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Middle Ages called, they want their concepts back. Why is "geographical independency" desirable here? We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for
by _Microft 6y ago
Middle Ages called, they want their concepts back.
Why is "geographical independency" desirable here?
We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#)
Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today.
Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process.
(#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago> Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? The examples you provided here really don't illustrate your point well because most of them are easily shipped across the ocean which is not at all true for energy.
- _Microft 6y agoRenewable energy production is not as centralized as production of physical goods. There is no need to transmit energy that far.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoExactly, and that's why those examples aren't really illustrative of the point you're making. That's all I was trying to say.
- roenxi 6y agoWe do ship energy across oceans though, in oil tankers and as coal. A better counterargument would the suspicious number of wars, invasions and military bases involved in cross-country energy exchanges (ie, there is a lot of fighting over oil in the middle east). It seems remarkably foolish to source energy from territory controlled by a foreign military.
- godelski 6y agoDo you really want to depend on another country for your power? Like maybe a little (we do this), but a significant portion? Honestly this seems like a disastrous idea. This is a huge security risk and pretty much puts your entire economy and social well being in the hands of another country. Idk about you, but I'll pay more money for this security.
- jnurmine 6y agoSelf-sufficiency is coming back, I think. The SARS-NCoV-2 epidemic showed how brittle the worldwide supply chains really are. China is a production powerhouse, producing all kinds of everything, and everyone and their neighbour wants to produce in China, but unfortunately this had created a single point of failure. Once the virus stopped things in China, the disruption cascaded along the supply chain networks; demand existed but production was stopped. Resiliency in supply chains won't happen through adding massive inventories to handle a months long disruption, instead it will happen by moving some of the production away from Asia back to USA, Europe, Great Britain, and so on. Naturally bananas and corn won't get this treatment, but technological goods will.