To meet U.S. energy needs with wind and solar power would require staggering quantities of materials, causing extensive environmental damage, while covering huge swaths of the country with wind turbines and solar photovoltaics. It would require building thousands upon thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines — environmentalists hate those, by the way — to deliver all of that power to cities and towns. And it would necessitate gigantic quantities of battery storage, costing many trillions of dollars, to deal with two pesky realities: The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun has an annoying tendency to disappear at night.