Re:In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults
by pseudohadamard on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:08AM
(#49961607)
It does work if you take the "distributed" part seriously. If you've got a giant field of panels then it's just another target for the orcs to take out, but if every single house is feeding in a few kw, which some countries are already doing as a result of which power prices there go negative during the day, the orcs can't take out every single house and shed in the country. "Solar on every structure" means literally that, not just in one or two locations.
And it takes quite a bit to knock out a solar panel, they're designed to resist hail and storm damage (and careless shipping/installers) and will continue to function with reduced efficiency in the presence of quite a bit of damage, you'd need to systematically demolish every single panel in an entire city to take it offline.
> Node level failures (hail on roof breaks solar) can be easily overcome.
If you are talking about "just change the panel if it breaks" scenario, it's unreliable. A big Ukrainian city near the border with Russia ran out of glass to change shattered windows at some point with logistics working well, and glass is easier to source than solar panels.
> Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV. This will be the most resilient, distributed grid
Resilience is questionable because solar panels can't be either quickly moved or armored (direct sunlight required). Damaging a lot of panels at once won't require a lot of explosives either, just a lot of projectiles (and maybe some bonus paint/chemicals to render panels useless), so the drones to do that will be cheap. If the cells inside a panel are wired sequentially (which is often the case), only a little bit should be damaged to break the whole panel.
Solar panels alone won't generate enough to power EVs and residential buildings. Modern buildings have multiple floors, but can only install their footprint (and maybe one side of building) worth of panels.
Seasonal sunlight changes make them less useful outside of summer. I know that batteries exist, but there's only so much power that can be generated over 8-10 hours from October to February — months when the power demand gets higher and EV efficiency gets lower.
> The idea of energy as packets, which can be Store-and-Forward (using batteries) will change everything we know about energy.
Sounds cool, but would it really change everything? Storing solar power (or from other sources) for later is indeed good, but it isn't that groundbreaking of a concept. It also requires additional costs to set up and maintain (and with big distributed network it will be either maintained at a big cost or neglected). Charging the batteries, storing and forwarding energy introduces energy losses at every step as well.