This is greenwashing.

The article suggests that renewables are somehow more helpful in a war when your grid is targeted by drones and missiles. It doesn't do a comparison to back it up though.

Decentralized power production vs. centralized does make sense: decentralized doesn't offer a single point of failure taking out which causes a lot of damage.

But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too? Sounds only better than renewables because it doesn't go up and down throughout a day, and doesn't need grid to amortize the jumps.

Renewables sort of need to be out there in the open to harvest energy from the elements. Solar needs sunlight, wind needs to spin its huge blades in open air. A diesel generator, on the other hand, perfectly goes underground, much harder to target.

So the article doesn't really establish that renewables offer a clear advantage over fossils in a war.

Upd: some comments below have convinced me that fossils don't decentralize as easily as renewables.

>But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?

If you sit on an oil well, perhaps. In practice every static part of the production and distribution chain is a centralized target: from wells over refineries to depots, roads, harbours and finally power plants. You simply can't run fossils in a distributed local-first approach. That's also the reason why even for a massive oil producer like Russia, Ukraine can cause billions in damages with drones costing a couple hundred grand.

A drone blows up 1kWp solar panel you lose about 1Mwh in a year assuming it’s completely broken.

A drone blows up an oil carrying road vehicle you lose 350Mwh instantly.

You blow up a pipeline you knock out 1 million MWh a day

You're comparing diesel to PV which doesn't speak to the merits of PV vs centralization. There's also the massive disadvantage of fuel distribution from diesel, which is a form of centralization and bottlenecking, and then there's fuel shortages and costs which PV doesn't have to bother with.

Also is Russia targeting individual PV systems? That's tantamount to targeting individual residences which, if we're granting that, there's no amount of decentralizing that would ever mitigate those attacks so diesel vs PV would be moot.

Lastly I don't think that's what greenwashing means. Greenwashing isn't representing renewables favorably, it's tying some external negative practice to language of environmentalism with vague buzzwords and questionable claims of environmental benefits to make that thing look better. But in this case there's no external thing being tied to environmentalism, we're just talking about PV directly.

A diesel generator needs a supply of fuel that can be trivially blockaded as Iran is so successfully doing.

The whole world is suffering from the effects of that disruption.

The supply of diesel itself also requires refineries and they can't be moved or rebuilt quickly either.

Ukraine is doing a sterling job of attacking Russia's refineries. All the portable diesel generators in world won't help you invade another country if you have no fuel to run them and no supply lines.

A small portable balcony setup costing a few hundred dollars, the type sold in supermarkets in Europe, will run every day and keep you alive.

There's nothing the enemy can do about it other than a direct hit and that would take out your generator and fuel anyway.

Remotest villages in India were doing gobar gas plants in 80s/90s. What you are saying is possible.

If you have enough cows/biomass, perhaps you can have a home biomass to methane converter. Then you can use it for cooking, heating, etc.

You can convert a petrol car to a CNG car.

You could also have a coal to liquid plant in the backyard and generate diesel or petrol.

You have to do without any cooling though, fridge, AC, etc. Cold can't be created. Without electricity, just with chemicals fuels, it is unlikely.

decentralising your fuel production and to a lesser extent distribution is not easy either though.

> But can't energy from fossil fuels be generated in a decentralized manner too?

How would that possibly work? Everyone has their own oil well and refinery? Their own fuel depots?

And even if you were able to build all that, we would basically have giant bombs waiting to be ignited all over residential neighborhoods during war time...

I would invite you to think through the logistics of what you propose before you launch into multiple paragraphs that assume those logistics are solved.

On "greenwashing". As the article said, the environmental aspect is at the bottom of Ukraine's list of concerns at the moment.

This is the most concrete evidence (if it wasn't clear to anyone not lobotomised by the fossil fuel industry propaganda already) that renewable energy is a sovereign asset, not an external risk like shipping gas and oil round the world from mostly western-hostile nations.

Ukrainians are fighting for their country and this is the route they take. Any government not doing that same is deliberately weakening their country.

But check the position of supposedly nation-first right wing political parties in the west and they all LOVE making their country energy dependent on Saudi Arabia or the US, or Russia. I wonder why that could be...

That's not what greenwashing means. Greenwashing refers to marketing that sells a product as environmentally beneficial, while it's not in reality.

Your claim is that they're selling a product (renewables) as beneficial for the war, while it's not. If I were to invent a term for that, it might be "camo-washing".

Whether your argument makes sense or not, I don't know. But you fail to note the drawback of a diesel generator: it needs diesel, and thus logistics.

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