In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
energytransition.org
energytransition.org
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.
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...
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).
cries
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The ethanol argument is a dying cause.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
This also applies to WMDs in general.
> 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.
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 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.
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,
Gonna need a citation on that, given that the average EV battery lifetime is 10-20 years.
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.
Maybe you meant invest in nuclear weapons.
Nukes are useless in defense: the cannot be used anyway.
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?
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.
Weapons yes, power seems quite stupid given the costs and lead times.
The answer twenty years ago is not the same as the one today.
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 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 is a bit closer to DPRK though and shares a land border so its a but easier for them to assist.
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.
In a decentralized country you don’t care about terrorism attacks, nuclear bombs, coups, revolutions, drones and what not.
Let alone all of the super expensive infrastructure that mega cities need, for example subways, buses, wide highways for traffic, heavy transportation for supply
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also no longer makes sense to attack the connecting lines between them as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Accepted. To your question: "in other words", I'm a senior leader of your mom's libido.
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.
Because these are cogeneration[0] facilities - they generate both electricity and heat.
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...
Bye.
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.
Keiv is a valid spelling in English. You wanting it to change for ideological reasons doesn't make it happen. It's everyone's personal choice what spelling they use.
Yes, I know, I read your comment history. Bye.
I think power plants are expensive and not cheap to fix.
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.
Or it's what 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.
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.
Cherry picking individual cases doesn't prove much (one could also cherry pick cases when a missile didn't hit civilians, and so what?) The right question to ask here is: if we take missiles that were fired during a week/month by Russia, what percentage of them ended up hitting civilians. If the percentage is high, I'd say they're targeting civilians, otherwise it's collateral damage or maybe just sloppy commanders.
If 1% of my tax contributions helps people suffering from Russian terror, that’s money well-spent.
Every war is cruel and inhumane, so why single out Russia here?
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.
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.
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.
> How do you know they targeted them?
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The first layer is storage is EVs, which is inevitable. EVs have humongous batteries.
Next layer, add thermal storage.
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.
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.
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.
At least with U.S imperialism, for the most part, we only funded and sold weapons to one side.
Where are intermittent energy sources illegal?
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.
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
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)?
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.
is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a long time.
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.
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.
Do you think thats sound strategy? The military generals in US would accept that?
Hell my 1000l tank alone costs more even when empty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...