Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.
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.
I'm not sure why I'd care about news related to them that wasn't their dismantling.
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...
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.
Maybe consider context before pasting your standard argument?
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.
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.
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.
> 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 TEC onfrastructure 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 TEC 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.
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...
You can't ignore physics and climate.
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.
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.
Heat vastly increases solar generation and battery demand.
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.
Chances are my roof won't be gone though.