In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
Thread
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
thelastgallon · · focus · HN ↗
<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.
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
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...
thelastgallon · · focus · HN ↗
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.
sandworm101 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
iso1631 · · focus · HN ↗
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
sandworm101 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
thelastgallon · · focus · HN ↗
thelastgallon · · focus · HN ↗
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.
iso1631 · · focus · HN ↗
23.5 million light-duty vehicles
<a href="https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241021/dq241021c-eng.htm" rel="nofollow">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 <a href="https://www.njc-cnm.gc.ca/s3/d896/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.njc-cnm.gc.ca/s3/d896/en, way higher than the insurance complanies say is the average - <a href="https://affiliatedinsurance.ca/blogs/how-average-mileage-per-year-in-canada-affects-car/" rel="nofollow">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.