meeting, Senator Flake engaged in a several-minute exchange with a constituent who urged the lawmaker to support efforts to promote alternative energy sources over fossil fuels and address climate change issues. One small portion of that exchange was later incorporated into an image macro that was widely spread online to make it appear as if the senator were ignorant about the basics of solar power: As video of the town hall event captures, Senator Flake engaged a constituent (who introduced himself as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve and a recent graduate of Arizona State University with a degree in Sustainability) in a fairly extensive conversation about alternative energy sources, with the constituent advocating the promotion of solar power technologies in Arizona, given that the state is blessed with an abundance of sunshine. In response, the senator didn't disdain the idea by expressing the absurd concept that solar energy wouldn't be available at night. Rather, Flake's contention was that battery technology was not yet sufficiently developed to be able to store enough solar-derived energy to provide base load power to cities during non-daylight hours, and thus the use of solar energy exclusively was not yet feasible — that if we wished to completely eliminate our use of fossil fuels, for the time being solar power would have to be supplemented by other non-carbon energy sources, such as nuclear power. This discussion of alternative energy sources begins at the 13:00 mark in the following video, with Senator Flake's now-infamous comment occurring a 18:20 — after more than five minutes of back-and-forth that established the context in which he made it: Clearly, Senator Flake was aware that solar-derived energy can be stored in batteries for later use, as the point he was disputing with his constituent was the state of the art in battery technology — Flake maintained batteries couldn't currently provide base load power levels to cities, while the constituent countered by referencing a solar energy station built by Tesla on the Hawaiian island of Kauai: Whether Senator Flake was right or wrong about the particulars of the current state of solar energy and battery technologies, he did demonstrate a working awareness of the manner in which energy from the sun is collected and stored, and he did not express a belief that dependence on solar energy would necessarily mean residents would have to go without power at night. The video of the town hall event shows that Senator Flake and a constituent disagreed about the current scalability of power gathered from the sun but were not in disagreement about the existence of solar technologies or the availability of sun-harvested energy at night. Nonetheless, the senator's remarks were misleadingly truncated and altered (replacing power with lights) and shared online in a form that falsely suggested he did not understand how solar power works.
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