Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community
pveurope.eu
pveurope.eu
> The project, underway since the end of 2023, is focused on the renovation and energy upgrade of a five-storey, 60-apartment block. [..] Heat pumps and solar energy now supply a large residential building in full, a first for Ukraine. Böhling urges: “Solutions like this should be prioritised over gas heating in EU-funded reconstruction.”
Not the first. I don't think some people realise this, but Ukraine is a country with highly-modernised, strong, and well spread-out industrial base. This is why it took the invaders three whole years to seriously damage our CHP infrastructure to the point it cannot be repaired in a timely manner. And most new apartment blocks are built with heat pumps, geothermal anyway. Some smaller ones (such as the 5-story one they're taking about) were being retrofitted by housing cooperatives due to favourable economics of it. We are not third-world; most existing apartment blocks in all major cities are largely reliant on vast, redundant CHP infrastructure for power distribution and centralised heating. THAT is a solved problem.
What we need is more air defense platforms and replacement parts that we cannot easily manufacture, in numbers.
I expect Ukrainians don't actually need to be told this and are already getting creative with ensuring they have power. There's plenty of incentive there to make sure they are not overly dependent on centralized power and heating infrastructure. Of course it takes time to fix and upgrade all buildings; that's why the Russians can still have huge impact with their nightly strikes against civilian infrastructure.
I think Russia and Puting will get credited for inadvertently speeding up the energy transition across Europe by a few decades. Everybody is going cold turkey on Russian gas and the replacement isn't LNG. That's more of a stop gap solution until something more economical can be put in place. We're having pretty harsh winter here in Germany (and elsewhere in the EU). There's not a lot of talk about gas prices in the news so far. That's because we've had a few years to diversify our energy sources. LNG is now a big part of the mix, obviously. But the high price of that is also an incentive for people to consider alternatives like heat pumps.
Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.
I'm not sure why I'd care about news related to them that wasn't their dismantling.
I don't think it's entirely appropriate to ignore the risks of nuclear in the country that contains Chernobyl, and another different nuclear plant which is quite close to the front lines and was shut down by capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail.
We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this most clearly in China which is still burning tons of coal in 2026 and have had no compunction with nuclear ever.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.
Holy hell, I didn't know it was that bad. Thanks for pointing that out.
Maybe consider context before pasting your standard argument?
You have to think about the system as a whole as I said, not get blinded by some detail right now.
And yea, scaling up nuclear right now is probably not super useful as batteries and solar have dropped so much in price. But we certainly shouldn't shut down nuclear reactors like Germany did.
Accidents and the rug pool of US/Soviet capital killed growth of the industry.
See the RepowerEU plan for more details:
You are not going to get your way out of this with more efficient energy grids or heat pumps and using your money on that instead of bullets is the fool's way out if your goal is to sideline Russia. Of course the most hilarious thing is to think we aren't all still buying "sanctioned" russian products and they totally aren't being "smuggled" and then rebranded as Chinese or myriad of other sources -- which in fact offers options to INCREASE profits to Russian and Chinese government since now they can squeeze their citizens for payoff money to wash their products as non-Russian to bypass sanctions.
EU countries on the other hand don't do that, the French will riot if their morning croissant isn't crispy enough.
Thus, making energy independence and power grid reliability a priority is an important step if push comes to shove and Russia goes full crazy, attacking EU power grids.
Country at war is absolute worst place to bring your dumb ideas and cost others their time and protection to deal with you. People who do nothing should absolutely condemn the people doing something if that is the case.
-George Carlin
after decades of destroying nuclear, German energy independence and thus pegging German energy sourcing to Russian pipelines, resulting in the geopolitical mess we and Ukraine are in – to have the gall to even pretend they're doing any good here...
You have that backwards. In 2025 China installed 100x as much solar as nuclear.
I don't agree. Oil and gas can be sourced from many different countries, you don't have to rely only on Russia. Russia is just the obvious choice if you are in the middle of Europe, but there are many other producers.
If China stops the supply of solar panels today, you are only good if you have already achieved 100% energy needs coverage with solar. No large country is going to be at that level anytime soon.
You can't ignore physics and climate.
what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.
China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.
If you have a central power nuclear/gas/coal station and a bomb hits it, nobody has power.
if that happens it can be repaired more economically and faster – as has been repeatedly shown in Ukraine.
Chances are my roof won't be gone though.
If a central power plant is destroyed, 0% of the neighbourhood will have power, but 100% will have roofs.
Which is better in your opinion?
Heat vastly increases solar generation and battery demand.
If your goal is to stay on grid the payoff on solar isn't really realized for 10+ years, when not only are the panels paid off but the accumulation factor of a country full of people with solar panels reduces the grid strain on the conventional sources you list. Adding them for war-time reasons is overall a net negative vs just buying diesel heaters, distributing solar for actual off-grid purposes so people have communications, etc. It is not going to meaningfully reduce dependency on those sources during the period of the war -- that's why I assumed it had to be for off-grid alternative because in that case it would achieve that goal.
Of course it is better than nothing, assuming they did not waste too many domestic resources doing this Greenpeace stunt. But this on-grid solar component is not a serious proposition for wartime demand, and you would be WAY better off donating to maintaining/defending the existing hydro/nuclear/coal generation than trying to deploy enough solar to move the needle for solar grid resiliency within the timespan of the war. I guess I just assumed they were acting rationally and that is why I thought it might be used in off-grid scenarios, but you've disillusioned me of that.
Solar panels are easy to spot from a drone, and fragile, so it's easy to damage them.
My friends in Ukraine charge their ecoflows with a generator, because if you put a solar panel outside your drone team bunker, you invite incoming artillery.
And how do you plan to get the fossil fuels for these generators? Gas stations and oil pipelines are even easier and more centralised targets than solar panels.
I think you're thinking of massive gigantic centralised solar power plants, what if every single house has enough solar for the basic necessities, would Putin just carpet bomb every neighbourhood to rubble just to destroy the cheap Chinese solar panels?