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Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

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31–40 of 71 posts

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#31
post #13
post #10

The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture

Heat pumps work fine on batteries. The better solution is extensive battery storage and (intermittent) grid power, under the circumstances.

Exactly. Micro grids keep on functioning unless they are hit directly. Batteries can charge up when there's power from solar, the grid, rooftop wind, generators, EVs that can provide power back, and so on. There are many options here; batteries don't care where the power comes from. That kind of resilience is very hard to take out with drones once you have it. Centralized grids are much less resilient.

I expect Ukrainians don't actually need to be told this and are already getting creative with ensuring they have power. There's plenty of incentive there to make sure they are not overly dependent on centralized power and heating infrastructure. Of course it takes time to fix and upgrade all buildings; that's why the Russians can still have huge impact with their nightly strikes against civilian infrastructure.

I think Russia and Puting will get credited for inadvertently speeding up the energy transition across Europe by a few decades. Everybody is going cold turkey on Russian gas and the replacement isn't LNG. That's more of a stop gap solution until something more economical can be put in place. We're having pretty harsh winter here in Germany (and elsewhere in the EU). There's not a lot of talk about gas prices in the news so far. That's because we've had a few years to diversify our energy sources. LNG is now a big part of the mix, obviously. But the high price of that is also an incentive for people to consider alternatives like heat pumps.

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#32
post #10

The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture

Solar is about 50% as productive during the depths of winter than the summer at 50 degrees North (65% or so of the peak power, but obviously the duration of sunlight is reduced). "Barely any"/"Useless" is not accurate. Solar arrays remain productive during the winter, even at Northern latitudes.

Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#33

Solar seems vulnerable in a war.

Compared to what? Gas, nuclear and hydro seem even more vulnerable.

Fossil fuel generators, can be hidden in trees or underground and vented.

Solar panels are easy to spot from a drone, and fragile, so it's easy to damage them.

My friends in Ukraine charge their ecoflows with a generator, because if you put a solar panel outside your drone team bunker, you invite incoming artillery.

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#34
post #10

The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture

Solar is about 50% as productive during the depths of winter than the summer at 50 degrees North (65% or so of the peak power, but obviously the duration of sunlight is reduced). "Barely any"/"Useless" is not accurate. Solar arrays remain productive during the winter, even at Northern latitudes. Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable an…

You forgot clouds. German experience shows they are at times, on average, only about 2% as effective (24 hours average, i.e. min vs max). And around 5% weekly average min vs max (battery storage over even longer periods is hard to imagine).

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#36
post #29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is though. Climate change due to fossil fuel use is not a risk, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you have to choose between a risk and certain disaster, you never choose the guaranteed disaster, yet that is what the anti-nuclear movement has done. I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail.

That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electric), and airplane emissions. It wouldn't stop military emissions (which are significant). We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this m…

If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#37
post #11

These guys... after decades of destroying nuclear, German energy independence and thus pegging German energy sourcing to Russian pipelines, resulting in the geopolitical mess we and Ukraine are in – to have the gall to even pretend they're doing any good here...

What are you talking about? Germany would be more energy independent if it had adopted solar and wind power when Greenpeace was advocating it fourty years ago, like China is showcasing today!

Check latitutes of largest cities in Germany, and compare them to largest cities in China. Have you noticed how all of major German cities are much further north than major Chinese cities?

You can't ignore physics and climate.

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#39
post #27
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenpeace got their start against nuclear weapons and nuclear waste dumping at sea. I don't think it's entirely appropriate to ignore the risks of nuclear in the country that contains Chernobyl, and another different nuclear plant which is quite close to the front lines and was shut down by capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

It is though. Climate change due to fossil fuel use is not a risk, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you have to choose between a risk and certain disaster, you never choose the guaranteed disaster, yet that is what the anti-nuclear movement has done. I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail.

I think you’re kind of off the rails in context of Ukraine, where a foreign army is shelling major power plants and torturing the engineers for fun from time to time.

Maybe consider context before pasting your standard argument?

Re: Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

#40
post #10

The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture

Why wouldnt a heatpump work during the winter? I.e. the entire nordic uses heatpumps..
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