Comment by yxhuvud
8 hours ago
In my country we have people, lots of them, that would prefer to forget that renewables forget and to massively build out nuclear to meet demand. In that situation it makes sense to bang the energy cost drum. Yes, obviously the network needs to be kept running and that may take some added nuclear and investment in the existing hydro plants, but at the end of the day a sizeable part will going to be renewables as it is so much cheaper.
Centralized energy infrastructure tends to be a military target. Russia targeted Ukraine's nuke plants right off the bat. The US appears to be losing to Iran one strait, pipeline, refinery, or tanker at a time. The neat thing about solar is that it's not cost effective to shoot at--you're gonna spend more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel. All of the things nuclear has going for it also make it a juicy target, and I'd rather pick up pieces of bombed panels than pieces of bombed reactors.
So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.
Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.
Your enemy doesn’t need to bomb the solar panels from a solar plant, they can just target the grid connection instead.
Unless you make rooftop solar + batteries with variable rate accessible for everyone (like Australia is said to have done), then yeah there will be no easy target.
But even then, your enemy could still target your grid stabilization infrastructure/peaker plants and make those who were not able to afford batteries lose power.
I wish grid operators could have some sort of remote control/feedback of “smart residential inverters” to be able to stabilize the last mile of the grid independently, maybe through a lora mesh or whatever their meters use.
The grid tends to be somewhat grid-shaped, and even industrial-scale solar doesn't usually have a large centralized grid hookup.
It's like trying to starve a country by bombing its supermarkets: you could try, but in reality you're mostly wasting bombs.
> more on the drone than your enemy is gonna spend replacing that panel.
supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.
It’s not very hard to make solar panels. Almost any country could spin up a plant if they had to. Or buy from a diverse set of other countries.