In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults

realty_geek

We need more positive stories like this

atoav

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.

gnull

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.

jmyeet

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

thelastgallon

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.

mitxela

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.

whatever1

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.

newsclues

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

codedokode

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/

broken-kebab

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.

narrator

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.