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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. SanjayMehta · 1791118344 · focus · HN ↗
  Invest in nukes especially if you're a resource rich country.
  1. ViewTrick1002 · 1791119699 · focus · HN ↗
    Nuclear weapons or nuclear power?
    Weapons yes, power seems quite stupid given the costs and lead times.
    throwaway27448 · 1791124923 · focus · HN ↗
    Compared to what? It serves its niche quite well. It's not nuclear power's fault people wait until they should have built it twenty years ago.
    ViewTrick1002 · 1791128283 · focus · HN ↗
    Or just build renewables and storage? Distributed and extremely cheap.
    The answer twenty years ago is not the same as the one today.
    leonidasrup · 1791142580 · focus · HN ↗
    The article doesn't provide much details about installed solar, wind capacity, installed battery capacity, electricity produced each month, and so on. But this is data that Ukraine would not like to get public.
    The biggest issue is only hinted in the article:
    > ‘There’s just enough sun [in January/this winter thus far] to make it work,’ says Olena Kondratiuk
    Solar+batteries work well in summer months, but for winter months, solar has much lower output. This is why Russia is attacking thermal plants especially in winter.

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