One of the ways Russia is making life for Ukraine as miserable as possible is by targeting the country’s electrical grid. The NY Times reports that there is one element that could make a difference: wind power.
Bombarding the power grid has been an essential part of Russia’s invasion, but officials say it would take many more missile strikes to badly damage a wind farm than a power plant.
(The link should allow passage through The NY Times paywall.)_
Maria Varenikova reports:
ODESA, Ukraine — The giants catch the wind with their huge arms, helping to keep the lights on in Ukraine — newly built windmills on plains along the Black Sea.
In 15 months of war, Russia has launched countless missiles and exploding drones at power plants, hydroelectric dams and substations, trying to black out as much of Ukraine as it can, as often as it can, in its campaign to pound the country into submission. The new Tyligulska wind farm stands only a few dozen miles from Russian artillery, but Ukrainians say it has a crucial advantage over most of the country’s grid.
A single, well-placed missile can damage a power plant severely enough to take it out of action, but Ukrainian officials say that doing the same to a set of windmills, each one hundreds of feet apart from any other, would require dozens of missiles. A wind farm can be temporarily disabled by striking a transformer substation or transmission lines, but these are much easier to repair than power plants.
“It is our response to Russians,” said Maksym Timchenko, the chief executive of DTEK Group, the company that built the turbines, in the southern Mykolaiv region, the first phase of what is planned as Eastern Europe’s largest wind farm. “It is the most profitable and, as we know now, most secure form of energy.”
Ukraine is capitalizing on something that gets overlooked: energy independence of a resilient sort through wind turbines. The article covers the issues Ukraine is facing with constant attacks, notes that wind provides only a tiny fraction of power to Ukraine, that further large scale construction will have to wait until the fighting has ended and contractors can return — but the long term potential is too great to ignore. Wind power is, as the article notes, harder to take out. It means access to fossil fuels and petro-blackmail becomes less of a problem. It’s a solution to climate as well.
The 5,700-megawatt Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which has been damaged repeatedly in fighting and has stopped transmitting energy to the grid, would also be a big answer to cutting emissions and would provide backup stability to the grid that would make renewable power variability less of a concern. Ending the war so it can be repaired and so that construction of wind turbines on a large scale can resume is going to be critical for reconstruction. It’s even more imperative for Ukraine to regain the territory where wind potential is higher.
This is providing a lesson to others looking at long term energy security — and is probably one of the things concerning Russia as a petro-state. It turns out Ukraine isn’t just fighting for survival. It’s now on the front lines of the climate fight as well.