Mother Jones: Putin Tried to Freeze Ukraine. Instead, He Sparked an Energy Revolution

Mother Jones: Putin Tried to Freeze Ukraine. Instead, He Sparked an Energy Revolution.

Russia is bombing fossil-fueled power plants, so the country is building solar and wind. From the story:

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.” 

“Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.”

Yale Environment 360: Europe to Ramp Up Offshore Wind in Push for Energy Independence

Yale Environment 360: Europe to Ramp Up Offshore Wind in Push for Energy Independence.

A group of European leaders pledged Monday to build 100 gigawatts of offshore wind,enough to power more than 50 million homes. As Europe faces a hostile Russia and an increasingly bellicose U.S., experts see deepening risks in its reliance on imported fossil fuels.

“Historically, interferences by the U.S. government in gas markets to exert pressure on Europe were considered unthinkable,” said Raffaele Piria, of the Ecologic Institute, a think tank based in Berlin. “In the current geopolitical context, this assumption is questionable.”