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.
