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Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community

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

#41

Post by notTooFarGone »

clarionbell wrote: post #37
lysium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?

what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.

China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.

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

#42

Post by boxed »

Spooky23 wrote: post #39
boxed wrote: 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.

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?

Not really. Imagine a world where Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria scaled up nuclear power in the 70s. In that situation Putin wouldn't have had any money for his army in the first place.

You have to think about the system as a whole as I said, not get blinded by some detail right now.

And yea, scaling up nuclear right now is probably not super useful as batteries and solar have dropped so much in price. But we certainly shouldn't shut down nuclear reactors like Germany did.

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

#43

Post by elric »

anovikov wrote: post #34
llm_nerd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Modern PV cells are pretty effective even in cloudy weather. Mine seem to produce more energy on overcast wintery days than on sunny wintery days because there are fewer harsh shadows that way.

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

#44

Post by danmaz74 »

mrmlz wrote: post #40
zihotki wrote: 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..

It's solar generation which doesn't work in winter in Ukraine, not the heat pumps. And as Russia is targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure as their main tactic, with the goal of getting the population to accept Putin's domination to avoid freezing to death, the heat pumps would only be useful if local solar worked.

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

#45

Post by NicuCalcea »

newsclues wrote: post #33
NicuCalcea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, I was talking about civilian use, not implying drone teams might spin up a nuclear reactor for a bit of warmth. Solar panels and heat pumps won't make a block of flats more of a target.

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

#46

Post by boxed »

AdamN wrote: post #29
boxed wrote: 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…

You can just look at the total emissions from France and compare with Germany. It's quite amazing the difference.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.

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

#47

Post by boxed »

empiricus wrote: post #36
AdamN wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that is a pretty unrealistic scenario though. Nuclear won't get that cheap.

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

#48

Post by nkmnz »

llm_nerd wrote: post #32
zihotki wrote: 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…

Clouds and snow say no.

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

#49

Post by 1718627440 »

mrmlz wrote: post #40
zihotki wrote: 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..

The "entire nordic" doesn't have bombs falling on the power plants.

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

#50

Post by rhubinak »

elric wrote: post #43
anovikov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Modern PV cells are pretty effective even in cloudy weather. Mine seem to produce more energy on overcast wintery days than on sunny wintery days because there are fewer harsh shadows that way.

Make and model please. I'll be adding more solar on my roof and the current ones (sunpro SP460-N120M10) don't perform well during cloudy days.
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