It's hard to drone a solar panel
It's hard to drone a solar panel

It's hard to drone a solar panel

The best reason for nations to switch to power from the sun and wind is that it will reduce, by some degree, the severity of the climate crisis (and save millions of lives lost each year to pollution). The second best reason is that it’s cheaper than fossil fuel, and any nation who doesn’t shift will be stuck with an economy running on expensive energy. But it seems to me—not a military analyst, but a fairly good tea-leaves reader—that the war in Ukraine may be adding a third to the list: its comparative invulnerability to attack.
As the world has begun to figure out, something important has happened amidst the carnage of Russia’s immoral invasion: warfare has changed forever, with the small drone quickly replacing much of the military hardware we grew accustomed to in the 20th century. Drones have been ubiquitous along the front lines, where the no-man’s zone between the armies is lethally patrolled by squadrons of drones able to take out tanks, troop transports, and pretty much anything else—that explains much of the stasis of the last two years; the competing forces are largely pinned down.
Over the course of the war, by sheer necessity, Ukraine has developed a formidable drone industry, and increasingly it is using them against a singular set of targets: the oil refining and transport infrastructure spread out across its sprawling foe. Russia has formidable air defenses, of course—Ukraine couldn’t fly a bomber across 1,400 kilometers of the country’s airspace to bomb a refinery. But the small and comparatively slow drones have proved equal to the task. As the FT reported last week,
Sixteen of Russia’s 38 refineries have been hit since the start of August, some of them multiple times, including one of Russia’s largest fuel-processing facilities, the 340,000 barrel-a-day plant at Ryazan, close to Moscow.
The strikes have disrupted more than 1 million barrels a day of Russia’s refining capacity, according to Energy Aspects, a research group. Diesel exports, if they maintain the current rate, will fall to the lowest monthly total in September since 2020, according to both OilX and Vortexa, which track cargoes.
“It seems to be the most effective campaign that Ukraine has carried out so far,” said Benedict George, head of European petroleum products pricing at Argus, which reports commodity prices.
Solar and wind are fundamentally not something that can be effectively protected from attack, it is necessarily exposed and dispersed over wide areas that will be essentially impossible to guard comprehensively. You can’t have someone with a MANPAD or AA gun guarding every single windmill or field of solar panels. but there are no particularly valuable points in the system, no Achilles heel. It will take damage, it will require constant replacements and repair, but, it will be extremely difficult to comprehensively disable it. And so long as the cost to replace and repair is not much more than the cost of munitions used on it, then it’s not exactly an economical usage of the attacker’s resources.
As supposed to a system of refineries, large power plants, and pipelines. Those are dense high value targets, you can plaster them from head to toe with high end air defense because there aren’t that many to protect. But if those defenses fail or are overwhelmed, replacing them is a multi year multi million dollar project. And realistically, the bomber will always get through, eventually the defenses will fail and you will loose a huge chunk of capacity that can’t be replaced easily. Even if it takes 10 cruise missiles, 100 drones, and 20 informants on the ground feeding information about defenses, it’s still much cheaper for the attacker to destroy than defender to defend or replace.
Wellll, all electrical power is ultimately vulnerable at delivery. The power grid is and always will be extremely vulnerable. If you wire up that field one way it’ll be resilient to random wire cutting, another way it won’t. Etc.
I’m more talking about diminishing capacity rather than temporary disruption, the less valuable or complicated any given part, the easier it is to replace it fairly quickly. Cutting a line is annoying, but it can be repaired fairly quickly, transformers, battery banks, and panels are more expensive and difficult to replace, but order of magnitude easier than a gas turbine.
Like say a bomb gets dropped in a field of solar panels, it’ll destroy some in the direct blast, and damage others near by with debris or other things, but, a significant portion of the field would probably be fine and could be running again fairly quickly. A bomb that blows up the turbine at a gas plant is a causing a lot more pain.