In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
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In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
gnull · · focus · HN ↗
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.
hdgvhicv · · focus · HN ↗
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
gnull · · focus · HN ↗
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)?
glenstein · · focus · HN ↗
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.
SideburnsOfDoom · · focus · HN ↗
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.
gnull · · focus · HN ↗