Fossil fuel supply chain makes your country very vulnerable!
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.
We're only a few years away from your electric car self driving itself to a helipad and flying you straight across a city in a pre-planned route on a quad-copter that just docks on your car.
> 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
The moral of the story is you should always invest in nukes, since if you don't the US will just lie and say you are developing nukes as a pretext anyway.
Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.
So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.
I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!
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.
> > Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV
> Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work?
Yes. All cars and vans in the UK drive a total of 320 billion miles a year. My own electric car tells me this would require 80 billion kWh. 1kWp produces 1000 kWh a year, so you need 80 million kWp or 80 TWh a year.
My house will easily provide 8kWp, meaning you'd need 10 million houses. There's 30 million homes, and that's before you factor in non-domestic buildings.
A single shooting estate in the uk could produce 20TWh a year with solar alone. Throw in wind and that would petty much double.
Sure, but you don't have inexhaustible source of crude oil and a refinery in your backyard!
But Sun reliably shows up most days. It doesn't ghost. Sunlight can't be sanctioned, tariffed, taxed, embargoed, pirated, nuked, rebuked, rebuffed, offended. Sunlight is also compatible with most religious beliefs (god is light, etc).
Funny thing is, fuel can be transported, so that's not needed!
If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.
I'm sure we'll see a transition to electric some day, it is more efficient purely from a physics standpoint. But I'd be shocked to see the military transition before civilian industry.
Most countries do not have enough to independently supply their own energy needs from fossil fuels, and they need to import more or less continuously, while renewable energy infrastructure needs building out and then lasts a very long time. This massively affects the strategic effects of losing your supply: one becomes an acute problem very quickly while the other is still a problem but it takes a lot longer to become a real problem.
I don't think the main focus is on converting military operations themselves to work without fossil fuels, but more that if you can convert your civilian industry then you have a much better overall strategic position because your total demand for fossil fuels is much lower. (Strategy is a lot more than just your military)
> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
That won't help you if you can't refine it. Russia has more oil than most and has/had lots of refineries. Ukraine has taken out so many of them that Trump is complaining it's affecting the price of diesel (even though the US also has lots of oil and lots of refineries).
Oil infrastructure is temporary, expensive and fragile whereas panels work for 30 years.
I am not sure how efficient we are when the US spends like 20% of its budget for military, police and fire depts.
Let alone all of the super expensive infrastructure that mega cities need, for example subways, buses, wide highways for traffic, heavy transportation for supply
They are also the cheapest source of energy with the fewest dependencies. The last part is why they will remain illegal. The power structures of society will do anything to maintain themselves.
Gas and diesel generators are charging small batteries (3coflow types), at least on the frontline because solar panels are good ways to invite incoming fires
If every building and other piece of infrastructure essentially powers itself, that means to disable a bunch of targets you now can't just disable a central substation that feeds them, you have to disable the targets themselves, and depending on the nature of the targets that may no longer be economical.
It also no longer makes sense to attack the connecting lines between them as well.
Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
People built centralized grids because it's cheaper to build and service when the equipment is concentrated in one place. The economy of scale kicks in.
If you move to decentralized so there's fewer outages, but now you're paying extra to maintain it, your solution is not as good as it used to be, that's economic damage right there.
And your enemy probably will also stop targeting the small decentralized grid elements, so they're not spending bucks on missiles. They can use more of them to hit other parts of your economy that are still centralized.
Estimating the net impact of this change is bigger than the article suggests.
What does the distinction between economic damage and not being an end goal in itself have to do with anything? Either way it's a live goal being pursued and decentralizing will mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain.
You're right that centralized grids are cheaper (as long as the utilities maintaining them are good faith actors) and that switching to decentralized solutions brings new maintenance costs. But this is a war, the choice isn't been idealized central distribution and costs of decentralization, it's between the latter and a grid under siege by missiles. Relying on a grid that's being struck by missiles with no backup plan isn't economical either.
Also in your other comment you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.
In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).
And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.
> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.
My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.
I've been thinking about this (more [1]) and I do believe smaller grids will be the future for many reasons. I guess this is another reason. But the transition from large grids to small grids has no obvious, easy path because a large grid without total market saturation falls apart as maintenance is averaged over fewer and fewer users.
One side benefit though is that it would stop utilities being able to push data center costs onto consumers, something that regulators and governments thus far seem completely unwilling to do.
Oh and distributed infrastructure and leadership (the so-called "mosaic defense") is (yet) another reason why the Iran war was always unwinnable from the start.
Indeed. The future is off-grid and community level mini/micro grids.
There is no need to build/maintain transmission network.
Legacy grid is production in far away places, miles and miles of transmission, then a distribution network. The distribution network built for homes is sufficient for homes to participate in grid for redundancy. All buildings can produce energy. Rooftop is proven. Next is vertical solar-- which adds ~4 hours of production. EVs become a storage reservoir and supply power back to the grid (V2X). Add some BESS if needed.
Villages in developing countries (half the population in Asia, Africa) can go completely offgrid. Start with plugins, slowly upgrade to bigger panels. No transmission network needed.
The technology and the means are there - whats required is the willingness to adopt to the self-powered lifestyle.
Many, many folks have done this - stepped off the grid and live on self-harvested local energy sources - however, the grid is powerful.
It is difficult for entire cities to do away with it so rapidly .. at least until PV harvesting gets a significant order or two cheaper and more efficient…
I think it’s pretty obvious that electric transportation needs to fully adopt integrated energy harvesting. This seems to be an obvious legislative low-hanging fruit.
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.
>But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
If you sit on an oil well, perhaps. In practice every static part of the production and distribution chain is a centralized target: from wells over refineries to depots, roads, harbours and finally power plants. You simply can't run fossils in a distributed local-first approach. That's also the reason why even for a massive oil producer like Russia, Ukraine can cause billions in damages with drones costing a couple hundred grand.
Right. I think the most optimistic take would be that vegetable oil with some processing, can be used for diesel but I'm not sure how practical that is or how reliable access to waste vegetable oil is
A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.
The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.
The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.
Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.
A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.
There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.
The drone will disbale more than one of those 1kW panels if it hits an array of them. Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage? Sounds a bit odd, because Wh is not the currency I pay bills with.
How much does it cost to replace an array of solar panels, compared to the cost of sending another diesel truck (and paying for the destroyed one + its fuel)?
>Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage?
Well there's an integral relation between the two, more kWh lost is more dollars lost. They both proxy for some venn diagram overlap that includes damage, cost, lost resources, and it's perfectly legitimate to reason from any permutation of those. It's notionally possible for different tech to attach those costs in different ways but in this case I would put the burden on you to explain the practical difference that you think cashes out in an advantage diesel has.
I'm not sure why you think a truck would be cheaper necessarily: smaller PV systems can range from $10k to $20k with no fuel payload. Is a diesel truck with a full payload of fuel really cheaper than that? And is a diesel truck supposed to be fueling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people depending on it at a time when bridges are getting bombed, and therefore an instance of centralization and attractive target for attack. And you said yourself you didn't think PV would be attacked because decentralizing in and and of itself inflicted the economic damage yet you've once again gone back to imaging a diesel advantage in the event on PV getting attacked.
> And is a diesel truck supposed to be fuelling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people
Completely correct, but then go one step further: Where is does that truck fill up? At a depot where many other trucks do the same. That's an even more tempting target - centralised, stationary, flammable.
I do not think that there is an equivalent node in the solar alternative.
And where does that fuel depot get resupply from. "decentralised" fossil fuel infrastructure isn't really a thing that exists.
I don't think they have to worry about lack of access to cold for the next few months. I believe you're accurate re: India and sources of biomass in that context and the possibility of some processing/conversion, but how representative is that of the resources at disposal of the typical person in Ukraine? I imagine more urban residences with electricity and not a lot of cows.
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.
> But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
How would that possibly work? Everyone has their own oil well and refinery? Their own fuel depots?
And even if you were able to build all that, we would basically have giant bombs waiting to be ignited all over residential neighborhoods during war time...
I would invite you to think through the logistics of what you propose before you launch into multiple paragraphs that assume those logistics are solved.
Then you don't solve the core problem of having a big juicy single point of failure. One that is very flammable at that, as Ukraine has proven in Russia recently.
That's not what greenwashing means. Greenwashing refers to marketing that sells a product as environmentally beneficial, while it's not in reality.
Your claim is that they're selling a product (renewables) as beneficial for the war, while it's not. If I were to invent a term for that, it might be "camo-washing".
Whether your argument makes sense or not, I don't know. But you fail to note the drawback of a diesel generator: it needs diesel, and thus logistics.
I meant greenwashing as pulling a reason to make something about renewables out of thin air. In this case article's choice to center it's argument on renewables is greenwashing. Maybe I need a different word, not sure.
The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me. What they do though is attribute the benefits of decentralized to renewables (ignoring how many buildings are powered by diesel in Ukraine today, those which did not receive that grant from Denmark to do solar), then completely skip potential downsides of renewables, and draw a conclusion from there.
Yeah, I agree greenwashing is not the word here. I don't know what is, but if anything I would say you're trying to express something that is in an important sense opposite to greenwashing (greenwashing is trying to make something look good by falsely presenting it as eco-friendly, you're accusing something of boosting renewables by falsely presenting it as tied to them)
And yes, decentralization is the core aspect that is important, but renewables are importantly much more decentralized end-to-end compared to a diesel generator, because renewables, once in place, have no real central point of failure, while the supply chain for the diesel in the generator still has very important central points of failure that can be attacked (and explode quite easily due to the large amounts of flammable material they are carrying). Distributing the generation does help smooth over short-term disruptions but the overall throughput in the longer term can still be disrupted.
Also, while renewables might be out in the open, they are cheap and spread out over a wide area, which makes them pretty cost-ineffective to attack compared to more concentrated facilities.
I don't think it's out of thin air, it's the reality of what's actually being used in Ukraine, and as comments in this thread have borne out it seems to have legitimate benefits, and so doesn't qualify as greenwashing.
Also if there's greenwashing, it means some questionable practice is being green washed. Apparently you think the idea of decentralization is the thing in this case... but you agree that decentralizing is a good idea and are more against the merits renewables, which is an anti renewables argument but not a correct diagnosis of something being greenwashed.
> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.
Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.
Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.
Fossil fuel supply chain makes your country very vulnerable!
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.
If you want to protect your country invest in nukes.
Maybe if the EV is an all-terrain truck because roads and bridges etc. are still vulnerable.
We're only a few years away from your electric car self driving itself to a helipad and flying you straight across a city in a pre-planned route on a quad-copter that just docks on your car.
> 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...
The moral of the story is you should always invest in nukes, since if you don't the US will just lie and say you are developing nukes as a pretext anyway.
This also applies to WMDs in general.
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.
Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.
So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.
I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!
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.
> > Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV
> Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work?
Yes. All cars and vans in the UK drive a total of 320 billion miles a year. My own electric car tells me this would require 80 billion kWh. 1kWp produces 1000 kWh a year, so you need 80 million kWp or 80 TWh a year.
My house will easily provide 8kWp, meaning you'd need 10 million houses. There's 30 million homes, and that's before you factor in non-domestic buildings.
A single shooting estate in the uk could produce 20TWh a year with solar alone. Throw in wind and that would petty much double.
> Uh... Cars are fuel tanks on wheels...
Sure, but you don't have inexhaustible source of crude oil and a refinery in your backyard!
But Sun reliably shows up most days. It doesn't ghost. Sunlight can't be sanctioned, tariffed, taxed, embargoed, pirated, nuked, rebuked, rebuffed, offended. Sunlight is also compatible with most religious beliefs (god is light, etc).
> most days
cries
> a refinery in your backyard
Funny thing is, fuel can be transported, so that's not needed!
If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.
I'm sure we'll see a transition to electric some day, it is more efficient purely from a physics standpoint. But I'd be shocked to see the military transition before civilian industry.
Most countries do not have enough to independently supply their own energy needs from fossil fuels, and they need to import more or less continuously, while renewable energy infrastructure needs building out and then lasts a very long time. This massively affects the strategic effects of losing your supply: one becomes an acute problem very quickly while the other is still a problem but it takes a lot longer to become a real problem.
I don't think the main focus is on converting military operations themselves to work without fossil fuels, but more that if you can convert your civilian industry then you have a much better overall strategic position because your total demand for fossil fuels is much lower. (Strategy is a lot more than just your military)
> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.
That won't help you if you can't refine it. Russia has more oil than most and has/had lots of refineries. Ukraine has taken out so many of them that Trump is complaining it's affecting the price of diesel (even though the US also has lots of oil and lots of refineries).
Oil infrastructure is temporary, expensive and fragile whereas panels work for 30 years.
If you want security the concept of the mega city needs to be abandoned.
In a decentralized country you don’t care about terrorism attacks, nuclear bombs, coups, revolutions, drones and what not.
There's a tradeoff there, because a very distributed society will also be able to resist disruption and control from a central state.
Trading off efficiency for security is not wise unless you are in war. The same applies to supply chains.
I am not sure how efficient we are when the US spends like 20% of its budget for military, police and fire depts.
Let alone all of the super expensive infrastructure that mega cities need, for example subways, buses, wide highways for traffic, heavy transportation for supply
"In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace." - Sun Tzu
We need more positive stories like this
They are also the cheapest source of energy with the fewest dependencies. The last part is why they will remain illegal. The power structures of society will do anything to maintain themselves.
Gas and diesel generators are charging small batteries (3coflow types), at least on the frontline because solar panels are good ways to invite incoming fires
If every building and other piece of infrastructure essentially powers itself, that means to disable a bunch of targets you now can't just disable a central substation that feeds them, you have to disable the targets themselves, and depending on the nature of the targets that may no longer be economical.
It also no longer makes sense to attack the connecting lines between them as well.
Disabling them is a means to deal economic damage, not an end-goal in itself.
People built centralized grids because it's cheaper to build and service when the equipment is concentrated in one place. The economy of scale kicks in.
If you move to decentralized so there's fewer outages, but now you're paying extra to maintain it, your solution is not as good as it used to be, that's economic damage right there.
And your enemy probably will also stop targeting the small decentralized grid elements, so they're not spending bucks on missiles. They can use more of them to hit other parts of your economy that are still centralized.
Estimating the net impact of this change is bigger than the article suggests.
What does the distinction between economic damage and not being an end goal in itself have to do with anything? Either way it's a live goal being pursued and decentralizing will mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain.
You're right that centralized grids are cheaper (as long as the utilities maintaining them are good faith actors) and that switching to decentralized solutions brings new maintenance costs. But this is a war, the choice isn't been idealized central distribution and costs of decentralization, it's between the latter and a grid under siege by missiles. Relying on a grid that's being struck by missiles with no backup plan isn't economical either.
Also in your other comment you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
> mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain
The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.
The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.
In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).
And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.
> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.
These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.
My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.
I've been thinking about this (more [1]) and I do believe smaller grids will be the future for many reasons. I guess this is another reason. But the transition from large grids to small grids has no obvious, easy path because a large grid without total market saturation falls apart as maintenance is averaged over fewer and fewer users.
One side benefit though is that it would stop utilities being able to push data center costs onto consumers, something that regulators and governments thus far seem completely unwilling to do.
Oh and distributed infrastructure and leadership (the so-called "mosaic defense") is (yet) another reason why the Iran war was always unwinnable from the start.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49902903
Indeed. The future is off-grid and community level mini/micro grids.
There is no need to build/maintain transmission network.
Legacy grid is production in far away places, miles and miles of transmission, then a distribution network. The distribution network built for homes is sufficient for homes to participate in grid for redundancy. All buildings can produce energy. Rooftop is proven. Next is vertical solar-- which adds ~4 hours of production. EVs become a storage reservoir and supply power back to the grid (V2X). Add some BESS if needed.
Villages in developing countries (half the population in Asia, Africa) can go completely offgrid. Start with plugins, slowly upgrade to bigger panels. No transmission network needed.
The transition is off-grid.
The technology and the means are there - whats required is the willingness to adopt to the self-powered lifestyle.
Many, many folks have done this - stepped off the grid and live on self-harvested local energy sources - however, the grid is powerful.
It is difficult for entire cities to do away with it so rapidly .. at least until PV harvesting gets a significant order or two cheaper and more efficient…
I think it’s pretty obvious that electric transportation needs to fully adopt integrated energy harvesting. This seems to be an obvious legislative low-hanging fruit.
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.
>But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
If you sit on an oil well, perhaps. In practice every static part of the production and distribution chain is a centralized target: from wells over refineries to depots, roads, harbours and finally power plants. You simply can't run fossils in a distributed local-first approach. That's also the reason why even for a massive oil producer like Russia, Ukraine can cause billions in damages with drones costing a couple hundred grand.
Right. I think the most optimistic take would be that vegetable oil with some processing, can be used for diesel but I'm not sure how practical that is or how reliable access to waste vegetable oil is
Fair!
A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.
The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.
The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.
Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.
A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.
There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.
A drone blows up 1kWp solar panel you lose about 1Mwh in a year assuming it’s completely broken.
A drone blows up an oil carrying road vehicle you lose 350Mwh instantly.
You blow up a pipeline you knock out 1 million MWh a day
The drone will disbale more than one of those 1kW panels if it hits an array of them. Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage? Sounds a bit odd, because Wh is not the currency I pay bills with.
How much does it cost to replace an array of solar panels, compared to the cost of sending another diesel truck (and paying for the destroyed one + its fuel)?
>Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage?
Well there's an integral relation between the two, more kWh lost is more dollars lost. They both proxy for some venn diagram overlap that includes damage, cost, lost resources, and it's perfectly legitimate to reason from any permutation of those. It's notionally possible for different tech to attach those costs in different ways but in this case I would put the burden on you to explain the practical difference that you think cashes out in an advantage diesel has.
I'm not sure why you think a truck would be cheaper necessarily: smaller PV systems can range from $10k to $20k with no fuel payload. Is a diesel truck with a full payload of fuel really cheaper than that? And is a diesel truck supposed to be fueling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people depending on it at a time when bridges are getting bombed, and therefore an instance of centralization and attractive target for attack. And you said yourself you didn't think PV would be attacked because decentralizing in and and of itself inflicted the economic damage yet you've once again gone back to imaging a diesel advantage in the event on PV getting attacked.
Fair points.
> And is a diesel truck supposed to be fuelling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people
Completely correct, but then go one step further: Where is does that truck fill up? At a depot where many other trucks do the same. That's an even more tempting target - centralised, stationary, flammable.
I do not think that there is an equivalent node in the solar alternative.
And where does that fuel depot get resupply from. "decentralised" fossil fuel infrastructure isn't really a thing that exists.
> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a long time.
> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.
Panels are small, numerous and widely dispersed, easy to install quickly and incrementally, and non-flammable.
Basically the opposite of (also stationary) centralised fossil fuel infrastructure.
It's clear which one is the more tempting target if you have a finite stockpile of drones.
Remotest villages in India were doing gobar gas plants in 80s/90s. What you are saying is possible.
If you have enough cows/biomass, perhaps you can have a home biomass to methane converter. Then you can use it for cooking, heating, etc.
You can convert a petrol car to a CNG car.
You could also have a coal to liquid plant in the backyard and generate diesel or petrol.
You have to do without any cooling though, fridge, AC, etc. Cold can't be created. Without electricity, just with chemicals fuels, it is unlikely.
I don't think they have to worry about lack of access to cold for the next few months. I believe you're accurate re: India and sources of biomass in that context and the possibility of some processing/conversion, but how representative is that of the resources at disposal of the typical person in Ukraine? I imagine more urban residences with electricity and not a lot of cows.
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.
decentralising your fuel production and to a lesser extent distribution is not easy either though.
> But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?
How would that possibly work? Everyone has their own oil well and refinery? Their own fuel depots?
And even if you were able to build all that, we would basically have giant bombs waiting to be ignited all over residential neighborhoods during war time...
I would invite you to think through the logistics of what you propose before you launch into multiple paragraphs that assume those logistics are solved.
I meant a diesel generator in a residential building. The refineries stay centralized somewhere safe (not a problem in Ukraine's case).
Do you mean a generator that creates diesel from bullshit[1]? Or a diesel generator that generates electricity?
If its the latter, how is your idea decentralized fossil fuel? You are using the same fossil fuel supply chain as it exists today.
For decentralized, you need an oil well in your backyard, and a refinery. THEN a diesel generator, if you want electricity.
[1] Assuming you have enough cows
Then you don't solve the core problem of having a big juicy single point of failure. One that is very flammable at that, as Ukraine has proven in Russia recently.
That's not what greenwashing means. Greenwashing refers to marketing that sells a product as environmentally beneficial, while it's not in reality.
Your claim is that they're selling a product (renewables) as beneficial for the war, while it's not. If I were to invent a term for that, it might be "camo-washing".
Whether your argument makes sense or not, I don't know. But you fail to note the drawback of a diesel generator: it needs diesel, and thus logistics.
I meant greenwashing as pulling a reason to make something about renewables out of thin air. In this case article's choice to center it's argument on renewables is greenwashing. Maybe I need a different word, not sure.
The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me. What they do though is attribute the benefits of decentralized to renewables (ignoring how many buildings are powered by diesel in Ukraine today, those which did not receive that grant from Denmark to do solar), then completely skip potential downsides of renewables, and draw a conclusion from there.
Yeah, I agree greenwashing is not the word here. I don't know what is, but if anything I would say you're trying to express something that is in an important sense opposite to greenwashing (greenwashing is trying to make something look good by falsely presenting it as eco-friendly, you're accusing something of boosting renewables by falsely presenting it as tied to them)
And yes, decentralization is the core aspect that is important, but renewables are importantly much more decentralized end-to-end compared to a diesel generator, because renewables, once in place, have no real central point of failure, while the supply chain for the diesel in the generator still has very important central points of failure that can be attacked (and explode quite easily due to the large amounts of flammable material they are carrying). Distributing the generation does help smooth over short-term disruptions but the overall throughput in the longer term can still be disrupted.
Also, while renewables might be out in the open, they are cheap and spread out over a wide area, which makes them pretty cost-ineffective to attack compared to more concentrated facilities.
I don't think it's out of thin air, it's the reality of what's actually being used in Ukraine, and as comments in this thread have borne out it seems to have legitimate benefits, and so doesn't qualify as greenwashing.
Also if there's greenwashing, it means some questionable practice is being green washed. Apparently you think the idea of decentralization is the thing in this case... but you agree that decentralizing is a good idea and are more against the merits renewables, which is an anti renewables argument but not a correct diagnosis of something being greenwashed.
> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.
Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.
Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.