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You can transport electricity from wind mills from far, far away. The wind will always blow somewhere, so the storage problem goes away. Or solar power transpo

• guenthert 6y ago
  You can do this today and if you get energy for free, then the transportation-losses are of little significance (they are just a few percent to begin with). Superconductors won't play a role in energy transport until their installation and operational costs over their lifetime are less then the installation, operational costs and losses of legacy conductors.
  • ben_w 6y ago
    > they are just a few percent to begin with To be more precise, losses are exponential with regard to distance. “A typical loss for 800 kV lines is 2.6% over 800 km”[0], which would be close to 60% losses between antipodes[2]. I think that’s still plausibly worth doing, given renewable prices[1], but it’s not great if you can avoid it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current [1] that said, I know nothing about the cost of making HV power grids, and it is entirely possible the costs I am ignorant of would make it a bad idea [2] but not, as autocorrupt first wrote, antipopes — cstross has nothing to do with the global electricity supply, to my knowledge