Thread

In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults

167 points · 190 comments · JumpCrisscross

thelastgallon · 1791106569 · focus · HN ↗
Fossil fuel supply chain makes your country very vulnerable!
<a href="https://github.com/Lkruitwagen/global-fossil-fuel-supply-chain" rel="nofollow">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.
1. streetfighter64 · 1791107434 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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...
  1. thelastgallon · 1791107981 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    streetfighter64 · 1791108279 · focus · HN ↗
    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!
    thelastgallon · 1791112039 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    wallst07 · 1791118267 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    pixl97 · 1791118687 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    thelastgallon · 1791119102 · focus · HN ↗
    You consume ethanol as food? Ethanol is supposed to go into gas cars, via the fossil fuel supply chain.
    youngtaff · 1791119541 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not an either / or… animals such as sheep can coexist with solar panels and yields go up
    MandieD · 1791132078 · focus · HN ↗
    Cattle love solar panels - I’ve seen fields of them in southern Germany, almost all hanging out in the shade while munching grass.
    subscribed · 1791128327 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    rainsford · 1791143783 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.