Thread

1. gnull · 1791105951 · focus · HN ↗

   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.

   1. lpcvoid · 1791106513 · focus · HN ↗

      [dead]

   2. juntoalaluna · 1791106622 · focus · HN ↗

      decentralising your fuel production and to a lesser extent distribution is not easy either though.
   3. hdgvhicv · 1791106626 · focus · HN ↗

      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

      1. gnull · 1791107210 · focus · HN ↗

         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)?

         1. SideburnsOfDoom · 1791107524 · focus · HN ↗

            > 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.

         2. dotcoma · 1791108417 · focus · HN ↗

            > Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.

            is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a long time.

         3. glenstein · 1791108762 · focus · HN ↗

            >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.

            1. SideburnsOfDoom · 1791109825 · focus · HN ↗

               > 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.

            2. gnull · 1791110118 · focus · HN ↗

               Fair points.
         4. thelastgallon · 1791113043 · focus · HN ↗

            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?

         5. hdgvhicv · 1791119371 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

   4. sigmoid10 · 1791106753 · focus · HN ↗

      >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.

      1. glenstein · 1791107012 · focus · HN ↗

         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
      2. gnull · 1791108275 · focus · HN ↗

         Fair!
   5. glenstein · 1791106801 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. tialaramex · 1791148235 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. Lumich · 1791180770 · focus · HN ↗

            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”).
   6. streetfighter64 · 1791107077 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. gnull · 1791108044 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. glenstein · 1791109941 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

         2. SideburnsOfDoom · 1791110261 · focus · HN ↗

            > 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.

         3. rcxdude · 1791110766 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

   7. thelastgallon · 1791107261 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. glenstein · 1791109299 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. thelastgallon · 1791111053 · focus · HN ↗

            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!

            1. glenstein · 1791114552 · focus · HN ↗

               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.
   8. vrganj · 1791107619 · focus · HN ↗

      > 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.

      1. gnull · 1791108160 · focus · HN ↗

         I meant a diesel generator in a residential building. The refineries stay centralized somewhere safe (not a problem in Ukraine's case).

         1. vrganj · 1791108815 · focus · HN ↗

            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.
         2. thelastgallon · 1791108940 · focus · HN ↗

            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

   9. Lio · 1791108434 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

   10. phatfish · 1791120317 · focus · HN ↗

       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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