An RE developer and lobbyist reacted to my paper, "Corrupted science to justify renewables cronyism". He wrote again to oped editor and his paper was published by BWorld. My reply to this in my next post.
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November 25, 2018 | 11:01 pm
By Eddie O’Connor
MR. Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. writes in his Oct. 10
column, “Corrupted science to justify renewables cronyism,” “if wind-solar are
indeed that cheap, then will the lobby agree to (a) abolish the priority and
mandatory dispatch of wind-solar to the grid, and (b) abolish the
feed-in-tariff (FIT) scheme of guaranteed high price for wind-solar, other
variable REs for 20 years?”
Of course, the developers of wind and solar agree to
abolish mandatory dispatch. So long as the system dispatchers continue with the
practice of dispatching the next batch of electricity at the lowest marginal
price, wind and solar will always be dispatched first. The marginal price of
wind and solar is zero. Every system dispatcher in the world dispatches the
lowest marginal cost first. Remember that once plants are built every marginal
unit of coal costs circa $3.5+ cents depending on efficiency. A unit of
electricity from a wind and solar plant, once built, costs 0.
Regarding abolishing the feed-in-tariff. It is not hard
to agree to this, as it is already abolished. Thank God. Now perhaps we will
get a chance to compete head to head with dirty coal. We can then do what has
been done in South Africa, Chile, Mexico, and everywhere auctions are run and
hammer coal into oblivion.
Mr. Oplas seems to be unaware that in an experiment
conducted in the Royal Institution in London in 1861, the great Irish
scientist, John Tyndell, passed radiation through a series of gases and
observed that CO2 CH4 and H2O, absorbed radiation while oxygen and nitrogen did
not. This experiment is easy to replicate, and any university to which Mr.
Oplas has access, can replicate it.
I apologize to non-technical readers for the following
but it is the real science which has driven the world to sign the Paris accord.
All radiation is quantized. These quanta, or packages of
solar radiation, only interact with certain molecules, whose electrons can be
jumped to a more energetic orbital. They then fall back releasing an increment
of heat.
The chart here shows the heat buildup due to the
absorption of radiation by greenhouse gases (see chart).
The slope of the global heat accumulation graph tells us
how rapidly the Earth’s climate is building up heat. Over the past decade, the
rate is 8 x 1021 Joules per year, or 2.5 x 1014 Joules per second. The yield of
the Hiroshima atomic bomb was 6.3 x 1013 Joules, hence the rate of global heat
accumulation is equivalent to about 4 Hiroshima bomb detonations per second.
The data comes from peer-reviewed research (Church et al.
2011) and has also been confirmed by more recent research (i.e. Balmaseda et
al. 2013).
The slope of the global heat accumulation graph tells us
how rapidly the Earth’s climate is building up heat. Over the past decade, the
rate is 8 x 1021 Joules per year, or 2.5 x 1014 Joules per second. The yield of
the Hiroshima atomic bomb was 6.3 x 1013 Joules, hence the rate of global heat
accumulation is equivalent to about 4 Hiroshima bomb detonations per second.
That’s nearly 2.7 billion atomic bomb detonations worth of heat accumulating in
the Earth’s climate system since 1998, when we’re told global warming
supposedly “paused.” That has to be the worst pause ever.
Again let me reiterate. I am alarmed, indeed, devastated
by the disappearance of some 60% of species by 2020 due to global warming. I am
similarly saddened to observe that even if we can limit the temperature
increase to 1.5 degrees we lose 90% of all the corals in the oceans.
There were those who persisted in believing that the
earth was flat for hundreds of years after it was demonstrated by Ferdinand
Magellan to be round. I am afraid that Mr. Oplas is a latter day flat earther
for denying climate science. Delighted to debate on my next visit in May 2019.
Eddie O’Connor is chairman of global renewable energy
company Mainstream Renewable Power.
---------------See also:
Energy 115, Response by wind-solar lobby, October 13, 2018
Energy 116, Cheaper oil but rising oil tax, November 04, 2018
Energy 117, Cheap oil and Trump, November 23, 2018
