TRCS on renewable energy and AGW (Hal Doiron, Don Bogard) USofA

The Right Climate Stuff is a team of retired and highly experienced engineers and scientists from the NASA Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle and International Space Station eras. They volunteer time and effort to conduct an objective, independent assessment of an Anthropogenic Global Warming actual threat.

EFN-USA interviews with two leading members of TRCS team:

1) Evaluating home solar photo-voltaic electrical system

By Dr. Harold Doiron

2)

Man-made global warming and renewable and nuclear energy

By Dr. Don Bogard

1

Evaluating home solar photo-voltaic electrical system Dr. Harold Doiron February 28, 2018 Dr. Hal Doiron is a retired VP, Engineering Analysis and Test Division, of InDyne, Inc. He holds a BS Physics degree and MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering. He joined NASA-Houston in 1963 and worked on the Apollo Lunar Program, the Skylab Program and the Space Shuttle. In retirement, he organized The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) Research Team of NASA Apollo Program veterans in an independent, objective review of man-made and natural global warming issues.

Last year, as part of his climate research, he agreed to sit down with his wife and go through a sales pitch for outfitting his home near Houston Texas with enough solar panels to cover his annual electrical power usage and then some, so he would have yearly net sales of power to the electrical grid (required by law to take his intermittent solar power whenever it is available to them) serving his home. The deal also included free work on his home to make it more energy efficient and use up to 20% (as he recalled) less electricity than he was using now, so the required investment in the solar installation would be smaller than without the home efficiency improvement. Since he grew up on a farm with energy use efficiency emphasized by his parents, and having the over-arching energy efficiency obsession of most engineers, this aspect of the sales pitch was very attractive to him even though the energy saved in his case would be minimal, less than $200/year for a major $15,000 investment. His projected total savings in electrical power costs (about zero net cost for the year) plus federal income tax incentives for the installation would just about allow him to pay off the $15,000 loan within one year to cover the solar system installation costs. He didn't do the deal because he didn't want the added pressure of filing his federal taxes on time to collect the large federal tax credit (in retirement you have to have enough taxable income to utilize the tax credit) and because his electrical power costs are really low at about $1050/yr.

He thinks his electrical power costs are very low considering the 3450 sq. ft. size of his home and an average monthly electric bill for 2017 at $87.46/mo., ($1050/year) so reducing electrical power costs isn't a big driver for him. His lowest bill in March was $45.45 and his maximum bill in August was $170.74. If these costs look attractive to you, he had a "24 Month Price Protection" plan from Spark Energy www.sparkenergy.com that he will need to renew in 9/2018. They offered rates as low as 7 cents/kWh when he last renewed (now offered at about 10% higher rates) but he thinks he chose their 9 cent/kWh rate based on his typical use of less than 1000 kWh/mo. with a lower monthly fixed fee.

2

They also offer about 25% higher rates if you want to have all of your energy supplied from renewable energy sources. (He doesn't know how they are able to guarantee all renewable sourcing this since the renewables are intermittent, unless they are using biodiesel somewhere to supplement the intermittent wind and solar renewables. Texas doesn't have much hydroelectric power generation and doesn’t import nor export electricity across its state borders.)

The solar system sales person's company installed Samsung solar panels that were made in South Korea and he commented he didn't know how much longer they would be available at the quoted price because they were selling at a loss to manufacturing costs.

President Trump has since started action to curtail solar panel "dumping" below manufacturing costs in the USA by foreign manufacturers, so he doesn't know if this "deal" is still available.

He wonders what would happen to the "converting to solar trend" if with time, experience, and actual climate trends, the Federal government and Texas Legislature decided to stop interfering in the marketplace, trying to pick winners and losers, and just let free market action and electrical power company long range engineering / economic planning decide how to achieve all of their objectives for providing low-cost, reliable electrical power to their customers. In countries where tax incentives for wind and solar systems have been curtailed, the markets have crashed.

The solar company guaranteed their solar system installation system for 20 years (if they stayed in business that long) and he wasn't sure how reliable Texas state laws would be in the future to force electrical power companies to accept power from his home solar system at the current BUY/SELL rate/kWh. And, of course, to get the "deal" offered by the solar company he would have to make the decision on the day of the sales pitch without further research on these important questions. As he said previously, he decided not to take this "too good to be true" deal.

He believes we need long range planning for our nation's electrical power needs of the future without federal and state politician influence and the flood of "crony capitalism" involved with our political candidate funding system. He believes energy companies are much better prepared than politicians, lobbyists, and government agencies, to figure out from solid engineering and economic study how best to make stockholder asset investment decisions without the myriad of politician-imposed rules, that, in general, produce sub-optimal results.

In comprehensive engineering/economics studies, complete life cycle costs of various decision options must be considered. Government mandates interfere with this normal engineering process. In particular, waste disposal aspects of energy generation would be part of any rational decision process for choosing an electrical power source not constrained by sub-optimal, politically-imposed laws and regulations.

How will solar panels be disposed of after the 20-year life the solar power company was willing to guarantee? A recent article pointed out windmill blade erosion from offshore (saltwater) installations in Europe was so severe after 4 years of service they would have 3

to be removed, transported back to shore, and reworked before they could be used again. He supports pilot projects to learn these lessons, but imposing mandates in the free market and influencing $100 billions of investment decisions without understanding all of these true life-cycle costs is just stupid from an engineering standpoint. What are the actual life cycle costs of a windmill installation? On land? Off shore? Have politicians considered these aspects of their mandates with all of their interference into free market evolution of our nation's electrical power future?

This doesn’t happen often in Texas, but hurricanes and tornadoes will cause more damage to solar panels and wind turbines than to fossil fuel and nuclear plants

4

Man-made global warming and renewable and nuclear energy Dr. Don Bogard Dr Bogard has a master’s degree in radiochemistry and a PhD in nuclear geochemistry.

His career was spent working in neutron activation (slow and fast neutrons and energetic protons), measuring nuclear products of high-energy nuclear reactions resulting from cosmic ray proton interactions and energetic solar flare interactions, agedating using natural radio-activities, isotopic exchange, and diffusion.

1) Earth has been warming. But it is difficult to know the precise amount, and "manipulations" with raw data and heat exchange among major thermal reservoirs complicate the question.

2) He thinks only part of this warming is due to CO2, and that natural factors (solar variations, deep ocean heat exchange, cloud cover, etc.) also contribute, but are poorly understood. More attention should be paid to these factors.

3) The CO2 sensitivity factor for warming is poorly known. The amount of humangenerated CO2 in the future (one major assumption in future model temperature predictions) is virtually impossible to estimate and depends on many variables.

With these two important uncertainties, it is not surprising that climate models predict future warming so poorly.

4) He supports diversification of Earth's power supply away from almost total reliance on fossil fuels. He has several reasons for this thinking. However, a blind, head-long rush into renewables advocated by some, without thinking and in ignorance of all the pitfalls and uncertainties involved, may produce a serious economic problem and yield more harm than good. We need to make any power transition slowly and carefully. And he supports nuclear as part of this transition (as apparently do some rapidly growing world economies, like India and China).

5