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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

#61

Post by empiricus »

boxed wrote: post #47
empiricus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.

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

#62

Post by nkmnz »

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.

This depends on the kind of clouds. Thick, low hanging clouds look gray for a reason.

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

#63

Post by tucnak »

mothballed wrote: post #59
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and heat pumps across all of Europe is in fact one of the quickest and best ways to sideline Russia. See the RepowerEU plan for more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPowerEU

The quickest and best way to sideline russia is to take your money they had for heat pumps and use them on weapons. Putin is making Europe look like a laughing stock because they have folded to Putins threats about nuclear war and he has bluffed them into buying heat pumps instead of ballistic missiles. Europe still has their thumb up their ass singing Kumbaya and buying heat pumps while their traditional protector U…

Very eloquently said, thank you!

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

#64

Post by Spooky23 »

boxed wrote: post #42
Spooky23 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Huh? Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, Hungary has extensive nuclear power and Germany made extensive use of nuclear power.

Accidents and the rug pool of US/Soviet capital killed growth of the industry.

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

#65

Post by theshrike79 »

mothballed wrote: post #59
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and heat pumps across all of Europe is in fact one of the quickest and best ways to sideline Russia. See the RepowerEU plan for more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPowerEU

The quickest and best way to sideline russia is to take your money they had for heat pumps and use them on weapons. Putin is making Europe look like a laughing stock because they have folded to Putins threats about nuclear war and he has bluffed them into buying heat pumps instead of ballistic missiles. Europe still has their thumb up their ass singing Kumbaya and buying heat pumps while their traditional protector U…

Yes and no. The capability for Russian people to endure hardship and death is unparalleled to anyone else as long as the goal is "Make Russia Great Again".

EU countries on the other hand don't do that, the French will riot if their morning croissant isn't crispy enough.

Thus, making energy independence and power grid reliability a priority is an important step if push comes to shove and Russia goes full crazy, attacking EU power grids.

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

#66

Post by theshrike79 »

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.

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

And how do you plan to get the fossil fuels for these generators? Gas stations and oil pipelines are even easier and more centralised targets than solar panels.

I think you're thinking of massive gigantic centralised solar power plants, what if every single house has enough solar for the basic necessities, would Putin just carpet bomb every neighbourhood to rubble just to destroy the cheap Chinese solar panels?

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

#67

Post by theshrike79 »

iso1631 wrote: post #6
newsclues wrote: post #2

Solar seems vulnerable in a war.

If you have solar on your roof and a bomb hits it, you have no power. And no roof. Power is the least of your problems. If you have a central power nuclear/gas/coal station and a bomb hits it, nobody has power.

But 99% of your neighbours will still have power and roofs.

If a central power plant is destroyed, 0% of the neighbourhood will have power, but 100% will have roofs.

Which is better in your opinion?

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

#68

Post by AdamN »

boxed wrote: post #46
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…

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.

Germany was the industrial heavyweight of the 70s and doing a lot more - those emissions aren't just because of nuclear vs coal (although that's very real too). Anyway, anti-nuclear activism only got traction in the 80s so any delta there is not because of that. Economics were probably the main driver (perhaps Atoms for Peace was more France-centric? Not sure if there were other drivers). You can see here that energy use per person was 1/3 higher in Germany than France in the 70s but I suspect if we could find total energy expenditure it would be more like double for Germany than France during that time period: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

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

#69

Post by boxed »

Spooky23 wrote: post #64
boxed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Huh? Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, Hungary has extensive nuclear power and Germany made extensive use of nuclear power. Accidents and the rug pool of US/Soviet capital killed growth of the industry.

Calling Germanys nuclear "extensive" is laughable. Do compare it to France.

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

#70

Post by boxed »

empiricus wrote: post #61
boxed wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.

Yea, I mean.. the point isn't the price imo. We can build out nuclear and sequester CO2 without it being super cheap. We can do massive projects like that anyway.
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