The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture
Solar is about 50% as productive during the depths of winter than the summer at 50 degrees North (65% or so of the peak power, but obviously the duration of sunlight is reduced). "Barely any"/"Useless" is not accurate. Solar arrays remain productive during the winter, even at Northern latitudes.
Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.
You forgot clouds. German experience shows they are at times, on average, only about 2% as effective (24 hours average, i.e. min vs max). And around 5% weekly average min vs max (battery storage over even longer periods is hard to imagine).
Modern PV cells are pretty effective even in cloudy weather. Mine seem to produce more energy on overcast wintery days than on sunny wintery days because there are fewer harsh shadows that way.
It's solar generation which doesn't work in winter in Ukraine, not the heat pumps. And as Russia is targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure as their main tactic, with the goal of getting the population to accept Putin's domination to avoid freezing to death, the heat pumps would only be useful if local solar worked.
Exactly. Micro grids keep on functioning unless they are hit directly. Batteries can charge up when there's power from solar, the grid, rooftop wind, generators, EVs that can provide power back, and so on. There are many options here; batteries don't care where the power comes from. That kind of resilience is very hard to take out with drones once you have it. Centralized grids are much less resilient.
I expect Ukrainians don't actually need to be told this and are already getting creative with ensuring they have power. There's plenty of incentive there to make sure they are not overly dependent on centralized power and heating infrastructure. Of course it takes time to fix and upgrade all buildings; that's why the Russians can still have huge impact with their nightly strikes against civilian infrastructure.
I think Russia and Puting will get credited for inadvertently speeding up the energy transition across Europe by a few decades. Everybody is going cold turkey on Russian gas and the replacement isn't LNG. That's more of a stop gap solution until something more economical can be put in place. We're having pretty harsh winter here in Germany (and elsewhere in the EU). There's not a lot of talk about gas prices in the news so far. That's because we've had a few years to diversify our energy sources. LNG is now a big part of the mix, obviously. But the high price of that is also an incentive for people to consider alternatives like heat pumps.
Greenpeace got their start against nuclear weapons and nuclear waste dumping at sea.
I don't think it's entirely appropriate to ignore the risks of nuclear in the country that contains Chernobyl, and another different nuclear plant which is quite close to the front lines and was shut down by capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
It is though. Climate change due to fossil fuel use is not a risk, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you have to choose between a risk and certain disaster, you never choose the guaranteed disaster, yet that is what the anti-nuclear movement has done.
I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail.
I think you’re kind of off the rails in context of Ukraine, where a foreign army is shelling major power plants and torturing the engineers for fun from time to time.
Maybe consider context before pasting your standard argument?
Not really. Imagine a world where Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria scaled up nuclear power in the 70s. In that situation Putin wouldn't have had any money for his army in the first place.
You have to think about the system as a whole as I said, not get blinded by some detail right now.
And yea, scaling up nuclear right now is probably not super useful as batteries and solar have dropped so much in price. But we certainly shouldn't shut down nuclear reactors like Germany did.
That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electric), and airplane emissions. It wouldn't stop military emissions (which are significant).
We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this most clearly in China which is still burning tons of coal in 2026 and have had no compunction with nuclear ever.
If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.
Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.
Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.
If they were serious about helping us, they would bring boiler, turbine, and transformer parts.
> The project, underway since the end of 2023, is focused on the renovation and energy upgrade of a five-storey, 60-apartment block. [..] Heat pumps and solar energy now supply a large residential building in full, a first for Ukraine. Böhling urges: “Solutions like this should be prioritised over gas heating in EU-funded reconstruction.”
Not the first. I don't think some people realise this, but Ukraine is a country with highly-modernised, strong, and well spread-out industrial base. This is why it took the invaders three whole years to seriously damage our CHP infrastructure to the point it cannot be repaired in a timely manner. And most new apartment blocks are built with heat pumps, geothermal anyway. Some smaller ones (such as the 5-story one they're taking about) were being retrofitted by housing cooperatives due to favourable economics of it. We are not third-world; most existing apartment blocks in all major cities are largely reliant on vast, redundant CHP infrastructure for power distribution and centralised heating. THAT is a solved problem.
What we need is more air defense platforms and replacement parts that we cannot easily manufacture, in numbers.
The article: green group promotes their pet solution in an application where it doesn't make any sense. Uses humanitarian disaster to quell criticism of mis-application. Pilot project launched in hope of getting a big chunk of taxpayer money for more misapplication of technology.
The quickest and best way to sideline russia is to take your money they had for heat pumps and use them on weapons. Putin is making Europe look like a laughing stock because they have folded to Putins threats about nuclear war and he has bluffed them into buying heat pumps instead of ballistic missiles. Europe still has their thumb up their ass singing Kumbaya and buying heat pumps while their traditional protector USA is giving every signal this tradition has ended and Europeans must spend this money to ramp up protection for themselves.
You are not going to get your way out of this with more efficient energy grids or heat pumps and using your money on that instead of bullets is the fool's way out if your goal is to sideline Russia. Of course the most hilarious thing is to think we aren't all still buying "sanctioned" russian products and they totally aren't being "smuggled" and then rebranded as Chinese or myriad of other sources -- which in fact offers options to INCREASE profits to Russian and Chinese government since now they can squeeze their citizens for payoff money to wash their products as non-Russian to bypass sanctions.
Sometimes something is worse than nothing. I saw a lot of that when I volunteered in a war zone. I see no reason why Greenpeace would be exempted.
Country at war is absolute worst place to bring your dumb ideas and cost others their time and protection to deal with you. People who do nothing should absolutely condemn the people doing something if that is the case.
Solar works fine when it's overcast - and it doesn't require a grid. Heat pump is kind of a valid criticism but it's not like those infrastructure attacks by Russia aren't taking out gas and oil also.
after decades of destroying nuclear, German energy independence and thus pegging German energy sourcing to Russian pipelines, resulting in the geopolitical mess we and Ukraine are in – to have the gall to even pretend they're doing any good here...
What are you talking about? Germany would be more energy independent if it had adopted solar and wind power when Greenpeace was advocating it fourty years ago, like China is showcasing today!
The question is not if renewables can replace nuclear. Obviously it is technically possible. The question is how many times bigger should be installed peak power of renewables. 20x? 50x? And of course if it’s economically viable. Because China does not gamble with renewables. They build nuclear capacity at unprecedented levels.
Check latitutes of largest cities in Germany, and compare them to largest cities in China. Have you noticed how all of major German cities are much further north than major Chinese cities?
Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?
what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.
China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.
There is a significant difference in term of dependency when it comes to solar vs gas/oil. Solar panels are not consumables when int comes to energy production- oil and gas are. China can shutdown the supply of solar panels, but not the energy generation with existing panels. This gives you time to start building other supply channels.
> in term of dependency when it comes to solar vs gas/oil.
I don't agree. Oil and gas can be sourced from many different countries, you don't have to rely only on Russia. Russia is just the obvious choice if you are in the middle of Europe, but there are many other producers.
If China stops the supply of solar panels today, you are only good if you have already achieved 100% energy needs coverage with solar. No large country is going to be at that level anytime soon.
Fossil fuel generators, can be hidden in trees or underground and vented.
Solar panels are easy to spot from a drone, and fragile, so it's easy to damage them.
My friends in Ukraine charge their ecoflows with a generator, because if you put a solar panel outside your drone team bunker, you invite incoming artillery.
Of course, I was talking about civilian use, not implying drone teams might spin up a nuclear reactor for a bit of warmth. Solar panels and heat pumps won't make a block of flats more of a target.
Adding some supplemental solar that will move the needle a drop in a brown-out isn't absolutely nothing I suppose, but really for immediate war-time resiliency you would be using solar for off-grid purposes (even if during grid blackouts only).
If your goal is to stay on grid the payoff on solar isn't really realized for 10+ years, when not only are the panels paid off but the accumulation factor of a country full of people with solar panels reduces the grid strain on the conventional sources you list. Adding them for war-time reasons is overall a net negative vs just buying diesel heaters, distributing solar for actual off-grid purposes so people have communications, etc. It is not going to meaningfully reduce dependency on those sources during the period of the war -- that's why I assumed it had to be for off-grid alternative because in that case it would achieve that goal.
Of course it is better than nothing, assuming they did not waste too many domestic resources doing this Greenpeace stunt. But this on-grid solar component is not a serious proposition for wartime demand, and you would be WAY better off donating to maintaining/defending the existing hydro/nuclear/coal generation than trying to deploy enough solar to move the needle for solar grid resiliency within the timespan of the war. I guess I just assumed they were acting rationally and that is why I thought it might be used in off-grid scenarios, but you've disillusioned me of that.
I think we need to look harder at the concept of survivor bias and what it doesn't mean for future chance if anyone believes Ukraine nuclear power stations suffering damage as routinely as any other physical asset would have been OK.
Solar and wind can be distributed and thus more robust - Russia needs to attack more then one place. Which is, I suspect, why certain people object to this.
The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture
What's the best option? Diesel heaters? Firewood / wood stoves? Probably they are things Greenpeace doesn't like.
Solar is about 50% as productive during the depths of winter than the summer at 50 degrees North (65% or so of the peak power, but obviously the duration of sunlight is reduced). "Barely any"/"Useless" is not accurate. Solar arrays remain productive during the winter, even at Northern latitudes.
Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.
You forgot clouds. German experience shows they are at times, on average, only about 2% as effective (24 hours average, i.e. min vs max). And around 5% weekly average min vs max (battery storage over even longer periods is hard to imagine).
Modern PV cells are pretty effective even in cloudy weather. Mine seem to produce more energy on overcast wintery days than on sunny wintery days because there are fewer harsh shadows that way.
This depends on the kind of clouds. Thick, low hanging clouds look gray for a reason.
Make and model please. I'll be adding more solar on my roof and the current ones (sunpro SP460-N120M10) don't perform well during cloudy days.
Clouds and snow say no.
Why wouldnt a heatpump work during the winter? I.e. the entire nordic uses heatpumps..
The "entire nordic" doesn't have bombs falling on the power plants.
It's solar generation which doesn't work in winter in Ukraine, not the heat pumps. And as Russia is targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure as their main tactic, with the goal of getting the population to accept Putin's domination to avoid freezing to death, the heat pumps would only be useful if local solar worked.
Heat pumps work fine on batteries. The better solution is extensive battery storage and (intermittent) grid power, under the circumstances.
They mention large hot water stores which are cheaper and simpler than batteries for storing heat, at least for now.
Exactly. Micro grids keep on functioning unless they are hit directly. Batteries can charge up when there's power from solar, the grid, rooftop wind, generators, EVs that can provide power back, and so on. There are many options here; batteries don't care where the power comes from. That kind of resilience is very hard to take out with drones once you have it. Centralized grids are much less resilient.
I expect Ukrainians don't actually need to be told this and are already getting creative with ensuring they have power. There's plenty of incentive there to make sure they are not overly dependent on centralized power and heating infrastructure. Of course it takes time to fix and upgrade all buildings; that's why the Russians can still have huge impact with their nightly strikes against civilian infrastructure.
I think Russia and Puting will get credited for inadvertently speeding up the energy transition across Europe by a few decades. Everybody is going cold turkey on Russian gas and the replacement isn't LNG. That's more of a stop gap solution until something more economical can be put in place. We're having pretty harsh winter here in Germany (and elsewhere in the EU). There's not a lot of talk about gas prices in the news so far. That's because we've had a few years to diversify our energy sources. LNG is now a big part of the mix, obviously. But the high price of that is also an incentive for people to consider alternatives like heat pumps.
Green Planet Energy, have been greenwashing fossil gas, especially russian gas, for years.
My first thought was "Greenpeace, the fossil fuel mouthpiece that killed the nuclear industry?"
I'm not sure why I'd care about news related to them that wasn't their dismantling.
Greenpeace got their start against nuclear weapons and nuclear waste dumping at sea.
I don't think it's entirely appropriate to ignore the risks of nuclear in the country that contains Chernobyl, and another different nuclear plant which is quite close to the front lines and was shut down by capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
It is though. Climate change due to fossil fuel use is not a risk, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you have to choose between a risk and certain disaster, you never choose the guaranteed disaster, yet that is what the anti-nuclear movement has done.
I get it, nuclear accidents are scary, but we have to be able to take a step back and look at the entire picture and not get blinded by some detail.
I think you’re kind of off the rails in context of Ukraine, where a foreign army is shelling major power plants and torturing the engineers for fun from time to time.
Maybe consider context before pasting your standard argument?
Not really. Imagine a world where Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria scaled up nuclear power in the 70s. In that situation Putin wouldn't have had any money for his army in the first place.
You have to think about the system as a whole as I said, not get blinded by some detail right now.
And yea, scaling up nuclear right now is probably not super useful as batteries and solar have dropped so much in price. But we certainly shouldn't shut down nuclear reactors like Germany did.
Huh? Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, Hungary has extensive nuclear power and Germany made extensive use of nuclear power.
Accidents and the rug pool of US/Soviet capital killed growth of the industry.
That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electric), and airplane emissions. It wouldn't stop military emissions (which are significant).
We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this most clearly in China which is still burning tons of coal in 2026 and have had no compunction with nuclear ever.
If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.
I think that is a pretty unrealistic scenario though. Nuclear won't get that cheap.
Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.
You can just look at the total emissions from France and compare with Germany. It's quite amazing the difference.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.
Germany does have half the CO2 emissions of the USA.
From greenwashing to ethic washing, they are sure good at washing.
If they were serious about helping us, they would bring boiler, turbine, and transformer parts.
> The project, underway since the end of 2023, is focused on the renovation and energy upgrade of a five-storey, 60-apartment block. [..] Heat pumps and solar energy now supply a large residential building in full, a first for Ukraine. Böhling urges: “Solutions like this should be prioritised over gas heating in EU-funded reconstruction.”
Not the first. I don't think some people realise this, but Ukraine is a country with highly-modernised, strong, and well spread-out industrial base. This is why it took the invaders three whole years to seriously damage our CHP infrastructure to the point it cannot be repaired in a timely manner. And most new apartment blocks are built with heat pumps, geothermal anyway. Some smaller ones (such as the 5-story one they're taking about) were being retrofitted by housing cooperatives due to favourable economics of it. We are not third-world; most existing apartment blocks in all major cities are largely reliant on vast, redundant CHP infrastructure for power distribution and centralised heating. THAT is a solved problem.
What we need is more air defense platforms and replacement parts that we cannot easily manufacture, in numbers.
Did they also bring rainbow flags?
This comment section: people who do nothing condemn people who do something for not doing another thing.
The article: green group promotes their pet solution in an application where it doesn't make any sense. Uses humanitarian disaster to quell criticism of mis-application. Pilot project launched in hope of getting a big chunk of taxpayer money for more misapplication of technology.
Solar and heat pumps across all of Europe is in fact one of the quickest and best ways to sideline Russia.
See the RepowerEU plan for more details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPowerEU
The quickest and best way to sideline russia is to take your money they had for heat pumps and use them on weapons. Putin is making Europe look like a laughing stock because they have folded to Putins threats about nuclear war and he has bluffed them into buying heat pumps instead of ballistic missiles. Europe still has their thumb up their ass singing Kumbaya and buying heat pumps while their traditional protector USA is giving every signal this tradition has ended and Europeans must spend this money to ramp up protection for themselves.
You are not going to get your way out of this with more efficient energy grids or heat pumps and using your money on that instead of bullets is the fool's way out if your goal is to sideline Russia. Of course the most hilarious thing is to think we aren't all still buying "sanctioned" russian products and they totally aren't being "smuggled" and then rebranded as Chinese or myriad of other sources -- which in fact offers options to INCREASE profits to Russian and Chinese government since now they can squeeze their citizens for payoff money to wash their products as non-Russian to bypass sanctions.
Very eloquently said, thank you!
Sometimes something is worse than nothing. I saw a lot of that when I volunteered in a war zone. I see no reason why Greenpeace would be exempted.
Country at war is absolute worst place to bring your dumb ideas and cost others their time and protection to deal with you. People who do nothing should absolutely condemn the people doing something if that is the case.
If you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem.
-George Carlin
How solar can help Ukraine now? When there weather is foggy, cloudy? How heap pump can help if there are electricity outages?
Solar works fine when it's overcast - and it doesn't require a grid. Heat pump is kind of a valid criticism but it's not like those infrastructure attacks by Russia aren't taking out gas and oil also.
These guys...
after decades of destroying nuclear, German energy independence and thus pegging German energy sourcing to Russian pipelines, resulting in the geopolitical mess we and Ukraine are in – to have the gall to even pretend they're doing any good here...
What are you talking about? Germany would be more energy independent if it had adopted solar and wind power when Greenpeace was advocating it fourty years ago, like China is showcasing today!
The question is not if renewables can replace nuclear. Obviously it is technically possible. The question is how many times bigger should be installed peak power of renewables. 20x? 50x? And of course if it’s economically viable. Because China does not gamble with renewables. They build nuclear capacity at unprecedented levels.
> Because China does not gamble with renewables. They build nuclear capacity at unprecedented levels.
You have that backwards. In 2025 China installed 100x as much solar as nuclear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638024
Check latitutes of largest cities in Germany, and compare them to largest cities in China. Have you noticed how all of major German cities are much further north than major Chinese cities?
You can't ignore physics and climate.
Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?
what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.
China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#Pr...
They would depend on china instead of Russia. huge improvement! /s
There is a significant difference in term of dependency when it comes to solar vs gas/oil. Solar panels are not consumables when int comes to energy production- oil and gas are. China can shutdown the supply of solar panels, but not the energy generation with existing panels. This gives you time to start building other supply channels.
> in term of dependency when it comes to solar vs gas/oil.
I don't agree. Oil and gas can be sourced from many different countries, you don't have to rely only on Russia. Russia is just the obvious choice if you are in the middle of Europe, but there are many other producers.
If China stops the supply of solar panels today, you are only good if you have already achieved 100% energy needs coverage with solar. No large country is going to be at that level anytime soon.
Solar seems vulnerable in a war.
Compared to what? Gas, nuclear and hydro seem even more vulnerable.
Fossil fuel generators, can be hidden in trees or underground and vented.
Solar panels are easy to spot from a drone, and fragile, so it's easy to damage them.
My friends in Ukraine charge their ecoflows with a generator, because if you put a solar panel outside your drone team bunker, you invite incoming artillery.
Of course, I was talking about civilian use, not implying drone teams might spin up a nuclear reactor for a bit of warmth. Solar panels and heat pumps won't make a block of flats more of a target.
Off grid people ~dont heat off solar. They use hydrocarbons for heat sources. Or wood.
Heat vastly increases solar generation and battery demand.
Most of rural Ukraine already uses or can use solid fuel (firewood, coal) for heating. The article is about flats, not off-grid houses.
Adding some supplemental solar that will move the needle a drop in a brown-out isn't absolutely nothing I suppose, but really for immediate war-time resiliency you would be using solar for off-grid purposes (even if during grid blackouts only).
If your goal is to stay on grid the payoff on solar isn't really realized for 10+ years, when not only are the panels paid off but the accumulation factor of a country full of people with solar panels reduces the grid strain on the conventional sources you list. Adding them for war-time reasons is overall a net negative vs just buying diesel heaters, distributing solar for actual off-grid purposes so people have communications, etc. It is not going to meaningfully reduce dependency on those sources during the period of the war -- that's why I assumed it had to be for off-grid alternative because in that case it would achieve that goal.
Of course it is better than nothing, assuming they did not waste too many domestic resources doing this Greenpeace stunt. But this on-grid solar component is not a serious proposition for wartime demand, and you would be WAY better off donating to maintaining/defending the existing hydro/nuclear/coal generation than trying to deploy enough solar to move the needle for solar grid resiliency within the timespan of the war. I guess I just assumed they were acting rationally and that is why I thought it might be used in off-grid scenarios, but you've disillusioned me of that.
Solar + battery helps against shorter blackouts, to at least keep your freezer and fridge running. All while they repair the grid.
If you have solar on your roof and a bomb hits it, you have no power. And no roof. Power is the least of your problems.
If you have a central power nuclear/gas/coal station and a bomb hits it, nobody has power.
The grid never relies on a single source
> If you have a central power nuclear/gas/coal station and a bomb hits it, nobody has power.
if that happens it can be repaired more economically and faster – as has been repeatedly shown in Ukraine.
I think we need to look harder at the concept of survivor bias and what it doesn't mean for future chance if anyone believes Ukraine nuclear power stations suffering damage as routinely as any other physical asset would have been OK.
If my roof has gone it doesn't matter, as I need to move elsewhere.
Chances are my roof won't be gone though.
Solar and wind can be distributed and thus more robust - Russia needs to attack more then one place. Which is, I suspect, why certain people object to this.