Conversation

#Russia today attacked Kyiv Hydro Power Plant in #Ukraine with rockets and I can’t pass this opportunity to demonstrate another popular media bias related to electricity generation.

Kyiv HPP reservoir is almost 1,000 km2 and the dam is 12 m high with a capacity of 1,500 m3/s. The potential energy of this mass of water is 1.5 GJ, or - if one likes comparisons to nuclear weapons - roughly half a kiloton of TNT per second. In terms of energy released, it’s like a small tactical nuclear weapon exploding every second for days, until all water escapes.

While everyone is getting excited about a hypothetical #nuclear meltdown in Zaporizhzhia or Kursk, the risks of #renewables have already materialised - the Russian destruction of the Novaya Kakhovka hydroelectric plant resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and the contamination of thousands of km2 of land and the Black Sea. The Russians have already attacked hydropower plants in Dnipro and now Kyiv, and have successfully stopped power generation (but not destroyed the dams themselves). Historically, the biggest energy-related disaster is also not any Chernobyls or Fukushimas, but also hydroelectric plants - the destruction of the Banquiao dam chain in China in 1975, which killed between 50’000 and 200’000 people.

The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows that renewable energy - and hydropower is one of the key renewables because it’s dispatchable - is a source of risks not just hypothetical, like NPPs, but real.

Please do not take what I wrote above about kilotons as an attack on renewables itself, just me poking the media bias and a polite reminder that any source of energy is a potential threat. A sound analysis of the risks associated with these sources involves a quantitative comparison of these risks converted into kWh of energy produced based on facts, not mythology wholesale manufactured by Greenpeace & friends.