solar

Steven Lyazi, Ugandan leader for better economy, government, medicine and energy for Uganda and Africa, Member of Board of Advisors for Environmentalists for Nuclear - USA, website: efn-usa.org: Africa has some big dreams. One is a Trans East Africa railway that will link Uganda, South Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and Horn of Africa countries. This will be a first of its kind electric railway, some 750 kilometers (466 miles) long, and it will need tremendous amounts of energy that cannot come from wind turbines and solar panels. It will have to come from nuclear power plants – or coal or natural gas generating plants. Africa has these resources in great abundance. But so far we are barely developing or using them, except maybe to export oil to wealthy nations.

Steven Lyazi is a member of the EFN-USA Board of Advisors in Kampala, Uganda. He describes the problems facing people and the environment in Uganda and across much of Africa. Many serious problems are rooted in African society and government. Other problems are imposed on Africa by environmental activists, western powers and UN agencies dictate what issues are important – and use them to keep us poor and deprived: manmade climate change, no GMO foods, no DDT to prevent malaria, using wind and solar power and never building coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants. This is a criminal trick that denies basic rights to affordable energy, jobs and modern living standards.

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Capell Aris, Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology: This paper assesses the cost effectiveness of installing a battery for storage of electricity generated by solar PV rooftop panels. Solar PV can reduce grid import by as much as 40% without need of battery storage. Consumers can shift electric demand to the solar peak production. The low level of winter solar generation in the UK means that battery storage will not be worthwhile.

It is clear from the remarks of Prince Charles’s central banker Mark Carney, Sir Michael Bloomberg, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the Glasgow “Suicide Summit” called COP26, that they have a) great financial momentum in organizing the worldwide 1% to cut off new fossil fuel investment, and b) a great problem—the “green finance” investments are failures.

Germany’s utopian dream of transforming itself into the world’s green powerhouse is collapsing as its political and media establishment is mugged by reality. The country’s climate obsession has turned into one of the country’s biggest political and economic handicaps, making Germany almost ungovernable.

Before climate science became politicised, warm periods were referred to by scientists as “climate optima” because, for almost all species on Earth, warmer is better than colder. The most dramatic advances in civilization took place during the last four warm periods—including our own. The advancement of science, technology and the arts have been directly linked to warmer weather.

Euan Mearns, Geologist, Ferruccio Ferroni, Energy Consultant, Robert Hopkirk, Engineering Research & Development, Switzerland: Euan Mearns (UK) presents the paper by Ferrucio Ferroni and Robert Hopkirk (Switzerland) about energy return on energy invested for solar photovoltaic energy used in Switzerland, Germany and the United Kingdom. Euan Mearns engages blogers on his website who are confident that they are more qualified than F. Ferroni and R. Hopkirk in Switzerland in knowing about solar PV energy. There are three kinds of learning science: a) the science sources themselves, b) the science sources with students in a classroom, and c) the science sources and "bloggers" on the Internet. We encourage everyone to learn and decide for yourselves. Switzerland has many fine scientists and engineers, no matter what these bloggers say. Starting with Paracelsus in the early 1500s, to Albert Einstein in the early 1900s and today's engineers and scientists in nuclear energy and nuclear science.

Michael Kelly, retired Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge, UK: The world is better off today as opposed to thirty or one hundred years ago because of, among other things, a sufficient supply of energy. The incidence of hunger, poverty, illiteracy and child mortality haveallbeenreducedbymorethanafactoroftwoovertheperiod1990–2015(Figure1a). Death rates associated with gas and nuclear energy production are less than a sixth those of oil and coal (Figure 1b). Deaths from natural disasters have dropped by 90% over the 20th century.. Warnings by radio and telephone are the main reason. More people live in safer and better conditions and are better fed than at any previous time in human history. At this time there are people in several countries who are straining to turn off the last coal-fired power stations in the cause of climate change mitigation.

Euan Mearns, geologist: It is important to recall that well over $1,700,000,000,000 ($1.7 trillion) has been spent on installing wind and solar devices in recent years with the sole objective of reducing global CO2 emissions. It transpires that since 1995 low carbon energy sources (nuclear, hydro and other renewables) share of global energy consumption has not changed at all. New renewables have not even replaced lost nuclear generating capacity since 1999. ZERO CO2 has been abated and the world has done zilch to prepare itself for the expected declines (escalating costs) of fossil fuels in the decades ahead. If this is not total policy failure, what is?

Jack Ponton, Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering: Most renewable energy enthusiasts now seem to understand that powering a modern society will require something else in addition to intermittent electricity generation. The currently fashionable ’something else’ is storage. This paper will discuss storage technologies, Britain’s current facilities and what might be needed to provide reliable power from wind, solar and tidal generation. There seems to be no possibility that any existing storage technology can handle the intermittency of wind generation. Solar plus battery storage is probably already cost-competitive for locations in or near the tropics, where year-round load factors are acceptable and so only overnight storage is required. In the UK, low winter load factors mean that essentially no useful generation takes place in December and January.

James Lovelock, Environmentalists, Chemist, Earth Scientist and John Shanahan, Civil Engineer and President of EFN-USA: This article presents ideas and quotes from one of the world's most respected environmentalists, James Lovelock, a funny, short video about HydroCarbon Man, and thoughts for the future by John Shanahan, Civil Engineer and President of Environmentalists for Nuclear - USA. We will have a much better future by staying with realists with moderate, middle of the road, sound leadership with broad consensus rather than radical extremists on the left or right.

Rolls-Royce said that it expects to receive regulatory approval from the British government by 2024 for its 470-megawatt small modular reactor and that it will begin producing power on Britains’ electric grid by 2029.

Will that happen? Time will tell. Many nuclear projects and startups have blown past their projected in-service dates. But Rolls-Royce’s announcement is important for two reasons. First, it adds more credence to the notion that a global nuclear renaissance is, in fact, underway. Second, Rolls-Royce’s new 470-megawatt reactor design shows that due to its unsurpassed power density, nuclear energy is the only way we can produce electricity at scale while preserving the natural environment.

David MacKay, Professor of Physics, University of Cambridge: How can we power a modern lifestyle without fossil fuels? Individual actions saving 10% here and 40% there will not get us off fossil fuels. To eliminate fossil fuel use, we will surely also need to increase the amount of energy we get from non-fossil-fuel sources. Even if we imagine strong efficiency measures and smart technology switches, halving our energy consumption from 125 kWh per day per person to 60 kWh per day, we should not kid ourselves about the scale of the energy challenge which would remain. If Britain and the United States were to "get off" fossil fuels, what would the effect be on Earth's climate? Most of the rest of the world can not afford to "get off" fossil fuels or do not have the right governments, economies, education systems, industrial capacity to do so.

Rauli Partanen, independent author on energy and its role in the environment and modern society. Nuclear power in Sweden has become uneconomical. Wholesale prices of electricity in Sweden have been much lower than the break even price for nuclear generation. Electricity has been sold at a record low price of €20 per megawatt hour (MWh), while the cost of generating nuclear power has been in the same ballpark, or even slightly higher. In addition, the Swedish government has set a tax on nuclear power, which has been steadily rising. After the latest hike, it amounts to about a third of the wholesale price, roughly €7 per MWh.

Michael Shellenberger, Environmental Progress: An all-star group of energy and climate scholars published a scientific article in a prestigious journal pointing out that a Stanford professor’s proposal for powering the United States entirely on renewable energy sources rests upon a gigantic lie. Over the last several years, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo and many politicians have pointed to Stanford scientist Mark Jacobson’s modeling as proof that we can quickly and cheaply transition to 100 percent renewables. What is the lie?100 percent renewable energy rested on a lie That we can increase the amount of power from U.S. hydroelectric dams ten-fold. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and all major studies, the real potential increase is just one percent of that.