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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. TitaRusell · 1791110310 · focus · HN ↗
  If you want to protect your country invest in nukes.
  1. ponector · 1791121060 · focus · HN ↗
    How it will protect from russian tanks advancing towards the capital of your country?
    Nukes are useless in defense: the cannot be used anyway.
    openasocket · 1791130765 · focus · HN ↗
    Nukes are arguably ONLY useful in defense (and deterring another from attacking). Using nuclear weapons against an opponent that also has nuclear weapons will very likely lead to a nuclear exchange and the decimation of both countries. It’s suicide, and so no one is going to do it unless they have nothing left to lose. A nation under attack, facing an existential threat, and about to be overrun, is in exactly that circumstance.
    And yeah, maybe the defending countries leader isn’t willing to end it all, and maybe try collaboration or partisan resistance. But if you were the attacking country, would you be willing to make that bet? Or would you hesitate?
    leonidasrup · 1791131273 · focus · HN ↗
    You use tactical nuclear weapons, as was planned by NATO in case of attack of Warsaw Pact tanks through Fulda Gap
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap
    In reality this escalates very fast into all out nuclear war. Which is why you don't see wars between two nuclear armed countries. There is no winner in a nuclear war.
    AnnikaL · 1791164972 · focus · HN ↗
    The idea is that if you promise to drop nuclear weapons on any country which attacks your capital, Russian tanks will not attack your capital. Whether this is a wise strategy is unclear, but countries like Pakistan[1] and Israel[2] have employed such a policy, and none of their unfriendly neighbors have yet managed to send tanks into Islamabad or Tel Aviv.
    [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_spectrum_deterrence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_spectrum_deterrence
    [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option

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