solar

Bernie Sanders, Democrat candidate for President of the USA 2020: He is determined to stop use of fossil fuels and nuclear and replace them with windmills and solar panels.

John Reilly, Co-Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change: If solar panels and wind turbines keep getting cheaper, why bother building anything else? Because as we add more solar panels and wind farms, their productivity declines. And while the cost of individual solar panels is low, when there are enough of them, they impose real costs on the rest of the system. This article contains good information about wind, solar and nuclear energy. However, it is based on the premise that use of fossil fuels cause Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming, which will soon be settled that they do not. The literature is full of articles that have good ideas about energy and bad science about the carbon dioxide cycle. Unfortunate. Worth reading for description of wind and solar energy.

Ken Haapala, SEPP, The Science and Environmental Policy Project: Many political leaders and political factions have little or no understanding of the importance of reliable, predictable electricity to modern civilization and economic wellbeing. Without thoroughly demonstrated examples of success, a number of local and national governments have passed laws phasing out electricity generated by fossil fuels based on the belief that wind and solar can replace fossil fuels. This “green dream” may become a nightmare. The fear of catastrophic global warming that is driving this political effort is based on unrealistic computer models that cannot describe what is happening in the current atmosphere, much less able to predict what will occur 30 or 80 years from now. Errors may be buried in tens of thousands of lines of computer code.

U.S. Department of Energy: The evolution of wholesale electricity markets, including the extent to which Federal policy interventions and the changing nature of the electricity fuel mix are challenging the original policy assumptions that shaped the creation of those markets. Markets recognize and compensate reliability, and must evolve to continue to compensatereliability, but more work is needed to address resilience. The biggest contributor to coal and nuclear plant retirements has been the advantaged economics of natural gas-fired generation.

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.

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.