Thread

In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults

169 points · 195 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.
    sandworm101 · 1791109083 · focus · HN ↗
    I have done the math, several times. The last time was to plan a hypothetical solar "highway gas station" capable of charging 100 teslas EVs per hour 24/7/365. Assuming flat ground at Vancouver's latitude, it came to a solar farm approaching square kilometers/miles in scale.
    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 · 1791110967 · focus · HN ↗
    I've done the math. The average car in Canada does 11,000 miles a year. A Tesla isn't great efficiency, it uses about 3.5 miles per kWh. Throw in inefficiency of charging and you're talking about 3MWh per car per year, and with about 25 million vehicles that means about 75TWh a year
    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
    thelastgallon · 1791115992 · focus · HN ↗
    > Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)
    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. <a href="https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/daily/conservatives-diesel-price-reduction-plan-scraps-biofuel-incentives/" rel="nofollow">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)

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