Fossil fuel supply chain makes your country very vulnerable!
https://github.com/Lkruitwagen/global-fossil-fuel-supply-cha...: The resulting complex network has 6.09mn nodes and 15.70mn edges and is implemented in a graph database. With estimates of annual coal, gas, and oil demand in 13,229 global population centres and 8,165 global power stations, we use a minimum-cost flow method to estimate global asset-level energy flows.
If you want to protect your country, here are your options:
1) Invest in nuclear power and nukes (source of Uranium may be a concern). See North Korea vs Iran.
2) Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV. This will be the most resilient, distributed grid that can never be disrupted. Node level failures (hail on roof breaks solar) can be easily overcome. EVs are batteries on wheels! They can go charge and come back. Some on this forum may be familiar with Cattle vs Pet, Redundancy, Resiliency, Virtualization (--> Virtual Power Plants), etc -- same concepts, but applied to power generation which is designed as a monolithic circuit switched network. The idea of energy as packets, which can be Store-and-Forward (using batteries) will change everything we know about energy.
No one will attack North Korea because they are backed by China. I'm not sure how nuclear weapons helps them unless they split from China. Maybe they make money selling the tech to others.
A defense pact doesn’t always hold, though. Poland had a mutual defense pact with France and the UK in September 1939. And even if China were to aide the DPRK in a crisis, the DPRK would be the junior partner in that arrangement. In this scenario, if China is providing the lions share of manpower and weapons, they get to decide strategy, and dictate terms for war termination.
The DPRKs primary goal is preservation of the Kim regime above all else. That’s why the DPRK over the last 70+ years has focused on Juche, a principle of self-reliance. The vast majority of their weapon systems are of indigenous designs and manufacture. And why they have developed and deployed an independent nuclear deterrent.
China’s support constrains them of course. And even if they don’t want to split, having the option to do so strengthens their negotiating position as well.
Solar-based distributed grid doesn't look like a great option, especially in the context of war in Europe.
> Node level failures (hail on roof breaks solar) can be easily overcome.
If you are talking about "just change the panel if it breaks" scenario, it's unreliable. A big Ukrainian city near the border with Russia ran out of glass to change shattered windows at some point with logistics working well, and glass is easier to source than solar panels.
> Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV. This will be the most resilient, distributed grid
Resilience is questionable because solar panels can't be either quickly moved or armored (direct sunlight required). Damaging a lot of panels at once won't require a lot of explosives either, just a lot of projectiles (and maybe some bonus paint/chemicals to render panels useless), so the drones to do that will be cheap. If the cells inside a panel are wired sequentially (which is often the case), only a little bit should be damaged to break the whole panel.
Solar panels alone won't generate enough to power EVs and residential buildings. Modern buildings have multiple floors, but can only install their footprint (and maybe one side of building) worth of panels.
Seasonal sunlight changes make them less useful outside of summer. I know that batteries exist, but there's only so much power that can be generated over 8-10 hours from October to February — months when the power demand gets higher and EV efficiency gets lower.
> The idea of energy as packets, which can be Store-and-Forward (using batteries) will change everything we know about energy.
Sounds cool, but would it really change everything? Storing solar power (or from other sources) for later is indeed good, but it isn't that groundbreaking of a concept. It also requires additional costs to set up and maintain (and with big distributed network it will be either maintained at a big cost or neglected). Charging the batteries, storing and forwarding energy introduces energy losses at every step as well.
It does work if you take the "distributed" part seriously. If you've got a giant field of panels then it's just another target for the orcs to take out, but if every single house is feeding in a few kw, which some countries are already doing as a result of which power prices there go negative during the day, the orcs can't take out every single house and shed in the country. "Solar on every structure" means literally that, not just in one or two locations.
And it takes quite a bit to knock out a solar panel, they're designed to resist hail and storm damage (and careless shipping/installers) and will continue to function with reduced efficiency in the presence of quite a bit of damage, you'd need to systematically demolish every single panel in an entire city to take it offline.
All terrain vehicles are sufficiently slow and visible that they're arguably more vulnerable in most cases.
In Ukraine electric buggies have been used for frontline mobility because they're quiet, the wheeled military vehicles are in demand because combined with even a dirt road they're a lot faster getting around - i.e. one feature of the HIMARS is that it's not tracked.
We're only a few years away from your electric car self driving itself to a helipad and flying you straight across a city in a pre-planned route on a quad-copter that just docks on your car.
Don't worry, the moment you get it, it won't be anything special and people will act like it's always been around. Or at least that's what I've come to expect after watching new technology show up in my lifetime.
The article doesn't provide much details about installed solar, wind capacity, installed battery capacity, electricity produced each month, and so on. But this is data that Ukraine would not like to get public.
The biggest issue is only hinted in the article:
> ‘There’s just enough sun [in January/this winter thus far] to make it work,’ says Olena Kondratiuk
Solar+batteries work well in summer months, but for winter months, solar has much lower output. This is why Russia is attacking thermal plants especially in winter.
The Civaux 2 reactor was connected to the grid in 1999, marking the end of the main 20th-century deployment wave. Flamanville 3 (EPR) reactor in Normandy was connected to the grid on December 21, 2024, marking the first new nuclear reactor added to France's network in 25 years.
France really decimated it's nuclear industry, it takes lot of money and time to restore back capabilities (heavy forging, nuclear grade quality construction) and train people.
Let's not forget that in 2015, French president Hollande promised to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025.
It was really only 2022 Russian invasion, that showed that slowly replacing nuclear power with imported gas was a bad strategy. (This error is still not acknowledged in Germany)
I have a hard time taking you seriously when you claim that Germany replaced nuclear with fossil gas. It has been roughly flat for the past 20 years while coal generation collapsed, renewables exploded and nuclear disappeared.
And this still assumes that rebuilding a nuclear industry somehow is an end in itself. It isn't.
The objective is to decarbonize society. Not construt nuclear reactors. We don't have any special obligation to build new nuclear, anymore more than there was an obligation to keep building oil-fired power plants once they stopped making economic sense.
Coal generation was taxed out by EU Emissions Trading System, physical costs of mining lignite in Germany and operating coal power plants are the same as 20 years ago. (and the health impacts are still very negative)
Nuclear in Germany disappeared not for economic reasons, but for political reasons.
"
Following a wide public debate, the Atomic Energy Act was amended accordingly on April 22, 2002.
The aim was to phase out nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity in an orderly manner. To this end, each nuclear power plant was assigned a residual electricity volume such that the total output of the respective plant corresponded to an average 32-year lifetime. The construction of new nuclear power plants was banned altogether.
"
The objective in Germany changes over time, in the 2000s it was removing nuclear power from electric grid, without much consideration for CO2 emissions. (
Construction of the last new coal power plant in Germany, Datteln 4, began in November 2007. Entered commercial operation on May 30, 2020)
Now in 2026, it's slowly removing fossil fuels from electric grid and the whole industry. I say slowly, because state subsidies are already allocated for construction of new gas power plants in Germany.
"
Germany will initially hold two sets of auctions for new backup power plants with a combined capacity of 11 gigawatts (GW). Of these, the first tenders (8 September and at the end of December 2026), covering 9 GW, are aimed at so-called "long-term capacity", which is capable of supplying electricity continuously over an extended period, ensuring that even prolonged periods without sufficient renewable energy generation can be covered. It is likely that only gas-fired power plants will be successful in these auctions. Successful bidders receive remuneration for having electricity available once a facility is built, providing the financial incentive needed to invest in the first place.
"
The idea is that if you promise to drop nuclear weapons on any country which attacks your capital, Russian tanks will not attack your capital. Whether this is a wise strategy is unclear, but countries like Pakistan[1] and Israel[2] have employed such a policy, and none of their unfriendly neighbors have yet managed to send tanks into Islamabad or Tel Aviv.
That may work on weak western state, but not on crazy russians. If they were wise they wouldn't invade Ukraine but simply bought it like they did with Belarus. Would be cheaper than war!
Nukes are arguably ONLY useful in defense (and deterring another from attacking). Using nuclear weapons against an opponent that also has nuclear weapons will very likely lead to a nuclear exchange and the decimation of both countries. It’s suicide, and so no one is going to do it unless they have nothing left to lose. A nation under attack, facing an existential threat, and about to be overrun, is in exactly that circumstance.
And yeah, maybe the defending countries leader isn’t willing to end it all, and maybe try collaboration or partisan resistance. But if you were the attacking country, would you be willing to make that bet? Or would you hesitate?
In reality this escalates very fast into all out nuclear war. Which is why you don't see wars between two nuclear armed countries. There is no winner in a nuclear war.
> Invest in nuclear power and nukes
> See North Korea vs Iran.
Both countries invested in nukes (it is claimed). Only Iran didn't get there in time, before the US stepped in to stop them (it is claimed). So unless the US lets you, it's probably a bad idea to invest in nukes, no? Or is your point that the US's nuke story was a lie, and that Iran actually should have invested in nukes?
> Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV
Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work? My gut feeling is that even if you put solar panels on literally every structure, you'd be far off from managing to power every vehicle. See if I get around to calculating later, but I at least advise you to do so yourself before making this argument.
> EVs are batteries on wheels! They can go charge and come back
Yes, Iran’s problem was they didn’t develop nuclear weapons.
The lesson all countries will take from Ukraine, Iran, and North Korea is: develop nuclear weapons.
Ukraine and Iran both don’t have nuclear weapons and they were both attacked by countries that do. North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.
North Korea's nuclear capabilities isn't what kept them from being attacked. It was Seoul being in artillery range and the refugee crisis on the chinese border that would result.
IMO, North Korea having nuclear weapons and Seoul being in artillery range of NK are strategically very similar, therefore hard to separate. Both allow NK to cause great destruction and many deaths in a short time.
> North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.
North Korea was never in danger of being attacked anyway. They don’t need nuclear weapons to flatten Seoul. The only country capable of invading NK is China, and they benefit much more from NK remaining buffer zone.
The moral of the story is you should always invest in nukes, since if you don't the US will just lie and say you are developing nukes as a pretext anyway.
> > Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV
> Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work?
Yes. All cars and vans in the UK drive a total of 320 billion miles a year. My own electric car tells me this would require 80 billion kWh. 1kWp produces 1000 kWh a year, so you need 80 million kWp or 80 TWh a year.
My house will easily provide 8kWp, meaning you'd need 10 million houses. There's 30 million homes, and that's before you factor in non-domestic buildings.
A single shooting estate in the uk could produce 20TWh a year with solar alone. Throw in wind and that would petty much double.
Small amount, easilly covered by roof space of commercial buildings.
Cars and vans use 16.5 billion litres of diesel and 15.5 billion litres of petrol
HGVs and busses use 8 billion litres of diesel, about 20% of the total of cars and vans. Agriculture adds another 1.5b and trains half a billion, so call it 10 billion litres, 30% of total fuel use by cars and vans. Push it 50% up from 80TWh to 120TWh if you want and require 15 million roofs
Of course the most economic way to deliver solar isn't by putting it on the roof
Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.
So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.
I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!
Corn for bioethanol is not feeding the nation, it's exploiting the fertile land to literally burn the output.
The argument about corn is to actually stop the waste of the fertile land for fuel. Solar panels can be installed wherever they're necessary, no one is proposing replacing the corn in situ.
Eh. Just stop feeding your crops to cows and you need a lot less space to grow stuff. Also you can put the panels on marginal lands first and save a lot of actual good land for grains and vegetables.
> Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power.
The math the person you're replying to was talking about was solar power vs ethanol. While your 800 m^2 sounds like a lot of land area for enough solar panels to fully charge a large electric truck, it's basically nothing compared to how much land area you'd need to grown enough corn to produce enough ethanol to power a similar truck. It's about 500 times as much land area, a fairly obvious result when you consider you get solar power from the land basically every day and corn once a year. Growing plants for ethanol is dumb.
Of course the benefit of a combustion engine is that you don't need to grow corn to make ethanol for it, at least as long as you can get fossil fuels out of the ground and the enemy doesn't disrupt your supply chain for drilling and refining fuel oil. But that's irrelevant since that wasn't the land-use comparison the parent poster was making.
I have done the math, several times. The last time was to plan a hypothetical solar "highway gas station" capable of charging 100 teslas EVs per hour 24/7/365. Assuming flat ground at Vancouver's latitude, it came to a solar farm approaching square kilometers/miles in scale.
10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh
Solar panels nominaly produce 1000kwh/m so 24,000m2 of panels... if facing the sun perfectly during normal day/night cycles. But non-equator latitudes need far more land than that because the sun isnt directly overhead, plus winter/rainy days... it is a massive solar farm (and a massive battery) just to replace an average highway gas station.
Given that any future 2-lane highway might see a couple thousand thousand EVs each hour, each needing charging every couple hundred miles, the number and size of solar charging stations per mile is crazy.
I've done the math. The average car in Canada does 11,000 miles a year. A Tesla isn't great efficiency, it uses about 3.5 miles per kWh. Throw in inefficiency of charging and you're talking about 3MWh per car per year, and with about 25 million vehicles that means about 75TWh a year
Travers Solar in Alberta generates about 2.5TWh a year from under 14 sqkm.
Build 30 of them and that's 400 sqkm.
A 20sqkm by 20sqkm solar plant would power every car and light van in Canada forever (setting aside seasonality).
Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.
That's less than 1 quarter of 1 percent of the land in Alberta alone.
(Of course you wouldn't put it in one location, it would be spread out across the country)
Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)
You'd have a lot of excess power in the summer -- you'd be generating 650TWh of excess power a year
> Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.
Or, convert the solar energy to heat, then back to electricity at 40% round trip efficiency. Needs only 2.5x the solar (or less, because some solar goes directly to the users without long term storage). The heat is very storable at scale, even for seasonal storage.
Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office. Actual average car use is closer to 25,000km/year (15,000 miles is the us average). But cars are not all road users. The "100 teslas/hour" standard is to accomidate trucks too.
If you are planning infrastructure like highways, national averages are irrelevant. It is the same debate that Hertz had when it dropped teslas: charging infrastructure is local and rental car locations (airports) cannot support the needed power density.
Averages are meaningless. You need to understand trips.
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles.
Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
> Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office.
Most countries have electricity at home and at office. They can charge at both locations. If you are still using kerosene lamps and haven't started using electricity at home, you have bigger problems than charging infrastructure.
It would require electricity to provide for 587500 million km of driving each year, that's about 118,000 million kWh, or 118 TWh.
Your statement
> 10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels
Is tricky to understand what you are on abbout as it's not clear what on earth you mean by this as solar panels aren't measured in kWh. kWh per year perhaps.
You are talking about delivering power to a specific location, not generating power. This is an argument from a decade ago, reality has proven that isn't a problem.
For what its worth, I drive over 30,000 km a year and very rarely use a public charger.
Don't do the math for homeless people. Most people live in homes. Homes usually have electricity, unless you live in a 4th world country. All buildings have electricity. Just park and plug in.
You need to go to a gas station BECAUSE there is no supply of gasoline straight to home. Homes have electricity. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, South Sudan, Yemen, remotest village in India. I don't know where you live, but if your home doesn't have electricity, your country has bigger problems to deal with than buying Teslas and DC Fast Chargers.
Highways. Highways need to support people traveling beyond the range of thier vehicles, be that a car or bus/truck. People could also eat and use the bathroom at home, but highways must still make space for restaurants and restrooms.
I ran into that problem during covid. I had to do a few work-related 1000-mile drives and they had closed most all the restrooms!
And my home is also home to a few hundred other people. Installing enough chargers for all our cars would require a massive grid upgrade that our city would never support. Not everyone lives in a suburb.
Highways often have powerlines nearby at least every now and then. With those you can take power from roofs many kilometres away!
And what you say about apartments is wrong, it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve heard of plenty of apartment blocks installing chargers, they have load management systems to manage the load and believe it or not, not every single apartment occupant will need to charge their car every day at exactly the same time as everyone else!
My building looked into it (a complex of several buildings sharing one giant underground carpark). Installing 300 chargers (one at each spot) would cost millions and take years to radar and cut the channels in the concrete. Even if done, the city connection to the facility would need a million-dollar upgrade too going all the way to the local substation. And then the local fire department had an opinion: they were not happy at the concept of 300 EVs in one underground structure. There are no rules limiting such things today (also on car ferries) but we are one bad fire away from some firecode regulation about EVs underground.
Except not every home has a driveway. With on street parking the norm in many places. Trailing a lead to your car on the other side of the road is frowned upon
Streets have streetlights. Streetlights are on poles. Poles have electricity that lights need. Utility can add chargers. Magically, the problem is solved.
I drive 90-130 miles a day and charge every night using the same power my oven pulls. It costs me 3 cents a mile, or equivalent of about $1 a gallon. It takes about 4 or 5 hours.
> Plus you couldn't do it anywhere where thieves steal copper. Car charging cables would quickly become a theft target.
Are you from the past? This simply doesn't happen. The reality is millions of people drive electric cars, and while there are some issues - mainly around the minority who don't have their own driveway, and the tiny numbers who drive over 70,000km year, it simply works.
Home solar arrays are 10-100kw (order of magnitude).
EVs go 2-5 miles per kWh.
So, the charge rate is 20-500 miles per hour when the sun is out.
Assume one extra EV per house, round robin. New EVs are $10-60K, depending on county. The solar is, say, $30K.
So, $60-210K per house for ten years of energy independence for a two car ICE house. ICE cars wear out faster than EVs. You can figure gas, grid and inflated maintenance on the ICE route yourself, but the math works.
Sure, but you don't have inexhaustible source of crude oil and a refinery in your backyard!
But Sun reliably shows up most days. It doesn't ghost. Sunlight can't be sanctioned, tariffed, taxed, embargoed, pirated, nuked, rebuked, rebuffed, offended. Sunlight is also compatible with most religious beliefs (god is light, etc).
Gonna need a citation on that, where I live in the Midwest there are legitimately times where I haven't seen the sun for 2 straight weeks. Not to mention some latitudes I've lived at where the sun doesn't get up till like 9 and is already almost gone by 4.
Like AZ, CA, Texas sure go nuts solarizing. But there are plenty of people for whom that's not really an option.
Solar panels work even if its cloudy: Power generation typically drops to 10% to 25% of normal capacity under heavy, grey overcast skies, but can reach 40% to 60% (or higher) under thin or partly cloudy skies.
Funny thing is, fuel can be transported, so that's not needed!
If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.
I'm sure we'll see a transition to electric some day, it is more efficient purely from a physics standpoint. But I'd be shocked to see the military transition before civilian industry.
Most countries do not have enough to independently supply their own energy needs from fossil fuels, and they need to import more or less continuously, while renewable energy infrastructure needs building out and then lasts a very long time. This massively affects the strategic effects of losing your supply: one becomes an acute problem very quickly while the other is still a problem but it takes a lot longer to become a real problem.
I don't think the main focus is on converting military operations themselves to work without fossil fuels, but more that if you can convert your civilian industry then you have a much better overall strategic position because your total demand for fossil fuels is much lower. (Strategy is a lot more than just your military)
You only need solar panels once. They do not need fueling, refueling, lubricants, anything at all.
Solar panels have 25 year warranty. Can you think of anything that you have bought or can buy with a 25 year warranty?
At the end of 25 years, they will produce 92%. Perfectly acceptable for a few more decades. The latest panels produce 740 - 800W+/panel, this is sufficient for a lifetime without ever having to think of upgrades.
> And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.
You still need raw materials to build oil tanks and pipelines and fuel trucks. They don't grow on trees.
> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
The problem is net usage. The UK has oil fields and it owns refineries, but it uses a lot more fuel than could be extracted and processed with these operations even if somehow Capitalism was dead and the State seized control of everything for domestic use rather than corporate profit.
The energy balance data I've looked at doesn't go back more than this century so maybe in the 1980s or something it would have been theoretically possible, but it isn't today and hasn't been for decades.
> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
That won't help you if you can't refine it. Russia has more oil than most and has/had lots of refineries. Ukraine has taken out so many of them that Trump is complaining it's affecting the price of diesel (even though the US also has lots of oil and lots of refineries).
Oil infrastructure is temporary, expensive and fragile whereas panels work for 30 years.
I've been thinking about this (more [1]) and I do believe smaller grids will be the future for many reasons. I guess this is another reason. But the transition from large grids to small grids has no obvious, easy path because a large grid without total market saturation falls apart as maintenance is averaged over fewer and fewer users.
One side benefit though is that it would stop utilities being able to push data center costs onto consumers, something that regulators and governments thus far seem completely unwilling to do.
Oh and distributed infrastructure and leadership (the so-called "mosaic defense") is (yet) another reason why the Iran war was always unwinnable from the start.
Indeed. The future is off-grid and community level mini/micro grids.
There is no need to build/maintain transmission network.
Legacy grid is production in far away places, miles and miles of transmission, then a distribution network. The distribution network built for homes is sufficient for homes to participate in grid for redundancy. All buildings can produce energy. Rooftop is proven. Next is vertical solar-- which adds ~4 hours of production. EVs become a storage reservoir and supply power back to the grid (V2X). Add some BESS if needed.
Villages in developing countries (half the population in Asia, Africa) can go completely offgrid. Start with plugins, slowly upgrade to bigger panels. No transmission network needed.
A key enabling technology for this is long term thermal storage, which I've been emphasizing here. It is claimed to work on a scale of ~100 kW or higher, storing heat at 600 C with losses less than 1% per month and capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity. This is very well suited for isolated microgrids.
Thats terrific! The plug-and-play layer of storage is plug-in batteries (as an extension of plug-in solar: if you can supply power from solar, you can also supply from batteries)
The first layer is storage is EVs, which is inevitable. EVs have humongous batteries.
The technology and the means are there - whats required is the willingness to adopt to the self-powered lifestyle.
Many, many folks have done this - stepped off the grid and live on self-harvested local energy sources - however, the grid is powerful.
It is difficult for entire cities to do away with it so rapidly .. at least until PV harvesting gets a significant order or two cheaper and more efficient…
I think it’s pretty obvious that electric transportation needs to fully adopt integrated energy harvesting. This seems to be an obvious legislative low-hanging fruit.
Individual self sufficiency is a bad solution. It's hard to scale to the point everyone can afford it, and it means risks like your inverter breaking down turn catastrophic so you need to invest in extra backups. You lose a lot of efficiency and flexibility.
I think it's way better to make a community grid. That means your home might only have solar without a storage system because there's a shared battery down the road, using cheaper but more dangerous chemistry you don't want in your home. You pay a small share of maintenance costs and pay off investments you helped decide because it's a co-op. And if that's not enough you can exchange with another neighborhood.
Basically I'm saying power should work like the internet. Independent systems that don't need to be self sufficient, but they're still resistant to failure because there is no centralized control.
> I think it's way better to make a community grid.
Indeed, like Internet, autonomous networks with connections.
US subdivisions can be a micro grid, a few hundred homes.
There are a lot of condo communities, the common elements (roof, etc) are the HOA responsibility. These can do community solar and grid.
In the metros of third world countries, there is a huge growth of gated communities with high rises. These can be net zero with their own production and grid.
While solar is helpful, when Russian missile attacks result in blackouts, Ukrainian cities mostly run on diesel, gasoline, and gas powered generators (source: saw it). I think the advantage of them is that they are mobile, and plug-and-play. Majority of consumers are densely placed which is a problem for decentralized solar usage, and centralized solar requires infrastructural changes, and could share the same being-target problem with other centralized solutions.
I am not sure if solar panel are worth using in places where the sky is clear only several months a year. A desert (for example, in Africa or Emirates) would be a better place for them.
Wouldn't it be better to have thousands of traditional natural gas, coal or diesel-powered generators to replace large centralized plants? They are compact (easier to hide). A 2 MW generator is a size of a truck. And portable 24 MW generator is a size of several trucks. Before the war, they had ~44 GW of generation (~1 kW per person), so one needs thousands of mobile generators to replace the system, and I doubt anyone provided them.
I wish there was a comparison of installation costs and generation costs for traditional and renewable energy. Without comparison, it might be that renewables are simply not worth investing yet.
One company advertises solar panels [1] and claims that 1 MW scale array requires 3000 panels and costs over $1M. While used diesel-powered 2MW generator costs several hundreds thousands USD. Why would someone buy one array when for that price several diesel generators can be bought?
Traditional energy is cheap. For example, Russia has 240 GW of generation, almost no solar and wind, and electricity costs 8 cents per kWh and in the West the energy is super expensive despite using solar and wind power. Also, diesel costs 65 RUB/liter, or 2.94 USD/US gallon (if 1 US gallon = 3.78 L) and again in the West for some reason it is overpriced. Maybe the renewables are only profitable with overpriced natural resources and government subsidies, without a comparison it is difficult to say.
Natural gas& co need infrastructure to be carried around, stored, processed etc.. you have just traded a single target power plant for a single target gas pipeline.
You don’t buy it from the truck though. The truck buys it from a massive storage facility at the refinery, fills the truck, the truck drives off and fills a hole someplace. Finally you buy it out of the hole.
A diesel powered generator doesn't generate anything it converts expensive but heavily subsidized fuel into pretty similar value electricity that often requires more subsidies for distribution networks.
If every building and other piece of infrastructure essentially powers itself, that means to disable a bunch of targets you now can't just disable a central substation that feeds them, you have to disable the targets themselves, and depending on the nature of the targets that may no longer be economical.
It also no longer makes sense to attack the connecting lines between them as well.
Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
People built centralized grids because it's cheaper to build and service when the equipment is concentrated in one place. The economy of scale kicks in.
If you move to decentralized so there's fewer outages, but now you're paying extra to maintain it, your solution is not as good as it used to be, that's economic damage right there.
And your enemy probably will also stop targeting the small decentralized grid elements, so they're not spending bucks on missiles. They can use more of them to hit other parts of your economy that are still centralized.
Estimating the net impact of this change is bigger than the article suggests.
> Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
Russia's goal in attacking Ukraine's energy sector is to make the country ungovernable. They attack the energy sector in winter because they know that causes suffering and hope that will cause the populace to turn against their government or at least against the war. It's not just a matter of causing economic damage, turning off the heat is a means to an end in ending the war in their favor.
That is a stated goal but it's repeatedly happened through history that someone has attempted to do that same thing and what it really did was make the population even more eager to go to war to defeat you.
But isn't West getting tired of war? For example, in Germany, an "Alternative for Germany" is winning which calls for making a deal with Russia to get the cheap energy and stop supporting the war. West thought that Russian economy would crumble under sanctions, but instead it seems that Western economies are not doing great, and the West has depleted its ammunition reserves due to the war in the Middle East.
Most polls in the EU show around 60% support for military assistance to Ukraine. People are fed up with many things and opposition parties are more likely to be pro Russian to get that vote. If anything the last years have shown Russia's true face and I don't think there is much appetite for renewing those business deals which have been shown to be such a dangerous dependency.
Ukraine is the one being attacked here, not Germany. I am not sure what your point is.
Certainly, Europe in general is tired of the war. Western Europe has been against war in general for a long time. That's not necessarily a sign that they're going to stop supporting Ukraine. Different countries, of course, will do different things, but overall, signs are, while Europe is tired of war and wants it to end, Europe is not willing to end it on Russia's terms. We will see countries have been flowed their support for Ukraine, but I would say overall all signs are Europe is still going to continue supporting Ukraine in the war for the foreseeable future. Only time will tell, but that's my current read of the situation.
Yes of course, but that is the point. Why do you hit substations when you could permanently destroy the individual targets of that outage?
You do it because targeting the individual sites is not economical. If every 1000 units of currency of range you inflict on your opponent costs you 2000 units of currency, you are basically just hurting yourself.
You target the substation because with one hit you can deny the service on many smaller targets, something which may not be economical if you targeted them one by one.
That means there are targets that would have been attractive targets in a central system, that are no longer attractive in a decentralized one.
Generally centralized systems can be run more efficiently, however it depends since electric transmission is not lossless and the construction/upkeep of the infrastructure is not free. That means the geography of the place plays a huge role. The more spread out the individual sites are, the more a decentralized system makes sense.
Renewable upkeep is a question of the requirements. I know mountain huts in high alpine areas that run on solar for the past two decades and have had basically zero maintenance cost, if you don't count the occasional shoveling of snow. Batteries of course need to be swapped out as well, if you have them, but they can also last a while. But the cost of running centralized power to a single high alpine hut is incomparably higher (if it wasn't, that is what would be there).
Even the big targets nowadays take hundreds of drones launched to destroy, because of air defense. Air defense seems like one of those thigs that's easier to concentrate around a select number of key sites. You won't put a Patriot next to each residential building, but you can put some next to a big power plant.
And the drones today are made with large targets in mind, carrying one bigger payload of explosive. I wonder how they can change if the goal would be to target stacks of fragile solar panelts with best cost efficiency. I've seen on the news yesterday that Russia started targeting bridges more because that have some new payload that's more destructive to them than just a big lump of explosive.
I don't know what's actually true here, just some ideas on what else need to be taken into account.
What does the distinction between economic damage and not being an end goal in itself have to do with anything? Either way it's a live goal being pursued and decentralizing will mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain.
You're right that centralized grids are cheaper (as long as the utilities maintaining them are good faith actors) and that switching to decentralized solutions brings new maintenance costs. But this is a war, the choice isn't been idealized central distribution and costs of decentralization, it's between the latter and a grid under siege by missiles. Relying on a grid that's being struck by missiles with no backup plan isn't economical either.
Also in your other comment you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.
In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).
And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.
> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.
My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.
> Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
This is not true - they’ve regularly targeted and hit kindergartens, supermarkets, gas stations, town squares/markets, residential buildings, etc. None of these targets are “budget draining” but instead are intended to terrify and hurt civilians. Russia isn’t calculating or being strategic at the level you suggest - instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive even at the cost of its own strategic interests.
I agree that they hit civilian targets, the evidence is there. How do you know they targeted them? Missiles sometimes can miss or or be shot down by air defenses, then fall and explode.
It's been broken down many times with a lot of examples from history: harassing civilians only mobilizes them. So Russia must be not only cruels but also stupid if you want to argue that they're targeting civilians.
The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
It's cheap to demonize and dismiss the side you don't like, picture them as cruel, stypid, evil. And from there, creatively explain everything they do with these qualities. It seldom helps you understand reality though.
So it could be that your case is special, you're not just being lazy and racist in building your worldview, but people you don't like are actually unreasonably cruel, evil and also stypid. Or maybe not, and your explanation is lazy and of poor quality. Guess which one is more likely.
Double-tap attacks are a tell-tale sign of this. If half an hour later another missile or a drone "accidentally" hits exactly the same spot to kill rescue workers, there's not much mystery left.
> The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
Modern drones and missiles are rather ineffective for killing lots of people. Most of them get shot down, and those that reach their targets have relatively small warheads. Nothing compared to old-school area bombing. A typical major air raid (500-800 planes) in WWII delivered 2000-4000 tons of bombs to a single city. A typical 200-drone strike in 2026 delivers potentially no more than 10 tons spread across the country, probably even less if we account for decoys. The largest strikes (drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles combined) had about 40 ton payload, of which 10 tons reached the intended target. In WWII terms, that's about 3 planes' worth of bombs.
I'm not sure how those killed in Bucha were _not_ targeted?
I'm also not sure how the execution of POWs could be accidental (with the evidence used in various reports provided by videos taken by Russians themselves) or the documented systematic torture (HRW report: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/11/russias-systematic-tortu...)
Or the kidnap of children (documented by UN) or the findings of the UN human rights commission:
> The Commission found that Russian authorities committed a wide range of
war crimes, and the corresponding human rights violations, including willful
killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape and other
sexual violence, as well as unlawful transfers and deportations of children.
Or the findings of HRW (Human Rights Watch) of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on populated areas, including homes, hospitals and schools.
Reading about this stuff - by credible sources like the UNHRC, Amnesty International, HRW, endless media and independent journalists' - and forming an opinion does not make me "lazy and racist".
Sometimes, one side are simply the bad guys and in this particular case, it's the Russian regime.
Because I was responding directly (I even quoted the line) to the claim that Russian’s actions could be understood as being part of a “clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget”.
Your attempt to deflect is very odd. We’re discussing an aspect of Russia’s behavior and strategy with respect to the invasion of Ukraine. If you want me to comment on the behavior of a different belligerent in a different conflict then feel free to start such a discussion concerning that conflict - then I may (or may not) respond to claims about the behavior of some country that isn’t Russia.
These attacks have been too well documented for your "propaganda" attack to appeal to anyone but the brainwashed or those acting in bad faith. Outside of Western media, multiple UN reports have presented direct photographic and have found physical evidence for these attacks.
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Sustained-large-scale-attacks-b... - documents and presents the irrefutable evidence for, among other attacks, the double ballistic missile strike on the historic centre of Sumy on Palm Sunday. The second exploded above a public area, killing at least 31 civilians and injuring 80. The UN describes civilians traveling to church, going to the market, working at a coffee stand, etc.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - another UN Commission report that found that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a civilian apartment building, killing 24 civilians. There was no military or economic target there and so the UN concluded that Russian forces had conducted an indiscriminate attack on a residential building
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Russian-attack-strikes-shopping... - found that a Russian long-range drone struck an operational shopping centre full of civilians, then another drone struck it about 30 minutes later. At least 16 civilians were killed and 128 injured. Investigators found no military presence, activity or equipment at the site.
Or read any of the Amnesty International reports (who have also been critical of some of Ukraine's actions so can hardly be accused of purveying Ukrainian propaganda), such as:
>Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain"
Oh but it is, there is no other explanation why civilian heating facilities are being targeted during winter otherwise, they don't cost much to fix, and actually cost a lot to target, but they do bring a lot of pain to the civilian population (winters in Ukraine are brutal).
And as if it wasn't obvious enough, the anti-ukrainian government bot campaigns that always coincide with the attacks make it obvious beyond belief.
Luckily, NATO spokesman answered that question 27 years ago.
Press conference by Mr Jamie Shea, NATO Spokesman, 25 May 1999 [0]
Question (Norwegian News Agency): I am sorry Jamie but if you say that the Army has a lot of back-up generators, why are you depriving 70% of the country of not only electricity, but also water supply, if he has so much back-up electricity that he can use because you say you are only targeting military targets?
Jamie Shea : Yes, I'm afraid electricity also drives command and control systems. If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign. But as long as he doesn't do so we will continue to attack those targets which provide the electricity for his armed forces.
>The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
Again there's an integral relation between those two things. Insofar as that distinction reinforces any point, it would seem to be the decentralization is a cost in and of itself and that Russia would consider that objective achieved once the cost of decentralization was incurred. As you point out there wouldn't be motivation to attack individual PV systems, yet you keep insisting there's a vulnerability to attack even though the whole point of your inflict pain/drain budget distinction is that such an attack wouldn't have a motivation.
>These are all hypotheticals
Why does them being hypothetical make having contradictory positions on them more defensible? One thing hypotheticals test is whether the totality of your explanations hang together without contradicting each other. And these aren't even distinct hypotheticals that are isolated from each other. They're contemplating basically the same scenario.
If talking about Russia not attacking decentralized system because being decentralized was the inflicted cost is the goal, then individual residential PVs aren't a really target after all. If they are a target, then Russia either wasn't satisfied that the switch inflicted damage that met a strategic goal, or you were wrong that they're distinguishing between inflicting pain and meeting some higher level strategic objective. I don't see that the hypotheticals are actually quarantined off from each other, they're about the same thing, so the contradiction can't be explained away by insisting each part of the contradiction was quarantined off from each other in separate hypotheticals.
A hypothetical is not a position. They are a logical/rhetorical tool that let's you see what are the implications of X being true without saying that X is true. The point of a hypothetical is seeing where something leads without making that something your position.
One reason to do hypotheticals is to see if X being true leads to any valuable, surprising implications. So that after that you can go back to talking about whether X is true, this time knowing why you need to know it (or skip talking about it if it doesn't lead anywhere interesting).
Making two hypothetical that contradict each other is extremely useful and common way to use them. One typical example is case matching. If you show that some Y holds under the assumption that X is true, then you show that Y also holds under the assumption that X is not true; this allows you to conclude that Y is true, no matter whether X is true.
In don't know if Ukraine moving to decentralized will make attacks on its grid useless. In two differs branches here I consider what happens if it does and what happens if it doesn't. In response to whatever the other commenters seem to believe in. When someone states X as their position, sometimes I prefer to see what are the implications of it, and if any are interesting come back to talking about whether their position is true. If no implications are surprising, I won't even approach the costlier task of trying to understand if the commenters position is true.
You seemed to believe that decentralizing will make grid attacks not viable, and from there try to go to saying decentralization helps. My point to you was that there's a few variables (decentralization penalty, Russia's next best target after grid) that must be taken into account if you were to conduct an argument like that. I'm saying that without stating (or even having) a position on whether decentralization will stop grid attcks.
In the other thread the discussion was about whether grid attcks will stop. And my point was that I don't find it obvious that they won't.
Strictly speaking, none of this was stating my position. There's so much more to logic and rhetorics than stating positions and defending them.
China sells killer drones to each side. China sells solar panels to each side to power their killer drones. Let barbarians fight barbarians is how Henry Kissinger described China's geopolitical strategy in his book "On China." Ukraine and Russia's drone and killer robot industries would collapse without constant imports of Chinese components. Please go look it up in chat or whatever if you don't believe me. Soon, every country will be in a proxy war with China as they sell all these little death gadgets to all sides of every conflict, everyone who wants them, cartels, guerilla groups, absolutely anyone with a grudge anywhere on planet earth, any side, as long as they're fighting each other. That's IMHO, why, for better or for worse, they're so ridiculously cavalier about AI safety.
At least with U.S imperialism, for the most part, we only funded and sold weapons to one side.
They are also the cheapest source of energy with the fewest dependencies. The last part is why they will remain illegal. The power structures of society will do anything to maintain themselves, and the current power structures are largely based around exchanging money for essential commodities. This doesn't work if they stop being essential.
In the USA. Offshore wind (that's where most of the wind is) is illegal because one of Trump's golf clubs is in sight of a wind farm and he hates it. Solar inverters are also illegal because chy nuh.
Gas and diesel generators are charging small batteries (3coflow types), at least on the frontline because solar panels are good ways to invite incoming fires
Mega cities are a lot more efficient and I think most people would rather live in one than a small town.
And they're actually easier to protect because you can build all your bunkers, barracks, drone bays and ABMs close together. The attack surface is a lot smaller. In less urban countries you have to decide what needs protection, and if you guess wrong more people will end up dead.
We should be decentralized in terms of power, not geographic distance. A city where everyone has a gun and military training is much harder to attack than 100 villages with the same total population. The important thing is making sure that even if the city falls theres a plan to avoid civilian casualties, and the rest of the country is independent enough to work without it.
The thing is history disagrees with this. Any war from past to present, cities fall relatively quickly and dramatically while the countryside can resist empires for decades. America, the most powerful military the planet has ever seen, has lost twice now to the 100 villages in Vietnam and now Afghanistan.
Cities are often strong fortified positions that can withstand anything a peer enemy can throw against them. In WW2, the Siege of Leningrad lasted over 2 years and ultimately failed.
In Afghanistan, the issue was that the country does not really make sense. The central government is usually weak and illegitimate, and it doesn't have effective control over most of the country. The US went in with a small force and quickly defeated the central government. But because they lacked the manpower to control the country, they created a new central government, which was again too weak and illegitimate for the task. And then the situation just dragged on, until the US lost interest.
As for the Vietnam War, cities rarely changed hands in the war before the US started withdrawing its troops. The US was unwilling to invade North Vietnam, because it was afraid of an outcome similar to the Korean War, where it would have to face China and/or the USSR directly. And North Vietnam was too weak to invade the South.
If that were true then everyone would have centralised their industry in WW2 to make it resist the bombing. They didn’t, because having one small target is way worse than having dispersed targets.
By the time you are in a war it is too late. Far better to be prepared.
Its not just war either, as the pandemic showed. Trade disputes that lead to sanctions, natural disasters, and lots of other things require the same security.
Its worth paying a bit more for the security, for the same reasons people buy insurance.
>> It’s worth paying a bit more for the security, for the same reasons people buy insurance.
Yeah but this “ If you want security the concept of the mega city needs to be abandoned.” is not a bit more. It’s paying more for insurance than the asset insured. Perhaps you heard of the term over engineer or the cure is worse than the disease. I think it applies here as well.
I am not sure how efficient we are when the US spends like 20% of its budget for military, police and fire depts.
Let alone all of the super expensive infrastructure that mega cities need, for example subways, buses, wide highways for traffic, heavy transportation for supply
“Encircling the cities from the countryside" (农村包围城市) is the foundational military and geopolitical strategy developed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap forward, building a distributed self sustaining (military) industrial complex. It was very hard to build and maintain. Altho a lot moved to the coastal areas again, there are constant oscillations and negations between the rich costal cities and the hinterland (data centers, taobao villages)
Not just for security - generally speaking if you have high speed rail infrastructure connected to a good and fast public transport grid, there's genuinely no reason to build a huge city.
High density housing is very slow to traverse and getting from point A to B in a big city might take more time than getting on a train that takes you to another city 200km away in 30 min. In a traffic jam, you'll be lucky to do 5km in the same time.
You have it backwards. Passenger railways only make sense when they connect large population centers. Public transport networks outside of urban areas barely exist.
I don't. High speed rail is everywhere in Europe and connects cities with a populations of a few hundred k to maybe a low million.
These mid sized cities are usually along the rail lines, like beads on a string.
Whereas these megacities are built densely and usually have radial transport networks which require insane levels of urban planning and are difficult to navigate in the best of cases.
Public transit requires density even when the cities are small. If the population is too evenly distributed, there are no routes with enough traffic to justify good transit service. People will then choose to drive if they can. And if transit connections to railway stations are not good enough, there is not enough demand for high-speed rail, because most people will choose to drive to the next city.
“Choose to drive”? What an elitist perspective we have.
Populations either have personal vehicles or they don’t. For many of my neighbors, “choosing to drive” is an absurd economic proposition. This choice involves paying for the car, the gas, the maintenance, and the insurance, at the very least. Maintaining your privilege, avoiding tickets and accidents, all a delicate urban ballet.
Cars are often assets that will save and even help you earn money, but it is a very interesting thing when the upper classes are incentivized to give up vehicle ownership, or eschew driving. When cars are not saving money & time, they become liabilities, and a millstone around your neck. Some people feel relieved to get rid of them.
Many people love cars and love driving, but car culture was foisted on the unwilling public by the military-industrial complex. You drive cars and have highways because of war. Now your soccer mom drives a toddler munching tank to her jobs. Think about it.
For many people, choosing to be Taylor Swift would be easier than “choosing to drive”. It’s either public transit, or bike/walk/stay home.
Public transit is mostly about the middle 80%. If it's useful for them, they are willing to pay to keep it that way one way or another. If it's not, they won't pay, and the service will be bad for those who have no other options.
Helsinki just completed a 10 km light rail line that cost ~€400 million, including some major bridges. That's maybe €10k per current and future resident in the areas connected by it to the city center. Spending that much for an option to have good public transit only makes sense if most of those people are going to use the line.
Yeah and cars are expensive, in real estate as well. A car needs like 20m2 minimum for a parking spot and the bit of road to get to it, if you build something like a garage. That m2 isn't really cheaper than living space, and that's half the size of a small apartment.
So most places either build less dense, or accept that wherever you go, there might not be parking spaces nearby. Which if you have public transport, often means its easier to park in some low cost P+R and take the subway.
I'm fairly convinced its within the means of almost every human (say like 5 of the 8 billion people) to drive a car. That includes people in African countries with like $1000 GDP per capita. Sure it will be genuniely awful, 30+ years old, held together by duct tape, society might want to stop you from owning something so horrible, or make it not worth it, but the economic bar for something that drives is so low, that people will scrap working or easy to fix cars.
There was far less risk to cities before social media algorithms sent the world fucking mad and helped get a total psychopath into the oval office and tore apart the world order and globalism.
But yeah, it's looking like state sponsored terrorism is back on the menu for those in cities, once everyone moves to the countries, small communities can be targeted by random drone attacks by Russians or something. Will be great.
The article suggests that renewables are somehow more helpful in a war when your grid is targeted by drones and missiles. It doesn't do a comparison to back it up though.
Decentralized power production vs. centralized does make sense: decentralized doesn't offer a single point of failure taking out which causes a lot of damage.
But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too? Sounds only better than renewables because it doesn't go up and down throughout a day, and doesn't need grid to amortize the jumps.
Renewables sort of need to be out there in the open to harvest energy from the elements. Solar needs sunlight, wind needs to spin its huge blades in open air. A diesel generator, on the other hand, perfectly goes underground, much harder to target.
So the article doesn't really establish that renewables offer a clear advantage over fossils in a war.
Upd: some comments below have convinced me that fossils don't decentralize as easily as renewables.
>But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
If you sit on an oil well, perhaps. In practice every static part of the production and distribution chain is a centralized target: from wells over refineries to depots, roads, harbours and finally power plants. You simply can't run fossils in a distributed local-first approach. That's also the reason why even for a massive oil producer like Russia, Ukraine can cause billions in damages with drones costing a couple hundred grand.
Right. I think the most optimistic take would be that vegetable oil with some processing, can be used for diesel but I'm not sure how practical that is or how reliable access to waste vegetable oil is
The drone will disbale more than one of those 1kW panels if it hits an array of them. Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage? Sounds a bit odd, because Wh is not the currency I pay bills with.
How much does it cost to replace an array of solar panels, compared to the cost of sending another diesel truck (and paying for the destroyed one + its fuel)?
>Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage?
Well there's an integral relation between the two, more kWh lost is more dollars lost. They both proxy for some venn diagram overlap that includes damage, cost, lost resources, and it's perfectly legitimate to reason from any permutation of those. It's notionally possible for different tech to attach those costs in different ways but in this case I would put the burden on you to explain the practical difference that you think cashes out in an advantage diesel has.
I'm not sure why you think a truck would be cheaper necessarily: smaller PV systems can range from $10k to $20k with no fuel payload. Is a diesel truck with a full payload of fuel really cheaper than that? And is a diesel truck supposed to be fueling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people depending on it at a time when bridges are getting bombed, and therefore an instance of centralization and attractive target for attack. And you said yourself you didn't think PV would be attacked because decentralizing in and and of itself inflicted the economic damage yet you've once again gone back to imaging a diesel advantage in the event of PV getting attacked.
> And is a diesel truck supposed to be fuelling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people
Completely correct, but then go one step further: Where does that truck fill up? At a depot where many other trucks do the same. That's an even more tempting target - centralised, stationary, flammable.
I do not think that there is an equivalent node in the solar alternative.
And where does that fuel depot get resupply from. etc. "decentralised" fossil fuel infrastructure isn't really a thing that exists.
Solar panels are dirt cheap. Which idiot would send drones to hit a solar panel? Going by your economic argument, use drones that cost hundreds of thousands of dollar to hit something thats costs 10 bucks?
Do you think thats sound strategy? The military generals in US would accept that?
The diesel alone in the fuel truck that used to fill my 1000l oil fired tank costs far more than the number of solar panels a single drone could destroy, let alone the cost of the truck itself.
Hell my 1000l tank alone costs more even when empty.
You're comparing diesel to PV which doesn't speak to the merits of PV vs centralization. There's also the massive disadvantage of fuel distribution from diesel, which is a form of centralization and bottlenecking, and then there's fuel shortages and costs which PV doesn't have to bother with.
Also is Russia targeting individual PV systems? That's tantamount to targeting individual residences which, if we're granting that, there's no amount of decentralizing that would ever mitigate those attacks so diesel vs PV would be moot.
Lastly I don't think that's what greenwashing means. Greenwashing isn't representing renewables favorably, it's tying some external negative practice to language of environmentalism with vague buzzwords and questionable claims of environmental benefits to make that thing look better. But in this case there's no external thing being tied to environmentalism, we're just talking about PV directly.
Right, a classic example of Greenwashing would be the UK's Drax power plant.
Drax burns "waste wood" to make electricity and argues that this is a carbon neutral endeavour.
Now, on the one hand yes these are not fossil fuels. The trees grew, probably over decades or centuries, but they weren't underground for millions of years before we burned them. However, "waste wood" to a lay person conjures ideas of sawdust or the offcuts from woodworking or maybe the bark from trees pulped for paper, something like that. Drax actually uses specially made pellets, produced in places such as Canada, from whole forests which are designated "waste" so as to meet their requirements...
Because this is "green" the majority of the UK's "green electricity" subsidies are spent on Drax†. And yet when you see people ranting about these subsidies being too high, they will invariably point at Wind Farms and Solar power.
† Because Drax is relatively old, lots of its subsidies are via an obsolete scheme we don't get raw data for, so all we can see is that billions of pounds were spent in the overall budget and the rational explanation is that we paid them to Drax. In 2027 Drax will move entirely to Contracts for Difference like a modern renewable power plant so then we can see more clearly what we're getting and how much it's costing under those new CfDs.
At least there's a certain creativity to the concept of overseas waste forests. You could take that further argueing that the vessels importing the pellets only burn^H^H^H dispose of waste minerals, and demand more subsidies. Although “minerals” has a bad ring to it (uuugh, “mining”), so rather call it “waste bio detritus”, which it is according to the theory (“rotten dinosaurs”).
> But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
How would that possibly work? Everyone has their own oil well and refinery? Their own fuel depots?
And even if you were able to build all that, we would basically have giant bombs waiting to be ignited all over residential neighborhoods during war time...
I would invite you to think through the logistics of what you propose before you launch into multiple paragraphs that assume those logistics are solved.
Then you don't solve the core problem of having a big juicy single point of failure. One that is very flammable at that, as Ukraine has proven in Russia recently.
A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.
The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.
The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.
Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.
A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.
There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.
I don't think they have to worry about lack of access to cold for the next few months. I believe you're accurate re: India and sources of biomass in that context and the possibility of some processing/conversion, but how representative is that of the resources at disposal of the typical person in Ukraine? I imagine more urban residences with electricity and not a lot of cows.
Sorry, I was trying to be sarcastic and might've failed! There is no way to do distributed fossil fuel infra. I was suggesting the OP get a few dozen cows to build one!
My bad, I understand now and I completely agree. If you try and imagine exactly what domestically sourced diesel fuel is supposed to mean in practice it's going to range from unrealistic to downright comical.
That's not what greenwashing means. Greenwashing refers to marketing that sells a product as environmentally beneficial, while it's not in reality.
Your claim is that they're selling a product (renewables) as beneficial for the war, while it's not. If I were to invent a term for that, it might be "camo-washing".
Whether your argument makes sense or not, I don't know. But you fail to note the drawback of a diesel generator: it needs diesel, and thus logistics.
I meant greenwashing as pulling a reason to make something about renewables out of thin air. In this case article's choice to center it's argument on renewables is greenwashing. Maybe I need a different word, not sure.
The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me. What they do though is attribute the benefits of decentralized to renewables (ignoring how many buildings are powered by diesel in Ukraine today, those which did not receive that grant from Denmark to do solar), then completely skip potential downsides of renewables, and draw a conclusion from there.
> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.
Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.
Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.
Yeah, I agree greenwashing is not the word here. I don't know what is, but if anything I would say you're trying to express something that is in an important sense opposite to greenwashing (greenwashing is trying to make something look good by falsely presenting it as eco-friendly, you're accusing something of boosting renewables by falsely presenting it as tied to them)
And yes, decentralization is the core aspect that is important, but renewables are importantly much more decentralized end-to-end compared to a diesel generator, because renewables, once in place, have no real central point of failure, while the supply chain for the diesel in the generator still has very important central points of failure that can be attacked (and explode quite easily due to the large amounts of flammable material they are carrying). Distributing the generation does help smooth over short-term disruptions but the overall throughput in the longer term can still be disrupted.
Also, while renewables might be out in the open, they are cheap and spread out over a wide area, which makes them pretty cost-ineffective to attack compared to more concentrated facilities.
I don't think it's out of thin air, it's the reality of what's actually being used in Ukraine, and as comments in this thread have borne out it seems to have legitimate benefits, and so doesn't qualify as greenwashing.
Also if there's greenwashing, it means some questionable practice is being green washed. Apparently you think the idea of decentralization is the thing in this case... but you agree that decentralizing is a good idea and are more against the merits renewables, which is an anti renewables argument but not a correct diagnosis of something being greenwashed.
On "greenwashing". As the article said, the environmental aspect is at the bottom of Ukraine's list of concerns at the moment.
This is the most concrete evidence (if it wasn't clear to anyone not lobotomised by the fossil fuel industry propaganda already) that renewable energy is a sovereign asset, not an external risk like shipping gas and oil round the world from mostly western-hostile nations.
Ukrainians are fighting for their country and this is the route they take. Any government not doing that same is deliberately weakening their country.
But check the position of supposedly nation-first right wing political parties in the west and they all LOVE making their country energy dependent on Saudi Arabia or the US, or Russia. I wonder why that could be...
Fossil fuel supply chain makes your country very vulnerable!
https://github.com/Lkruitwagen/global-fossil-fuel-supply-cha...: The resulting complex network has 6.09mn nodes and 15.70mn edges and is implemented in a graph database. With estimates of annual coal, gas, and oil demand in 13,229 global population centres and 8,165 global power stations, we use a minimum-cost flow method to estimate global asset-level energy flows.
If you want to protect your country, here are your options:
1) Invest in nuclear power and nukes (source of Uranium may be a concern). See North Korea vs Iran.
2) Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV. This will be the most resilient, distributed grid that can never be disrupted. Node level failures (hail on roof breaks solar) can be easily overcome. EVs are batteries on wheels! They can go charge and come back. Some on this forum may be familiar with Cattle vs Pet, Redundancy, Resiliency, Virtualization (--> Virtual Power Plants), etc -- same concepts, but applied to power generation which is designed as a monolithic circuit switched network. The idea of energy as packets, which can be Store-and-Forward (using batteries) will change everything we know about energy.
No one will attack North Korea because they are backed by China. I'm not sure how nuclear weapons helps them unless they split from China. Maybe they make money selling the tech to others.
A defense pact doesn’t always hold, though. Poland had a mutual defense pact with France and the UK in September 1939. And even if China were to aide the DPRK in a crisis, the DPRK would be the junior partner in that arrangement. In this scenario, if China is providing the lions share of manpower and weapons, they get to decide strategy, and dictate terms for war termination.
The DPRKs primary goal is preservation of the Kim regime above all else. That’s why the DPRK over the last 70+ years has focused on Juche, a principle of self-reliance. The vast majority of their weapon systems are of indigenous designs and manufacture. And why they have developed and deployed an independent nuclear deterrent.
The defense pact for Poland held, GB and France entered a war because of it.
China is a bit closer to DPRK though and shares a land border so its a but easier for them to assist.
China’s support constrains them of course. And even if they don’t want to split, having the option to do so strengthens their negotiating position as well.
I think nobody threatens NK because they have 10k artillery pieces in range of SK capital, and have all sorts of NCB munitions to use.
Solar-based distributed grid doesn't look like a great option, especially in the context of war in Europe.
> Node level failures (hail on roof breaks solar) can be easily overcome.
If you are talking about "just change the panel if it breaks" scenario, it's unreliable. A big Ukrainian city near the border with Russia ran out of glass to change shattered windows at some point with logistics working well, and glass is easier to source than solar panels.
> Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV. This will be the most resilient, distributed grid
Resilience is questionable because solar panels can't be either quickly moved or armored (direct sunlight required). Damaging a lot of panels at once won't require a lot of explosives either, just a lot of projectiles (and maybe some bonus paint/chemicals to render panels useless), so the drones to do that will be cheap. If the cells inside a panel are wired sequentially (which is often the case), only a little bit should be damaged to break the whole panel.
Solar panels alone won't generate enough to power EVs and residential buildings. Modern buildings have multiple floors, but can only install their footprint (and maybe one side of building) worth of panels.
Seasonal sunlight changes make them less useful outside of summer. I know that batteries exist, but there's only so much power that can be generated over 8-10 hours from October to February — months when the power demand gets higher and EV efficiency gets lower.
> The idea of energy as packets, which can be Store-and-Forward (using batteries) will change everything we know about energy.
Sounds cool, but would it really change everything? Storing solar power (or from other sources) for later is indeed good, but it isn't that groundbreaking of a concept. It also requires additional costs to set up and maintain (and with big distributed network it will be either maintained at a big cost or neglected). Charging the batteries, storing and forwarding energy introduces energy losses at every step as well.
It does work if you take the "distributed" part seriously. If you've got a giant field of panels then it's just another target for the orcs to take out, but if every single house is feeding in a few kw, which some countries are already doing as a result of which power prices there go negative during the day, the orcs can't take out every single house and shed in the country. "Solar on every structure" means literally that, not just in one or two locations.
And it takes quite a bit to knock out a solar panel, they're designed to resist hail and storm damage (and careless shipping/installers) and will continue to function with reduced efficiency in the presence of quite a bit of damage, you'd need to systematically demolish every single panel in an entire city to take it offline.
Maybe if the EV is an all-terrain truck because roads and bridges etc. are still vulnerable.
All terrain vehicles are sufficiently slow and visible that they're arguably more vulnerable in most cases.
In Ukraine electric buggies have been used for frontline mobility because they're quiet, the wheeled military vehicles are in demand because combined with even a dirt road they're a lot faster getting around - i.e. one feature of the HIMARS is that it's not tracked.
We're only a few years away from your electric car self driving itself to a helipad and flying you straight across a city in a pre-planned route on a quad-copter that just docks on your car.
We’ve been a few years away from personal helicopter transport for my entire 34 year lifetime
Don't worry, the moment you get it, it won't be anything special and people will act like it's always been around. Or at least that's what I've come to expect after watching new technology show up in my lifetime.
Invest in nukes especially if you're a resource rich country.
Nuclear weapons or nuclear power?
Weapons yes, power seems quite stupid given the costs and lead times.
Compared to what? It serves its niche quite well. It's not nuclear power's fault people wait until they should have built it twenty years ago.
Or just build renewables and storage? Distributed and extremely cheap.
The answer twenty years ago is not the same as the one today.
The article doesn't provide much details about installed solar, wind capacity, installed battery capacity, electricity produced each month, and so on. But this is data that Ukraine would not like to get public.
The biggest issue is only hinted in the article:
> ‘There’s just enough sun [in January/this winter thus far] to make it work,’ says Olena Kondratiuk
Solar+batteries work well in summer months, but for winter months, solar has much lower output. This is why Russia is attacking thermal plants especially in winter.
Why is both not an option? Nuclear works well where solar and wind don't.
Which is like in the polar high north of the arctic circle?
What’s the relevance?
Or on a windless night?
Those system cost analyses easily solve, at far lower costs than involving new nuclear.
I favor a "diversify" approach more than I have a dogmatic interest in any one source. The benefits of developing any of these far outweigh the costs.
> Weapons yes, power seems quite stupid given the costs and lead times.
Have the hyperscalers fund them, they have an unlimited source of money for AI DCs. Nuclear should be significantly cheaper than space DCs.
Lead times such as... 4 years? Sounds like light speed compared with a lot of other mega-engineering projects. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 6 & 7, ~4.3 years.
Which is why the best possible days for the first EPR2 reactor in France is 2038 with massive state support.
The Civaux 2 reactor was connected to the grid in 1999, marking the end of the main 20th-century deployment wave. Flamanville 3 (EPR) reactor in Normandy was connected to the grid on December 21, 2024, marking the first new nuclear reactor added to France's network in 25 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/462168/nuclear-reactors-...
France really decimated it's nuclear industry, it takes lot of money and time to restore back capabilities (heavy forging, nuclear grade quality construction) and train people.
Let's not forget that in 2015, French president Hollande promised to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren...
It was really only 2022 Russian invasion, that showed that slowly replacing nuclear power with imported gas was a bad strategy. (This error is still not acknowledged in Germany)
I have a hard time taking you seriously when you claim that Germany replaced nuclear with fossil gas. It has been roughly flat for the past 20 years while coal generation collapsed, renewables exploded and nuclear disappeared.
And this still assumes that rebuilding a nuclear industry somehow is an end in itself. It isn't.
The objective is to decarbonize society. Not construt nuclear reactors. We don't have any special obligation to build new nuclear, anymore more than there was an obligation to keep building oil-fired power plants once they stopped making economic sense.
> coal generation collapsed
Coal generation was taxed out by EU Emissions Trading System, physical costs of mining lignite in Germany and operating coal power plants are the same as 20 years ago. (and the health impacts are still very negative)
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-regulator-says-n...
> nuclear disappeared
Nuclear in Germany disappeared not for economic reasons, but for political reasons.
" Following a wide public debate, the Atomic Energy Act was amended accordingly on April 22, 2002. The aim was to phase out nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity in an orderly manner. To this end, each nuclear power plant was assigned a residual electricity volume such that the total output of the respective plant corresponded to an average 32-year lifetime. The construction of new nuclear power plants was banned altogether. "
https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...
The objective in Germany changes over time, in the 2000s it was removing nuclear power from electric grid, without much consideration for CO2 emissions. ( Construction of the last new coal power plant in Germany, Datteln 4, began in November 2007. Entered commercial operation on May 30, 2020)
https://www.powermag.com/germany-brings-last-new-coal-plant-...
Now in 2026, it's slowly removing fossil fuels from electric grid and the whole industry. I say slowly, because state subsidies are already allocated for construction of new gas power plants in Germany.
" Germany will initially hold two sets of auctions for new backup power plants with a combined capacity of 11 gigawatts (GW). Of these, the first tenders (8 September and at the end of December 2026), covering 9 GW, are aimed at so-called "long-term capacity", which is capable of supplying electricity continuously over an extended period, ensuring that even prolonged periods without sufficient renewable energy generation can be covered. It is likely that only gas-fired power plants will be successful in these auctions. Successful bidders receive remuneration for having electricity available once a facility is built, providing the financial incentive needed to invest in the first place. "
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-passes-law-subs...
If you want to protect your country invest in nukes.
So you can have large single points of failure? Makes no sense.
Maybe you meant invest in nuclear weapons.
"nuke" means a nuclear weapon
That was the most reasonable interpretation of what I was responding to.
They needn’t be that large. You can put one on a submarine.
[dead]
How it will protect from russian tanks advancing towards the capital of your country?
Nukes are useless in defense: the cannot be used anyway.
The idea is that if you promise to drop nuclear weapons on any country which attacks your capital, Russian tanks will not attack your capital. Whether this is a wise strategy is unclear, but countries like Pakistan[1] and Israel[2] have employed such a policy, and none of their unfriendly neighbors have yet managed to send tanks into Islamabad or Tel Aviv.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_spectrum_deterrence
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
That may work on weak western state, but not on crazy russians. If they were wise they wouldn't invade Ukraine but simply bought it like they did with Belarus. Would be cheaper than war!
Nukes are arguably ONLY useful in defense (and deterring another from attacking). Using nuclear weapons against an opponent that also has nuclear weapons will very likely lead to a nuclear exchange and the decimation of both countries. It’s suicide, and so no one is going to do it unless they have nothing left to lose. A nation under attack, facing an existential threat, and about to be overrun, is in exactly that circumstance.
And yeah, maybe the defending countries leader isn’t willing to end it all, and maybe try collaboration or partisan resistance. But if you were the attacking country, would you be willing to make that bet? Or would you hesitate?
You use tactical nuclear weapons, as was planned by NATO in case of attack of Warsaw Pact tanks through Fulda Gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap
In reality this escalates very fast into all out nuclear war. Which is why you don't see wars between two nuclear armed countries. There is no winner in a nuclear war.
> Invest in nuclear power and nukes > See North Korea vs Iran.
Both countries invested in nukes (it is claimed). Only Iran didn't get there in time, before the US stepped in to stop them (it is claimed). So unless the US lets you, it's probably a bad idea to invest in nukes, no? Or is your point that the US's nuke story was a lie, and that Iran actually should have invested in nukes?
> Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV
Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work? My gut feeling is that even if you put solar panels on literally every structure, you'd be far off from managing to power every vehicle. See if I get around to calculating later, but I at least advise you to do so yourself before making this argument.
> EVs are batteries on wheels! They can go charge and come back
Uh... Cars are fuel tanks on wheels...
Yes, Iran’s problem was they didn’t develop nuclear weapons.
The lesson all countries will take from Ukraine, Iran, and North Korea is: develop nuclear weapons.
Ukraine and Iran both don’t have nuclear weapons and they were both attacked by countries that do. North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.
North Korea's nuclear capabilities isn't what kept them from being attacked. It was Seoul being in artillery range and the refugee crisis on the chinese border that would result.
IMO, North Korea having nuclear weapons and Seoul being in artillery range of NK are strategically very similar, therefore hard to separate. Both allow NK to cause great destruction and many deaths in a short time.
> North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.
North Korea was never in danger of being attacked anyway. They don’t need nuclear weapons to flatten Seoul. The only country capable of invading NK is China, and they benefit much more from NK remaining buffer zone.
The moral of the story is you should always invest in nukes, since if you don't the US will just lie and say you are developing nukes as a pretext anyway.
This also applies to WMDs in general.
> > Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV
> Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work?
Yes. All cars and vans in the UK drive a total of 320 billion miles a year. My own electric car tells me this would require 80 billion kWh. 1kWp produces 1000 kWh a year, so you need 80 million kWp or 80 TWh a year.
My house will easily provide 8kWp, meaning you'd need 10 million houses. There's 30 million homes, and that's before you factor in non-domestic buildings.
A single shooting estate in the uk could produce 20TWh a year with solar alone. Throw in wind and that would petty much double.
Well, if you want the solar power to only cover the cars and vans, sure. What about all the trucks needed for transportation?
Small amount, easilly covered by roof space of commercial buildings.
Cars and vans use 16.5 billion litres of diesel and 15.5 billion litres of petrol
HGVs and busses use 8 billion litres of diesel, about 20% of the total of cars and vans. Agriculture adds another 1.5b and trains half a billion, so call it 10 billion litres, 30% of total fuel use by cars and vans. Push it 50% up from 80TWh to 120TWh if you want and require 15 million roofs
Of course the most economic way to deliver solar isn't by putting it on the roof
Sure, do the math and get back.
First, do the math for millions of acres of Ethanol, a small fraction of fuel additive.
Using the same acres for solar with be sufficient for the entire energy (all forms of energy) many times over.
Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.
So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.
I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!
Just for the Ethanol acres. 30 million acres for a small fraction of fuel. Instead use the same acres for solar panels.
Annual Electricity Generated is 26,300 TWh/year.
Over 6× total U.S. annual electricity consumption (~4,100 TWh/year). This is enough to electrify everything in US.
Solar panels don't feed a nation, giving up fertile land for panels is a bad idea. Put them where you can't grow anything.
The ethanol argument is a dying cause.
Corn for bioethanol is not feeding the nation, it's exploiting the fertile land to literally burn the output.
The argument about corn is to actually stop the waste of the fertile land for fuel. Solar panels can be installed wherever they're necessary, no one is proposing replacing the corn in situ.
You consume ethanol as food? Ethanol is supposed to go into gas cars, via the fossil fuel supply chain.
It’s not an either / or… animals such as sheep can coexist with solar panels and yields go up
Cattle love solar panels - I’ve seen fields of them in southern Germany, almost all hanging out in the shade while munching grass.
Eh. Just stop feeding your crops to cows and you need a lot less space to grow stuff. Also you can put the panels on marginal lands first and save a lot of actual good land for grains and vegetables.
> Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power.
The math the person you're replying to was talking about was solar power vs ethanol. While your 800 m^2 sounds like a lot of land area for enough solar panels to fully charge a large electric truck, it's basically nothing compared to how much land area you'd need to grown enough corn to produce enough ethanol to power a similar truck. It's about 500 times as much land area, a fairly obvious result when you consider you get solar power from the land basically every day and corn once a year. Growing plants for ethanol is dumb.
Of course the benefit of a combustion engine is that you don't need to grow corn to make ethanol for it, at least as long as you can get fossil fuels out of the ground and the enemy doesn't disrupt your supply chain for drilling and refining fuel oil. But that's irrelevant since that wasn't the land-use comparison the parent poster was making.
I have done the math, several times. The last time was to plan a hypothetical solar "highway gas station" capable of charging 100 teslas EVs per hour 24/7/365. Assuming flat ground at Vancouver's latitude, it came to a solar farm approaching square kilometers/miles in scale.
10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels nominaly produce 1000kwh/m so 24,000m2 of panels... if facing the sun perfectly during normal day/night cycles. But non-equator latitudes need far more land than that because the sun isnt directly overhead, plus winter/rainy days... it is a massive solar farm (and a massive battery) just to replace an average highway gas station.
Given that any future 2-lane highway might see a couple thousand thousand EVs each hour, each needing charging every couple hundred miles, the number and size of solar charging stations per mile is crazy.
I've done the math. The average car in Canada does 11,000 miles a year. A Tesla isn't great efficiency, it uses about 3.5 miles per kWh. Throw in inefficiency of charging and you're talking about 3MWh per car per year, and with about 25 million vehicles that means about 75TWh a year
Travers Solar in Alberta generates about 2.5TWh a year from under 14 sqkm.
Build 30 of them and that's 400 sqkm.
A 20sqkm by 20sqkm solar plant would power every car and light van in Canada forever (setting aside seasonality).
Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.
That's less than 1 quarter of 1 percent of the land in Alberta alone.
(Of course you wouldn't put it in one location, it would be spread out across the country)
Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)
You'd have a lot of excess power in the summer -- you'd be generating 650TWh of excess power a year
> Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.
Or, convert the solar energy to heat, then back to electricity at 40% round trip efficiency. Needs only 2.5x the solar (or less, because some solar goes directly to the users without long term storage). The heat is very storable at scale, even for seasonal storage.
> Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)
Please also consider land for biofuel/biodiesel.
1 in 3 acres of Canadian canola (amounting to roughly 7 million acres of farmland) goes directly into producing feedstock for the global and domestic biofuel markets. https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/daily/conservatives-diesel-...
For 7 million acres (Canadian acres - 16% Capacity Factor)
Annual Electricity Generation (16% CF): ~4,467 Terawatt-hours (TWh/year)
National Scale Comparison:~7.4× Canada's total annual electricity consumption (~600 TWh/year)
Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office. Actual average car use is closer to 25,000km/year (15,000 miles is the us average). But cars are not all road users. The "100 teslas/hour" standard is to accomidate trucks too.
If you are planning infrastructure like highways, national averages are irrelevant. It is the same debate that Hertz had when it dropped teslas: charging infrastructure is local and rental car locations (airports) cannot support the needed power density.
Averages are meaningless. You need to understand trips.
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles.
Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
> Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office.
Most countries have electricity at home and at office. They can charge at both locations. If you are still using kerosene lamps and haven't started using electricity at home, you have bigger problems than charging infrastructure.
You provide no evidence of the number of cars or the kilometres driven
23.5 million light-duty vehicles
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241021/dq241...
If each one were to drive 25,000 km (way higher than the NJC assume on https://www.njc-cnm.gc.ca/s3/d896/en, way higher than the insurance complanies say is the average - https://affiliatedinsurance.ca/blogs/how-average-mileage-per...)
It would require electricity to provide for 587500 million km of driving each year, that's about 118,000 million kWh, or 118 TWh.
Your statement
> 10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels
Is tricky to understand what you are on abbout as it's not clear what on earth you mean by this as solar panels aren't measured in kWh. kWh per year perhaps.
You are talking about delivering power to a specific location, not generating power. This is an argument from a decade ago, reality has proven that isn't a problem.
For what its worth, I drive over 30,000 km a year and very rarely use a public charger.
The math is already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49952816
Don't do the math for homeless people. Most people live in homes. Homes usually have electricity, unless you live in a 4th world country. All buildings have electricity. Just park and plug in.
You need to go to a gas station BECAUSE there is no supply of gasoline straight to home. Homes have electricity. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, South Sudan, Yemen, remotest village in India. I don't know where you live, but if your home doesn't have electricity, your country has bigger problems to deal with than buying Teslas and DC Fast Chargers.
Highways. Highways need to support people traveling beyond the range of thier vehicles, be that a car or bus/truck. People could also eat and use the bathroom at home, but highways must still make space for restaurants and restrooms.
I ran into that problem during covid. I had to do a few work-related 1000-mile drives and they had closed most all the restrooms!
And my home is also home to a few hundred other people. Installing enough chargers for all our cars would require a massive grid upgrade that our city would never support. Not everyone lives in a suburb.
Highways often have powerlines nearby at least every now and then. With those you can take power from roofs many kilometres away!
And what you say about apartments is wrong, it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve heard of plenty of apartment blocks installing chargers, they have load management systems to manage the load and believe it or not, not every single apartment occupant will need to charge their car every day at exactly the same time as everyone else!
My building looked into it (a complex of several buildings sharing one giant underground carpark). Installing 300 chargers (one at each spot) would cost millions and take years to radar and cut the channels in the concrete. Even if done, the city connection to the facility would need a million-dollar upgrade too going all the way to the local substation. And then the local fire department had an opinion: they were not happy at the concept of 300 EVs in one underground structure. There are no rules limiting such things today (also on car ferries) but we are one bad fire away from some firecode regulation about EVs underground.
> Installing enough chargers for all our cars would require a massive grid upgrade that our city would never support
Do you not have an ovens? Or electric shower? Mine use 7kW, same as the car charger.
Except not every home has a driveway. With on street parking the norm in many places. Trailing a lead to your car on the other side of the road is frowned upon
Streets have streetlights. Streetlights are on poles. Poles have electricity that lights need. Utility can add chargers. Magically, the problem is solved.
Streetlights are low power.
Car chargers are high power.
For example https://electricbrighton.com/news/considerations-for-lamp-po... says charging times are 18 hours, which is hardly overnight.
Plus you couldn't do it anywhere where thieves steal copper. Car charging cables would quickly become a theft target.
Thats 18 hours if your battery is at 0%.
Most people drive 20 - 40 miles/day, hardly 10% of the battery. You will be fine.
You could also charge at work. They should have more than lamp posts.
I drive 90-130 miles a day and charge every night using the same power my oven pulls. It costs me 3 cents a mile, or equivalent of about $1 a gallon. It takes about 4 or 5 hours.
> Plus you couldn't do it anywhere where thieves steal copper. Car charging cables would quickly become a theft target.
Are you from the past? This simply doesn't happen. The reality is millions of people drive electric cars, and while there are some issues - mainly around the minority who don't have their own driveway, and the tiny numbers who drive over 70,000km year, it simply works.
People certainly steal diesel though.
Home solar arrays are 10-100kw (order of magnitude).
EVs go 2-5 miles per kWh.
So, the charge rate is 20-500 miles per hour when the sun is out.
Assume one extra EV per house, round robin. New EVs are $10-60K, depending on county. The solar is, say, $30K.
So, $60-210K per house for ten years of energy independence for a two car ICE house. ICE cars wear out faster than EVs. You can figure gas, grid and inflated maintenance on the ICE route yourself, but the math works.
Of course, used EVs more than halve my estimates,
> ICE cars wear out faster than EVs
Gonna need a citation on that, given that the average EV battery lifetime is 10-20 years.
> Uh... Cars are fuel tanks on wheels...
Sure, but you don't have inexhaustible source of crude oil and a refinery in your backyard!
But Sun reliably shows up most days. It doesn't ghost. Sunlight can't be sanctioned, tariffed, taxed, embargoed, pirated, nuked, rebuked, rebuffed, offended. Sunlight is also compatible with most religious beliefs (god is light, etc).
> But Sun reliably shows up most days.
Gonna need a citation on that, where I live in the Midwest there are legitimately times where I haven't seen the sun for 2 straight weeks. Not to mention some latitudes I've lived at where the sun doesn't get up till like 9 and is already almost gone by 4.
Like AZ, CA, Texas sure go nuts solarizing. But there are plenty of people for whom that's not really an option.
Its okay, you don't need to believe it.
Solar panels work even if its cloudy: Power generation typically drops to 10% to 25% of normal capacity under heavy, grey overcast skies, but can reach 40% to 60% (or higher) under thin or partly cloudy skies.
> most days
cries
> a refinery in your backyard
Funny thing is, fuel can be transported, so that's not needed!
If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.
I'm sure we'll see a transition to electric some day, it is more efficient purely from a physics standpoint. But I'd be shocked to see the military transition before civilian industry.
Most countries do not have enough to independently supply their own energy needs from fossil fuels, and they need to import more or less continuously, while renewable energy infrastructure needs building out and then lasts a very long time. This massively affects the strategic effects of losing your supply: one becomes an acute problem very quickly while the other is still a problem but it takes a lot longer to become a real problem.
I don't think the main focus is on converting military operations themselves to work without fossil fuels, but more that if you can convert your civilian industry then you have a much better overall strategic position because your total demand for fossil fuels is much lower. (Strategy is a lot more than just your military)
You only need solar panels once. They do not need fueling, refueling, lubricants, anything at all.
Solar panels have 25 year warranty. Can you think of anything that you have bought or can buy with a 25 year warranty?
At the end of 25 years, they will produce 92%. Perfectly acceptable for a few more decades. The latest panels produce 740 - 800W+/panel, this is sufficient for a lifetime without ever having to think of upgrades.
> And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.
You still need raw materials to build oil tanks and pipelines and fuel trucks. They don't grow on trees.
> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
The problem is net usage. The UK has oil fields and it owns refineries, but it uses a lot more fuel than could be extracted and processed with these operations even if somehow Capitalism was dead and the State seized control of everything for domestic use rather than corporate profit.
The energy balance data I've looked at doesn't go back more than this century so maybe in the 1980s or something it would have been theoretically possible, but it isn't today and hasn't been for decades.
> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
That won't help you if you can't refine it. Russia has more oil than most and has/had lots of refineries. Ukraine has taken out so many of them that Trump is complaining it's affecting the price of diesel (even though the US also has lots of oil and lots of refineries).
Oil infrastructure is temporary, expensive and fragile whereas panels work for 30 years.
I've been thinking about this (more [1]) and I do believe smaller grids will be the future for many reasons. I guess this is another reason. But the transition from large grids to small grids has no obvious, easy path because a large grid without total market saturation falls apart as maintenance is averaged over fewer and fewer users.
One side benefit though is that it would stop utilities being able to push data center costs onto consumers, something that regulators and governments thus far seem completely unwilling to do.
Oh and distributed infrastructure and leadership (the so-called "mosaic defense") is (yet) another reason why the Iran war was always unwinnable from the start.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49902903
Indeed. The future is off-grid and community level mini/micro grids.
There is no need to build/maintain transmission network.
Legacy grid is production in far away places, miles and miles of transmission, then a distribution network. The distribution network built for homes is sufficient for homes to participate in grid for redundancy. All buildings can produce energy. Rooftop is proven. Next is vertical solar-- which adds ~4 hours of production. EVs become a storage reservoir and supply power back to the grid (V2X). Add some BESS if needed.
Villages in developing countries (half the population in Asia, Africa) can go completely offgrid. Start with plugins, slowly upgrade to bigger panels. No transmission network needed.
A key enabling technology for this is long term thermal storage, which I've been emphasizing here. It is claimed to work on a scale of ~100 kW or higher, storing heat at 600 C with losses less than 1% per month and capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity. This is very well suited for isolated microgrids.
Thats terrific! The plug-and-play layer of storage is plug-in batteries (as an extension of plug-in solar: if you can supply power from solar, you can also supply from batteries)
The first layer is storage is EVs, which is inevitable. EVs have humongous batteries.
Next layer, add thermal storage.
The transition is off-grid.
The technology and the means are there - whats required is the willingness to adopt to the self-powered lifestyle.
Many, many folks have done this - stepped off the grid and live on self-harvested local energy sources - however, the grid is powerful.
It is difficult for entire cities to do away with it so rapidly .. at least until PV harvesting gets a significant order or two cheaper and more efficient…
I think it’s pretty obvious that electric transportation needs to fully adopt integrated energy harvesting. This seems to be an obvious legislative low-hanging fruit.
Individual self sufficiency is a bad solution. It's hard to scale to the point everyone can afford it, and it means risks like your inverter breaking down turn catastrophic so you need to invest in extra backups. You lose a lot of efficiency and flexibility.
I think it's way better to make a community grid. That means your home might only have solar without a storage system because there's a shared battery down the road, using cheaper but more dangerous chemistry you don't want in your home. You pay a small share of maintenance costs and pay off investments you helped decide because it's a co-op. And if that's not enough you can exchange with another neighborhood.
Basically I'm saying power should work like the internet. Independent systems that don't need to be self sufficient, but they're still resistant to failure because there is no centralized control.
> I think it's way better to make a community grid.
Indeed, like Internet, autonomous networks with connections.
US subdivisions can be a micro grid, a few hundred homes.
There are a lot of condo communities, the common elements (roof, etc) are the HOA responsibility. These can do community solar and grid.
In the metros of third world countries, there is a huge growth of gated communities with high rises. These can be net zero with their own production and grid.
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While solar is helpful, when Russian missile attacks result in blackouts, Ukrainian cities mostly run on diesel, gasoline, and gas powered generators (source: saw it). I think the advantage of them is that they are mobile, and plug-and-play. Majority of consumers are densely placed which is a problem for decentralized solar usage, and centralized solar requires infrastructural changes, and could share the same being-target problem with other centralized solutions.
Gasoline is renewable, nobody mentioned a timeline for renewing.
If you power your generator off some homemade booze from stuff growing outside however, that is renewable.
I am not sure if solar panel are worth using in places where the sky is clear only several months a year. A desert (for example, in Africa or Emirates) would be a better place for them.
Wouldn't it be better to have thousands of traditional natural gas, coal or diesel-powered generators to replace large centralized plants? They are compact (easier to hide). A 2 MW generator is a size of a truck. And portable 24 MW generator is a size of several trucks. Before the war, they had ~44 GW of generation (~1 kW per person), so one needs thousands of mobile generators to replace the system, and I doubt anyone provided them.
I wish there was a comparison of installation costs and generation costs for traditional and renewable energy. Without comparison, it might be that renewables are simply not worth investing yet.
One company advertises solar panels [1] and claims that 1 MW scale array requires 3000 panels and costs over $1M. While used diesel-powered 2MW generator costs several hundreds thousands USD. Why would someone buy one array when for that price several diesel generators can be bought?
Traditional energy is cheap. For example, Russia has 240 GW of generation, almost no solar and wind, and electricity costs 8 cents per kWh and in the West the energy is super expensive despite using solar and wind power. Also, diesel costs 65 RUB/liter, or 2.94 USD/US gallon (if 1 US gallon = 3.78 L) and again in the West for some reason it is overpriced. Maybe the renewables are only profitable with overpriced natural resources and government subsidies, without a comparison it is difficult to say.
[1] https://solartechonline.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-array/
Natural gas& co need infrastructure to be carried around, stored, processed etc.. you have just traded a single target power plant for a single target gas pipeline.
It can be transported by a truck? No infrastructure needed.
You don’t buy it from the truck though. The truck buys it from a massive storage facility at the refinery, fills the truck, the truck drives off and fills a hole someplace. Finally you buy it out of the hole.
A diesel powered generator doesn't generate anything it converts expensive but heavily subsidized fuel into pretty similar value electricity that often requires more subsidies for distribution networks.
Why is fuel so costly in Russia? In Libya and Venezuela, prices are around $0.02 to $0.03 per liter.
Companies there decided to earn more money instead of earning less.
The current war plays a part.
If every building and other piece of infrastructure essentially powers itself, that means to disable a bunch of targets you now can't just disable a central substation that feeds them, you have to disable the targets themselves, and depending on the nature of the targets that may no longer be economical.
It also no longer makes sense to attack the connecting lines between them as well.
Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
People built centralized grids because it's cheaper to build and service when the equipment is concentrated in one place. The economy of scale kicks in.
If you move to decentralized so there's fewer outages, but now you're paying extra to maintain it, your solution is not as good as it used to be, that's economic damage right there.
And your enemy probably will also stop targeting the small decentralized grid elements, so they're not spending bucks on missiles. They can use more of them to hit other parts of your economy that are still centralized.
Estimating the net impact of this change is bigger than the article suggests.
> Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
Russia's goal in attacking Ukraine's energy sector is to make the country ungovernable. They attack the energy sector in winter because they know that causes suffering and hope that will cause the populace to turn against their government or at least against the war. It's not just a matter of causing economic damage, turning off the heat is a means to an end in ending the war in their favor.
That is a stated goal but it's repeatedly happened through history that someone has attempted to do that same thing and what it really did was make the population even more eager to go to war to defeat you.
But isn't West getting tired of war? For example, in Germany, an "Alternative for Germany" is winning which calls for making a deal with Russia to get the cheap energy and stop supporting the war. West thought that Russian economy would crumble under sanctions, but instead it seems that Western economies are not doing great, and the West has depleted its ammunition reserves due to the war in the Middle East.
Most polls in the EU show around 60% support for military assistance to Ukraine. People are fed up with many things and opposition parties are more likely to be pro Russian to get that vote. If anything the last years have shown Russia's true face and I don't think there is much appetite for renewing those business deals which have been shown to be such a dangerous dependency.
Ukraine is the one being attacked here, not Germany. I am not sure what your point is. Certainly, Europe in general is tired of the war. Western Europe has been against war in general for a long time. That's not necessarily a sign that they're going to stop supporting Ukraine. Different countries, of course, will do different things, but overall, signs are, while Europe is tired of war and wants it to end, Europe is not willing to end it on Russia's terms. We will see countries have been flowed their support for Ukraine, but I would say overall all signs are Europe is still going to continue supporting Ukraine in the war for the foreseeable future. Only time will tell, but that's my current read of the situation.
Yes of course, but that is the point. Why do you hit substations when you could permanently destroy the individual targets of that outage?
You do it because targeting the individual sites is not economical. If every 1000 units of currency of range you inflict on your opponent costs you 2000 units of currency, you are basically just hurting yourself.
You target the substation because with one hit you can deny the service on many smaller targets, something which may not be economical if you targeted them one by one.
That means there are targets that would have been attractive targets in a central system, that are no longer attractive in a decentralized one.
Generally centralized systems can be run more efficiently, however it depends since electric transmission is not lossless and the construction/upkeep of the infrastructure is not free. That means the geography of the place plays a huge role. The more spread out the individual sites are, the more a decentralized system makes sense.
Renewable upkeep is a question of the requirements. I know mountain huts in high alpine areas that run on solar for the past two decades and have had basically zero maintenance cost, if you don't count the occasional shoveling of snow. Batteries of course need to be swapped out as well, if you have them, but they can also last a while. But the cost of running centralized power to a single high alpine hut is incomparably higher (if it wasn't, that is what would be there).
Even the big targets nowadays take hundreds of drones launched to destroy, because of air defense. Air defense seems like one of those thigs that's easier to concentrate around a select number of key sites. You won't put a Patriot next to each residential building, but you can put some next to a big power plant.
And the drones today are made with large targets in mind, carrying one bigger payload of explosive. I wonder how they can change if the goal would be to target stacks of fragile solar panelts with best cost efficiency. I've seen on the news yesterday that Russia started targeting bridges more because that have some new payload that's more destructive to them than just a big lump of explosive.
I don't know what's actually true here, just some ideas on what else need to be taken into account.
What does the distinction between economic damage and not being an end goal in itself have to do with anything? Either way it's a live goal being pursued and decentralizing will mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain.
You're right that centralized grids are cheaper (as long as the utilities maintaining them are good faith actors) and that switching to decentralized solutions brings new maintenance costs. But this is a war, the choice isn't been idealized central distribution and costs of decentralization, it's between the latter and a grid under siege by missiles. Relying on a grid that's being struck by missiles with no backup plan isn't economical either.
Also in your other comment you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
> mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain
The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.
In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).
And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.
> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.
My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.
> Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
This is not true - they’ve regularly targeted and hit kindergartens, supermarkets, gas stations, town squares/markets, residential buildings, etc. None of these targets are “budget draining” but instead are intended to terrify and hurt civilians. Russia isn’t calculating or being strategic at the level you suggest - instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive even at the cost of its own strategic interests.
I agree that they hit civilian targets, the evidence is there. How do you know they targeted them? Missiles sometimes can miss or or be shot down by air defenses, then fall and explode.
It's been broken down many times with a lot of examples from history: harassing civilians only mobilizes them. So Russia must be not only cruels but also stupid if you want to argue that they're targeting civilians.
The death toll among civilians also does not look like they're being targeted, more like collateral damage. Typically when you see a headline like "another bloodthirsty attack of Russian orcs of Ukraine's civilians", you open the post to see that there's 4 dead + 15 injured. Like if they had a goal of killing civilians, they wouldn't do it by hundreds.
It's cheap to demonize and dismiss the side you don't like, picture them as cruel, stypid, evil. And from there, creatively explain everything they do with these qualities. It seldom helps you understand reality though.
So it could be that your case is special, you're not just being lazy and racist in building your worldview, but people you don't like are actually unreasonably cruel, evil and also stypid. Or maybe not, and your explanation is lazy and of poor quality. Guess which one is more likely.
Good points, didn't know that.
> How do you know they targeted them?
I'm not sure how those killed in Bucha were _not_ targeted?
I'm also not sure how the execution of POWs could be accidental (with the evidence used in various reports provided by videos taken by Russians themselves) or the documented systematic torture (HRW report: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/11/russias-systematic-tortu...)
Or the kidnap of children (documented by UN) or the findings of the UN human rights commission:
> The Commission found that Russian authorities committed a wide range of war crimes, and the corresponding human rights violations, including willful killings, attacks on civilians, unlawful confinement, torture, rape and other sexual violence, as well as unlawful transfers and deportations of children.
Or the findings of HRW (Human Rights Watch) of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on populated areas, including homes, hospitals and schools.
Reading about this stuff - by credible sources like the UNHRC, Amnesty International, HRW, endless media and independent journalists' - and forming an opinion does not make me "lazy and racist".
Sometimes, one side are simply the bad guys and in this particular case, it's the Russian regime.
> instead its actions are often simply cruel, inhumane and vindictive
Every war is cruel and inhumane, so why single out Russia here?
Because I was responding directly (I even quoted the line) to the claim that Russian’s actions could be understood as being part of a “clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget”.
Your attempt to deflect is very odd. We’re discussing an aspect of Russia’s behavior and strategy with respect to the invasion of Ukraine. If you want me to comment on the behavior of a different belligerent in a different conflict then feel free to start such a discussion concerning that conflict - then I may (or may not) respond to claims about the behavior of some country that isn’t Russia.
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Western propaganda planting dead bodies and destroying residential buildings.
If 1% of my tax contributions helps people suffering from Russian terror, that’s money well-spent.
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These attacks have been too well documented for your "propaganda" attack to appeal to anyone but the brainwashed or those acting in bad faith. Outside of Western media, multiple UN reports have presented direct photographic and have found physical evidence for these attacks.
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Sustained-large-scale-attacks-b... - documents and presents the irrefutable evidence for, among other attacks, the double ballistic missile strike on the historic centre of Sumy on Palm Sunday. The second exploded above a public area, killing at least 31 civilians and injuring 80. The UN describes civilians traveling to church, going to the market, working at a coffee stand, etc.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - this is a formal UN commission report on a series of Russian attacks in Kherson which struck a number of supermarkets, a gas station, railway station and residential buildings.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies... - another UN Commission report that found that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a civilian apartment building, killing 24 civilians. There was no military or economic target there and so the UN concluded that Russian forces had conducted an indiscriminate attack on a residential building
https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Russian-attack-strikes-shopping... - found that a Russian long-range drone struck an operational shopping centre full of civilians, then another drone struck it about 30 minutes later. At least 16 civilians were killed and 128 injured. Investigators found no military presence, activity or equipment at the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre - the Bucha massacre of civilians
Or read any of the Amnesty International reports (who have also been critical of some of Ukraine's actions so can hardly be accused of purveying Ukrainian propaganda), such as:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/ukraine-belea... - attacks on residential houses, schools, kindergartens, medical facilities and food stores in Izium
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/ukraine-major... - attack on Ohmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/7508/2023/en/ - a long list of attacks on childrens' schools
I could go on and on with such reports but I suspect, from the tone and implication of your response, I'm not going to change your mind with evidence.
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>Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain"
Oh but it is, there is no other explanation why civilian heating facilities are being targeted during winter otherwise, they don't cost much to fix, and actually cost a lot to target, but they do bring a lot of pain to the civilian population (winters in Ukraine are brutal).
And as if it wasn't obvious enough, the anti-ukrainian government bot campaigns that always coincide with the attacks make it obvious beyond belief.
>why civilian heating facilities are being targeted during winter
Because these are cogeneration[0] facilities - they generate both electricity and heat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
Sure, but they generate civilian electricity, military has generators, and had them for years, so it just doubles the war crime.
>civilian electricity
Luckily, NATO spokesman answered that question 27 years ago.
Press conference by Mr Jamie Shea, NATO Spokesman, 25 May 1999 [0]
Question (Norwegian News Agency): I am sorry Jamie but if you say that the Army has a lot of back-up generators, why are you depriving 70% of the country of not only electricity, but also water supply, if he has so much back-up electricity that he can use because you say you are only targeting military targets?
Jamie Shea : Yes, I'm afraid electricity also drives command and control systems. If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign. But as long as he doesn't do so we will continue to attack those targets which provide the electricity for his armed forces.
[0] https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/1...
Checked out your other comments, wish I would've done so before engaging.
Bye.
Yeah, the C++ comments this gentleman posts ate rather repelling.
"Western and Ukrainian propaganda wants you to believe so you keep voting for the politicians that prop the regime in Kiev with your tax money"
I'd rather not discuss it with people who can't even spell Kyiv correctly, I'm good.
EDIT: Read your comments, two for two, damn.
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>I see nothing controversial in the quote you give
Yes, I know, I read your comment history. Bye.
> they don't cost much to fix
I think power plants are expensive and not cheap to fix.
Not compared to how much the rockets that are used to hit them cost.
>The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
Again there's an integral relation between those two things. Insofar as that distinction reinforces any point, it would seem to be the decentralization is a cost in and of itself and that Russia would consider that objective achieved once the cost of decentralization was incurred. As you point out there wouldn't be motivation to attack individual PV systems, yet you keep insisting there's a vulnerability to attack even though the whole point of your inflict pain/drain budget distinction is that such an attack wouldn't have a motivation.
>These are all hypotheticals
Why does them being hypothetical make having contradictory positions on them more defensible? One thing hypotheticals test is whether the totality of your explanations hang together without contradicting each other. And these aren't even distinct hypotheticals that are isolated from each other. They're contemplating basically the same scenario.
If talking about Russia not attacking decentralized system because being decentralized was the inflicted cost is the goal, then individual residential PVs aren't a really target after all. If they are a target, then Russia either wasn't satisfied that the switch inflicted damage that met a strategic goal, or you were wrong that they're distinguishing between inflicting pain and meeting some higher level strategic objective. I don't see that the hypotheticals are actually quarantined off from each other, they're about the same thing, so the contradiction can't be explained away by insisting each part of the contradiction was quarantined off from each other in separate hypotheticals.
A hypothetical is not a position. They are a logical/rhetorical tool that let's you see what are the implications of X being true without saying that X is true. The point of a hypothetical is seeing where something leads without making that something your position.
One reason to do hypotheticals is to see if X being true leads to any valuable, surprising implications. So that after that you can go back to talking about whether X is true, this time knowing why you need to know it (or skip talking about it if it doesn't lead anywhere interesting).
Making two hypothetical that contradict each other is extremely useful and common way to use them. One typical example is case matching. If you show that some Y holds under the assumption that X is true, then you show that Y also holds under the assumption that X is not true; this allows you to conclude that Y is true, no matter whether X is true.
In don't know if Ukraine moving to decentralized will make attacks on its grid useless. In two differs branches here I consider what happens if it does and what happens if it doesn't. In response to whatever the other commenters seem to believe in. When someone states X as their position, sometimes I prefer to see what are the implications of it, and if any are interesting come back to talking about whether their position is true. If no implications are surprising, I won't even approach the costlier task of trying to understand if the commenters position is true.
You seemed to believe that decentralizing will make grid attacks not viable, and from there try to go to saying decentralization helps. My point to you was that there's a few variables (decentralization penalty, Russia's next best target after grid) that must be taken into account if you were to conduct an argument like that. I'm saying that without stating (or even having) a position on whether decentralization will stop grid attcks.
In the other thread the discussion was about whether grid attcks will stop. And my point was that I don't find it obvious that they won't.
Strictly speaking, none of this was stating my position. There's so much more to logic and rhetorics than stating positions and defending them.
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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't post vile dreck like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
China sells killer drones to each side. China sells solar panels to each side to power their killer drones. Let barbarians fight barbarians is how Henry Kissinger described China's geopolitical strategy in his book "On China." Ukraine and Russia's drone and killer robot industries would collapse without constant imports of Chinese components. Please go look it up in chat or whatever if you don't believe me. Soon, every country will be in a proxy war with China as they sell all these little death gadgets to all sides of every conflict, everyone who wants them, cartels, guerilla groups, absolutely anyone with a grudge anywhere on planet earth, any side, as long as they're fighting each other. That's IMHO, why, for better or for worse, they're so ridiculously cavalier about AI safety.
At least with U.S imperialism, for the most part, we only funded and sold weapons to one side.
We need more positive stories like this
They are also the cheapest source of energy with the fewest dependencies. The last part is why they will remain illegal. The power structures of society will do anything to maintain themselves, and the current power structures are largely based around exchanging money for essential commodities. This doesn't work if they stop being essential.
> The last part is why they will remain illegal
Where are intermittent energy sources illegal?
In the USA. Offshore wind (that's where most of the wind is) is illegal because one of Trump's golf clubs is in sight of a wind farm and he hates it. Solar inverters are also illegal because chy nuh.
I'm absolutely not a fan of Trump and of politically motivated liars in general regardless of their affiliations.
Gas and diesel generators are charging small batteries (3coflow types), at least on the frontline because solar panels are good ways to invite incoming fires
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If you want security the concept of the mega city needs to be abandoned.
In a decentralized country you don’t care about terrorism attacks, nuclear bombs, coups, revolutions, drones and what not.
Mega cities are a lot more efficient and I think most people would rather live in one than a small town.
And they're actually easier to protect because you can build all your bunkers, barracks, drone bays and ABMs close together. The attack surface is a lot smaller. In less urban countries you have to decide what needs protection, and if you guess wrong more people will end up dead.
We should be decentralized in terms of power, not geographic distance. A city where everyone has a gun and military training is much harder to attack than 100 villages with the same total population. The important thing is making sure that even if the city falls theres a plan to avoid civilian casualties, and the rest of the country is independent enough to work without it.
The thing is history disagrees with this. Any war from past to present, cities fall relatively quickly and dramatically while the countryside can resist empires for decades. America, the most powerful military the planet has ever seen, has lost twice now to the 100 villages in Vietnam and now Afghanistan.
Cities are often strong fortified positions that can withstand anything a peer enemy can throw against them. In WW2, the Siege of Leningrad lasted over 2 years and ultimately failed.
In Afghanistan, the issue was that the country does not really make sense. The central government is usually weak and illegitimate, and it doesn't have effective control over most of the country. The US went in with a small force and quickly defeated the central government. But because they lacked the manpower to control the country, they created a new central government, which was again too weak and illegitimate for the task. And then the situation just dragged on, until the US lost interest.
As for the Vietnam War, cities rarely changed hands in the war before the US started withdrawing its troops. The US was unwilling to invade North Vietnam, because it was afraid of an outcome similar to the Korean War, where it would have to face China and/or the USSR directly. And North Vietnam was too weak to invade the South.
If that were true then everyone would have centralised their industry in WW2 to make it resist the bombing. They didn’t, because having one small target is way worse than having dispersed targets.
Trading off efficiency for security is not wise unless you are in war. The same applies to supply chains.
By the time you are in a war it is too late. Far better to be prepared.
Its not just war either, as the pandemic showed. Trade disputes that lead to sanctions, natural disasters, and lots of other things require the same security.
Its worth paying a bit more for the security, for the same reasons people buy insurance.
>> It’s worth paying a bit more for the security, for the same reasons people buy insurance.
Yeah but this “ If you want security the concept of the mega city needs to be abandoned.” is not a bit more. It’s paying more for insurance than the asset insured. Perhaps you heard of the term over engineer or the cure is worse than the disease. I think it applies here as well.
I am not sure how efficient we are when the US spends like 20% of its budget for military, police and fire depts.
Let alone all of the super expensive infrastructure that mega cities need, for example subways, buses, wide highways for traffic, heavy transportation for supply
All of which is more expensive, per resident, in the countryside.
"super expensive infrastructure" that is always going to be cheaper in a city compared to building equivalents in the countryside.
Citation needed. Those are less than 5% of any budget I've seen.
Its not even more secure, Russia didn't conquer Kiev and Harkov because they're huge. They were only able to take on smaller cities and towns.
"In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace." - Sun Tzu
“Encircling the cities from the countryside" (农村包围城市) is the foundational military and geopolitical strategy developed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap forward, building a distributed self sustaining (military) industrial complex. It was very hard to build and maintain. Altho a lot moved to the coastal areas again, there are constant oscillations and negations between the rich costal cities and the hinterland (data centers, taobao villages)
Not just for security - generally speaking if you have high speed rail infrastructure connected to a good and fast public transport grid, there's genuinely no reason to build a huge city.
High density housing is very slow to traverse and getting from point A to B in a big city might take more time than getting on a train that takes you to another city 200km away in 30 min. In a traffic jam, you'll be lucky to do 5km in the same time.
You have it backwards. Passenger railways only make sense when they connect large population centers. Public transport networks outside of urban areas barely exist.
I don't. High speed rail is everywhere in Europe and connects cities with a populations of a few hundred k to maybe a low million.
These mid sized cities are usually along the rail lines, like beads on a string.
Whereas these megacities are built densely and usually have radial transport networks which require insane levels of urban planning and are difficult to navigate in the best of cases.
Public transit requires density even when the cities are small. If the population is too evenly distributed, there are no routes with enough traffic to justify good transit service. People will then choose to drive if they can. And if transit connections to railway stations are not good enough, there is not enough demand for high-speed rail, because most people will choose to drive to the next city.
“Choose to drive”? What an elitist perspective we have.
Populations either have personal vehicles or they don’t. For many of my neighbors, “choosing to drive” is an absurd economic proposition. This choice involves paying for the car, the gas, the maintenance, and the insurance, at the very least. Maintaining your privilege, avoiding tickets and accidents, all a delicate urban ballet.
Cars are often assets that will save and even help you earn money, but it is a very interesting thing when the upper classes are incentivized to give up vehicle ownership, or eschew driving. When cars are not saving money & time, they become liabilities, and a millstone around your neck. Some people feel relieved to get rid of them.
Many people love cars and love driving, but car culture was foisted on the unwilling public by the military-industrial complex. You drive cars and have highways because of war. Now your soccer mom drives a toddler munching tank to her jobs. Think about it.
For many people, choosing to be Taylor Swift would be easier than “choosing to drive”. It’s either public transit, or bike/walk/stay home.
Public transit is mostly about the middle 80%. If it's useful for them, they are willing to pay to keep it that way one way or another. If it's not, they won't pay, and the service will be bad for those who have no other options.
Helsinki just completed a 10 km light rail line that cost ~€400 million, including some major bridges. That's maybe €10k per current and future resident in the areas connected by it to the city center. Spending that much for an option to have good public transit only makes sense if most of those people are going to use the line.
Yeah and cars are expensive, in real estate as well. A car needs like 20m2 minimum for a parking spot and the bit of road to get to it, if you build something like a garage. That m2 isn't really cheaper than living space, and that's half the size of a small apartment.
So most places either build less dense, or accept that wherever you go, there might not be parking spaces nearby. Which if you have public transport, often means its easier to park in some low cost P+R and take the subway.
I'm fairly convinced its within the means of almost every human (say like 5 of the 8 billion people) to drive a car. That includes people in African countries with like $1000 GDP per capita. Sure it will be genuniely awful, 30+ years old, held together by duct tape, society might want to stop you from owning something so horrible, or make it not worth it, but the economic bar for something that drives is so low, that people will scrap working or easy to fix cars.
There's a tradeoff there, because a very distributed society will also be able to resist disruption and control from a central state.
Writing from London I'm not planning on abandoning. It might be nice to have a country place too in case Russia nukes.
There was far less risk to cities before social media algorithms sent the world fucking mad and helped get a total psychopath into the oval office and tore apart the world order and globalism.
But yeah, it's looking like state sponsored terrorism is back on the menu for those in cities, once everyone moves to the countries, small communities can be targeted by random drone attacks by Russians or something. Will be great.
This is greenwashing.
The article suggests that renewables are somehow more helpful in a war when your grid is targeted by drones and missiles. It doesn't do a comparison to back it up though.
Decentralized power production vs. centralized does make sense: decentralized doesn't offer a single point of failure taking out which causes a lot of damage.
But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too? Sounds only better than renewables because it doesn't go up and down throughout a day, and doesn't need grid to amortize the jumps.
Renewables sort of need to be out there in the open to harvest energy from the elements. Solar needs sunlight, wind needs to spin its huge blades in open air. A diesel generator, on the other hand, perfectly goes underground, much harder to target.
So the article doesn't really establish that renewables offer a clear advantage over fossils in a war.
Upd: some comments below have convinced me that fossils don't decentralize as easily as renewables.
>But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
If you sit on an oil well, perhaps. In practice every static part of the production and distribution chain is a centralized target: from wells over refineries to depots, roads, harbours and finally power plants. You simply can't run fossils in a distributed local-first approach. That's also the reason why even for a massive oil producer like Russia, Ukraine can cause billions in damages with drones costing a couple hundred grand.
Right. I think the most optimistic take would be that vegetable oil with some processing, can be used for diesel but I'm not sure how practical that is or how reliable access to waste vegetable oil is
Fair!
A drone blows up 1kWp solar panel you lose about 1Mwh in a year assuming it’s completely broken.
A drone blows up an oil carrying road vehicle you lose 350Mwh instantly.
You blow up a pipeline you knock out 1 million MWh a day
The drone will disbale more than one of those 1kW panels if it hits an array of them. Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage? Sounds a bit odd, because Wh is not the currency I pay bills with.
How much does it cost to replace an array of solar panels, compared to the cost of sending another diesel truck (and paying for the destroyed one + its fuel)?
>Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage?
Well there's an integral relation between the two, more kWh lost is more dollars lost. They both proxy for some venn diagram overlap that includes damage, cost, lost resources, and it's perfectly legitimate to reason from any permutation of those. It's notionally possible for different tech to attach those costs in different ways but in this case I would put the burden on you to explain the practical difference that you think cashes out in an advantage diesel has.
I'm not sure why you think a truck would be cheaper necessarily: smaller PV systems can range from $10k to $20k with no fuel payload. Is a diesel truck with a full payload of fuel really cheaper than that? And is a diesel truck supposed to be fueling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people depending on it at a time when bridges are getting bombed, and therefore an instance of centralization and attractive target for attack. And you said yourself you didn't think PV would be attacked because decentralizing in and and of itself inflicted the economic damage yet you've once again gone back to imaging a diesel advantage in the event of PV getting attacked.
> And is a diesel truck supposed to be fuelling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people
Completely correct, but then go one step further: Where does that truck fill up? At a depot where many other trucks do the same. That's an even more tempting target - centralised, stationary, flammable.
I do not think that there is an equivalent node in the solar alternative.
And where does that fuel depot get resupply from. etc. "decentralised" fossil fuel infrastructure isn't really a thing that exists.
Fair points.
Solar panels are dirt cheap. Which idiot would send drones to hit a solar panel? Going by your economic argument, use drones that cost hundreds of thousands of dollar to hit something thats costs 10 bucks?
Do you think thats sound strategy? The military generals in US would accept that?
> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Panels are small, numerous and widely dispersed, easy to install quickly and incrementally, and non-flammable.
Basically the opposite of (also stationary) centralised fossil fuel infrastructure.
It's clear which one is the more tempting target if you have a finite stockpile of drones.
> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a long time.
The diesel alone in the fuel truck that used to fill my 1000l oil fired tank costs far more than the number of solar panels a single drone could destroy, let alone the cost of the truck itself.
Hell my 1000l tank alone costs more even when empty.
You're comparing diesel to PV which doesn't speak to the merits of PV vs centralization. There's also the massive disadvantage of fuel distribution from diesel, which is a form of centralization and bottlenecking, and then there's fuel shortages and costs which PV doesn't have to bother with.
Also is Russia targeting individual PV systems? That's tantamount to targeting individual residences which, if we're granting that, there's no amount of decentralizing that would ever mitigate those attacks so diesel vs PV would be moot.
Lastly I don't think that's what greenwashing means. Greenwashing isn't representing renewables favorably, it's tying some external negative practice to language of environmentalism with vague buzzwords and questionable claims of environmental benefits to make that thing look better. But in this case there's no external thing being tied to environmentalism, we're just talking about PV directly.
Right, a classic example of Greenwashing would be the UK's Drax power plant.
Drax burns "waste wood" to make electricity and argues that this is a carbon neutral endeavour.
Now, on the one hand yes these are not fossil fuels. The trees grew, probably over decades or centuries, but they weren't underground for millions of years before we burned them. However, "waste wood" to a lay person conjures ideas of sawdust or the offcuts from woodworking or maybe the bark from trees pulped for paper, something like that. Drax actually uses specially made pellets, produced in places such as Canada, from whole forests which are designated "waste" so as to meet their requirements...
Because this is "green" the majority of the UK's "green electricity" subsidies are spent on Drax†. And yet when you see people ranting about these subsidies being too high, they will invariably point at Wind Farms and Solar power.
† Because Drax is relatively old, lots of its subsidies are via an obsolete scheme we don't get raw data for, so all we can see is that billions of pounds were spent in the overall budget and the rational explanation is that we paid them to Drax. In 2027 Drax will move entirely to Contracts for Difference like a modern renewable power plant so then we can see more clearly what we're getting and how much it's costing under those new CfDs.
At least there's a certain creativity to the concept of overseas waste forests. You could take that further argueing that the vessels importing the pellets only burn^H^H^H dispose of waste minerals, and demand more subsidies. Although “minerals” has a bad ring to it (uuugh, “mining”), so rather call it “waste bio detritus”, which it is according to the theory (“rotten dinosaurs”).
> But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
How would that possibly work? Everyone has their own oil well and refinery? Their own fuel depots?
And even if you were able to build all that, we would basically have giant bombs waiting to be ignited all over residential neighborhoods during war time...
I would invite you to think through the logistics of what you propose before you launch into multiple paragraphs that assume those logistics are solved.
I meant a diesel generator in a residential building. The refineries stay centralized somewhere safe (not a problem in Ukraine's case).
Then you don't solve the core problem of having a big juicy single point of failure. One that is very flammable at that, as Ukraine has proven in Russia recently.
Do you mean a generator that creates diesel from bullshit[1]? Or a diesel generator that generates electricity?
If its the latter, how is your idea decentralized fossil fuel? You are using the same fossil fuel supply chain as it exists today.
For decentralized, you need an oil well in your backyard, and a refinery. THEN a diesel generator, if you want electricity.
[1] Assuming you have enough cows
A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.
The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.
The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.
Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.
A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.
There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.
Remotest villages in India were doing gobar gas plants in 80s/90s. What you are saying is possible.
If you have enough cows/biomass, perhaps you can have a home biomass to methane converter. Then you can use it for cooking, heating, etc.
You can convert a petrol car to a CNG car.
You could also have a coal to liquid plant in the backyard and generate diesel or petrol.
You have to do without any cooling though, fridge, AC, etc. Cold can't be created. Without electricity, just with chemicals fuels, it is unlikely.
I don't think they have to worry about lack of access to cold for the next few months. I believe you're accurate re: India and sources of biomass in that context and the possibility of some processing/conversion, but how representative is that of the resources at disposal of the typical person in Ukraine? I imagine more urban residences with electricity and not a lot of cows.
Sorry, I was trying to be sarcastic and might've failed! There is no way to do distributed fossil fuel infra. I was suggesting the OP get a few dozen cows to build one!
My bad, I understand now and I completely agree. If you try and imagine exactly what domestically sourced diesel fuel is supposed to mean in practice it's going to range from unrealistic to downright comical.
That's not what greenwashing means. Greenwashing refers to marketing that sells a product as environmentally beneficial, while it's not in reality.
Your claim is that they're selling a product (renewables) as beneficial for the war, while it's not. If I were to invent a term for that, it might be "camo-washing".
Whether your argument makes sense or not, I don't know. But you fail to note the drawback of a diesel generator: it needs diesel, and thus logistics.
I meant greenwashing as pulling a reason to make something about renewables out of thin air. In this case article's choice to center it's argument on renewables is greenwashing. Maybe I need a different word, not sure.
The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me. What they do though is attribute the benefits of decentralized to renewables (ignoring how many buildings are powered by diesel in Ukraine today, those which did not receive that grant from Denmark to do solar), then completely skip potential downsides of renewables, and draw a conclusion from there.
> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.
Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.
Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.
Yeah, I agree greenwashing is not the word here. I don't know what is, but if anything I would say you're trying to express something that is in an important sense opposite to greenwashing (greenwashing is trying to make something look good by falsely presenting it as eco-friendly, you're accusing something of boosting renewables by falsely presenting it as tied to them)
And yes, decentralization is the core aspect that is important, but renewables are importantly much more decentralized end-to-end compared to a diesel generator, because renewables, once in place, have no real central point of failure, while the supply chain for the diesel in the generator still has very important central points of failure that can be attacked (and explode quite easily due to the large amounts of flammable material they are carrying). Distributing the generation does help smooth over short-term disruptions but the overall throughput in the longer term can still be disrupted.
Also, while renewables might be out in the open, they are cheap and spread out over a wide area, which makes them pretty cost-ineffective to attack compared to more concentrated facilities.
I don't think it's out of thin air, it's the reality of what's actually being used in Ukraine, and as comments in this thread have borne out it seems to have legitimate benefits, and so doesn't qualify as greenwashing.
Also if there's greenwashing, it means some questionable practice is being green washed. Apparently you think the idea of decentralization is the thing in this case... but you agree that decentralizing is a good idea and are more against the merits renewables, which is an anti renewables argument but not a correct diagnosis of something being greenwashed.
decentralising your fuel production and to a lesser extent distribution is not easy either though.
On "greenwashing". As the article said, the environmental aspect is at the bottom of Ukraine's list of concerns at the moment.
This is the most concrete evidence (if it wasn't clear to anyone not lobotomised by the fossil fuel industry propaganda already) that renewable energy is a sovereign asset, not an external risk like shipping gas and oil round the world from mostly western-hostile nations.
Ukrainians are fighting for their country and this is the route they take. Any government not doing that same is deliberately weakening their country.
But check the position of supposedly nation-first right wing political parties in the west and they all LOVE making their country energy dependent on Saudi Arabia or the US, or Russia. I wonder why that could be...
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