We’ve been a few years away from personal helicopter transport for my entire 34 year lifetime

Lead times such as... 4 years? Sounds like light speed compared with a lot of other mega-engineering projects. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 6 & 7, ~4.3 years.

Compared to what? It serves its niche quite well. It's not nuclear power's fault people wait until they should have built it twenty years ago.

They needn’t be that large. You can put one on a submarine.

"nuke" means a nuclear weapon

Nukes are arguably ONLY useful in defense (and deterring another from attacking). Using nuclear weapons against an opponent that also has nuclear weapons will very likely lead to a nuclear exchange and the decimation of both countries. It’s suicide, and so no one is going to do it unless they have nothing left to lose. A nation under attack, facing an existential threat, and about to be overrun, is in exactly that circumstance.

And yeah, maybe the defending countries leader isn’t willing to end it all, and maybe try collaboration or partisan resistance. But if you were the attacking country, would you be willing to make that bet? Or would you hesitate?

You use tactical nuclear weapons, as was planned by NATO in case of attack of Warsaw Pact tanks through Fulda Gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulda_Gap

In reality this escalates very fast into all out nuclear war. Which is why you don't see wars between two nuclear armed countries. There is no winner in a nuclear war.

North Korea's nuclear capabilities isn't what kept them from being attacked. It was Seoul being in artillery range and the refugee crisis on the chinese border that would result.

> North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.

North Korea was never in danger of being attacked anyway. They don’t need nuclear weapons to flatten Seoul. The only country capable of invading NK is China, and they benefit much more from NK remaining buffer zone.

Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.

So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.

I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!

I have done the math, several times. The last time was to plan a hypothetical solar "highway gas station" capable of charging 100 teslas EVs per hour 24/7/365. Assuming flat ground at Vancouver's latitude, it came to a solar farm approaching square kilometers/miles in scale.

10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels nominaly produce 1000kwh/m so 24,000m2 of panels... if facing the sun perfectly during normal day/night cycles. But non-equator latitudes need far more land than that because the sun isnt directly overhead, plus winter/rainy days... it is a massive solar farm (and a massive battery) just to replace an average highway gas station.

Given that any future 2-lane highway might see a couple thousand thousand EVs each hour, each needing charging every couple hundred miles, the number and size of solar charging stations per mile is crazy.

> But Sun reliably shows up most days.

Gonna need a citation on that, where I live in the Midwest there are legitimately times where I haven't seen the sun for 2 straight weeks. Not to mention some latitudes I've lived at where the sun doesn't get up till like 9 and is already almost gone by 4.

Like AZ, CA, Texas sure go nuts solarizing. But there are plenty of people for whom that's not really an option.

> most days

cries

> a refinery in your backyard

Funny thing is, fuel can be transported, so that's not needed!

If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.

And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.

I'm sure we'll see a transition to electric some day, it is more efficient purely from a physics standpoint. But I'd be shocked to see the military transition before civilian industry.

You don’t buy it from the truck though. The truck buys it from a massive storage facility at the refinery, fills the truck, the truck drives off and fills a hole someplace. Finally you buy it out of the hole.

"super expensive infrastructure" that is always going to be cheaper in a city compared to building equivalents in the countryside.

All of which is more expensive, per resident, in the countryside.

Citation needed. Those are less than 5% of any budget I've seen.

That is a stated goal but it's repeatedly happened through history that someone has attempted to do that same thing and what it really did was make the population even more eager to go to war to defeat you.

> mitigate Russia's ability to inflict pain

The crux of the distinction I'm making is right there. Russia is not doing some ephemeral "inflict pain", it's pursuing a clear objective of draining Ukraine's budget.

The way I'd do it if I was in Kremlin is something close to make up a list of targets, rank them by (Ukraine's cost to maintain)/(Russia's cost of missiles), pick the top 3-5 and hit them. Also continuously update the cost estimates and reevaluate those 3-5 targets.

In this vocabulary, Ukraine moving to decentralized is a cost in itself, so if it does pay that cost to move "energy grid" item down Russia's list, Russia can celebrate it and move on to the next target. If this happens, Ukraine will have paid the cost of moving to decentralized, and will be continuously paying a penalty for it, while Russia's coat of incurring that on Ukraine goes to zero (since the new missiles are hitting different targets).

And critically, if we assume moving to decentralized will make it pointless for Russia to hit the grid, deciding how much will it help requires knowing what target they will aim those newly freed missiles at, and how much cost that is going to incur.

> you were claiming PV being outside was "much easier to hit" but now you are saying those systems probably won't be targeted.

These are all hypotheticals, I assumed we're on the same page about it. We don't really know here in this forum what's going to work. Considering two contradicting hypotheticals in different threads is alright.

My comments are not about what is true, what's going to actually happen on the ground. They're about how one should go about arguing whatever they're arguing for, what reservations they're missing, and what assumptions they made they're not aware of.

Even the big targets nowadays take hundreds of drones launched to destroy, because of air defense. Air defense seems like one of those thigs that's easier to concentrate around a select number of key sites. You won't put a Patriot next to each residential building, but you can put some next to a big power plant.

And the drones today are made with large targets in mind, carrying one bigger payload of explosive. I wonder how they can change if the goal would be to target stacks of fragile solar panelts with best cost efficiency. I've seen on the news yesterday that Russia started targeting bridges more because that have some new payload that's more destructive to them than just a big lump of explosive.

I don't know what's actually true here, just some ideas on what else need to be taken into account.

Thats terrific! The plug-and-play layer of storage is plug-in batteries (as an extension of plug-in solar: if you can supply power from solar, you can also supply from batteries)

The first layer is storage is EVs, which is inevitable. EVs have humongous batteries.

Next layer, add thermal storage.

> I think it's way better to make a community grid.

Indeed, like Internet, autonomous networks with connections.

US subdivisions can be a micro grid, a few hundred homes.

There are a lot of condo communities, the common elements (roof, etc) are the HOA responsibility. These can do community solar and grid.

In the metros of third world countries, there is a huge growth of gated communities with high rises. These can be net zero with their own production and grid.

>Could you also motivate the choice to compare Wh of energy lost, instead of, say, US dollar cost of the damage?

Well there's an integral relation between the two, more kWh lost is more dollars lost. They both proxy for some venn diagram overlap that includes damage, cost, lost resources, and it's perfectly legitimate to reason from any permutation of those. It's notionally possible for different tech to attach those costs in different ways but in this case I would put the burden on you to explain the practical difference that you think cashes out in an advantage diesel has.

I'm not sure why you think a truck would be cheaper necessarily: smaller PV systems can range from $10k to $20k with no fuel payload. Is a diesel truck with a full payload of fuel really cheaper than that? And is a diesel truck supposed to be fueling just one house? It's likely a single point of failure for a network of people depending on it at a time when bridges are getting bombed, and therefore an instance of centralization and attractive target for attack. And you said yourself you didn't think PV would be attacked because decentralizing in and and of itself inflicted the economic damage yet you've once again gone back to imaging a diesel advantage in the event of PV getting attacked.

Solar panels are dirt cheap. Which idiot would send drones to hit a solar panel? Going by your economic argument, use drones that cost hundreds of thousands of dollar to hit something thats costs 10 bucks?

Do you think thats sound strategy? The military generals in US would accept that?

> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.

is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a long time.

The diesel alone in the fuel truck that used to fill my 1000l oil fired tank costs far more than the number of solar panels a single drone could destroy, let alone the cost of the truck itself.

Hell my 1000l tank alone costs more even when empty.

> Panels are stationary, easier to target than vehicles.

Panels are small, numerous and widely dispersed, easy to install quickly and incrementally, and non-flammable.

Basically the opposite of (also stationary) centralised fossil fuel infrastructure.

It's clear which one is the more tempting target if you have a finite stockpile of drones.

Sorry, I was trying to be sarcastic and might've failed! There is no way to do distributed fossil fuel infra. I was suggesting the OP get a few dozen cows to build one!

Do you mean a generator that creates diesel from bullshit[1]? Or a diesel generator that generates electricity?

If its the latter, how is your idea decentralized fossil fuel? You are using the same fossil fuel supply chain as it exists today.

For decentralized, you need an oil well in your backyard, and a refinery. THEN a diesel generator, if you want electricity.

[1] Assuming you have enough cows

Then you don't solve the core problem of having a big juicy single point of failure. One that is very flammable at that, as Ukraine has proven in Russia recently.

Yeah, I agree greenwashing is not the word here. I don't know what is, but if anything I would say you're trying to express something that is in an important sense opposite to greenwashing (greenwashing is trying to make something look good by falsely presenting it as eco-friendly, you're accusing something of boosting renewables by falsely presenting it as tied to them)

And yes, decentralization is the core aspect that is important, but renewables are importantly much more decentralized end-to-end compared to a diesel generator, because renewables, once in place, have no real central point of failure, while the supply chain for the diesel in the generator still has very important central points of failure that can be attacked (and explode quite easily due to the large amounts of flammable material they are carrying). Distributing the generation does help smooth over short-term disruptions but the overall throughput in the longer term can still be disrupted.

Also, while renewables might be out in the open, they are cheap and spread out over a wide area, which makes them pretty cost-ineffective to attack compared to more concentrated facilities.

> The argument that decentralization (diesel or renewable) helps makes sense to me.

Sure, but also in the real world, fossil fuel infrastructure is always centralised. "decentralised diesel" might exist in the sense that you can run lots of generators all over, but that's energy consumption not energy supply.

Those generators have to be supplied with fuel or they're useless. That supply is always centralised. Fossil fuels cannot be decentralised in the same way as solar.

I don't think it's out of thin air, it's the reality of what's actually being used in Ukraine, and as comments in this thread have borne out it seems to have legitimate benefits, and so doesn't qualify as greenwashing.

Also if there's greenwashing, it means some questionable practice is being green washed. Apparently you think the idea of decentralization is the thing in this case... but you agree that decentralizing is a good idea and are more against the merits renewables, which is an anti renewables argument but not a correct diagnosis of something being greenwashed.