Thread

1. gnull · 1791105951 · focus · HN ↗

   This is greenwashing.

   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.

   1. glenstein · 1791106801 · focus · HN ↗

      You're comparing diesel to PV which doesn't speak to the merits of PV vs centralization. There's also the massive disadvantage of fuel distribution from diesel, which is a form of centralization and bottlenecking, and then there's fuel shortages and costs which PV doesn't have to bother with.

      Also is Russia targeting individual PV systems? That's tantamount to targeting individual residences which, if we're granting that, there's no amount of decentralizing that would ever mitigate those attacks so diesel vs PV would be moot.

      Lastly I don't think that's what greenwashing means. Greenwashing isn't representing renewables favorably, it's tying some external negative practice to language of environmentalism with vague buzzwords and questionable claims of environmental benefits to make that thing look better. But in this case there's no external thing being tied to environmentalism, we're just talking about PV directly.

      1. tialaramex · 1791148235 · focus · HN ↗

         Right, a classic example of Greenwashing would be the UK's Drax power plant.

         Drax burns "waste wood" to make electricity and argues that this is a carbon neutral endeavour.

         Now, on the one hand yes these are not fossil fuels. The trees grew, probably over decades or centuries, but they weren't underground for millions of years before we burned them. However, "waste wood" to a lay person conjures ideas of sawdust or the offcuts from woodworking or maybe the bark from trees pulped for paper, something like that. Drax actually uses specially made pellets, produced in places such as Canada, from whole forests which are designated "waste" so as to meet their requirements...

         Because this is "green" the majority of the UK's "green electricity" subsidies are spent on Drax†. And yet when you see people ranting about these subsidies being too high, they will invariably point at Wind Farms and Solar power.

         † Because Drax is relatively old, lots of its subsidies are via an obsolete scheme we don't get raw data for, so all we can see is that billions of pounds were spent in the overall budget and the rational explanation is that we paid them to Drax. In 2027 Drax will move entirely to Contracts for Difference like a modern renewable power plant so then we can see more clearly what we're getting and how much it's costing under those new CfDs.

         1. Lumich · 1791180770 · focus · HN ↗

            At least there's a certain creativity to the concept of overseas waste forests. You could take that further argueing that the vessels importing the pellets only burn^H^H^H dispose of waste minerals, and demand more subsidies. Although “minerals” has a bad ring to it (uuugh, “mining”), so rather call it “waste bio detritus”, which it is according to the theory (“rotten dinosaurs”).

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