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Running a power cable across the Pacific is going to be rife with expensive engineering problems, but sure, you could send electrons from Three Gorges to Google
by bregma 6y ago
Running a power cable across the Pacific is going to be rife with expensive engineering problems, but sure, you could send electrons from Three Gorges to Google at some cost. I wouldn't call it cheaper, though.
- BurningFrog 6y agoIn the spirit of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." I wonder if shipping big piles of fully charged batteries around has any chance of being a practical power distribution method?
- jpollock 6y agoThe value of the electricity can be measured by comparing it to the value of a petroleum product. transportable energy can be made using from CO2 in the air using Fischer-Tropsch. It's energy intensive, and uneconomic - which is why people are stringing HVDC links across bodies of water - Denmark/Sweden, Australia/Tasmania, NZ North/South Islands instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
- chartpath 6y agoSneakernet 4.0
- sremani 6y agoBatteries are heavy - unless you are sending these station wagons downhill, its probably not such a great idea.
- gruez 6y agoI highly doubt this. According to wikipedia[1], three high voltage towers can transmit 7079 MW of power. To beat that with lipo batteries you'd need to move 26,713 metric tons worth of batteries per hour[2], and that's not even including time to charge. I don't think any sort of freight transportation method can do that cheaper than some transmission towers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7079+MWh+%2F+265Wh%2Fkg https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7079+MWh+%2F+265Wh%2Fk...
- ljlolel 6y agoA 747 as a giant lithium battery with wings
- MayeulC 6y agoWell, this is technically true, and already being done today with gas and petroleum. Converting it back-and-forth to electricity isn't easy nor very efficient, though. Hydrogen is a bit easier, although still lossy. I'd say it's doable, and not as bad as it sounds, if you really have excess production. inb4 compressed air supertankers. That said, it will in most cases be less expensive to use it as close to the originating point as possible if you can find a need for it.
- bregma 6y agoThe most effective (relatively safe, relatively energy-dense, easy to handle) way to store energy is in a hydrogen-carbon bond. If only there was some way to transport that across oceans in large tankers....
- manfredo 6y agoNot even remotely. Batteries have some of the worst energy density both by unit of volume and mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Energy_density.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene.... Not to mention global annual battery production amounts to less than 1 hour of the USA's national electricity usage.
- ben_w 6y agoYour first point is valid, but I think the second is using the wrong measure — as batteries are rechargeable, surely the measure should be total existent batteries not annual production of batteries? (I would be surprised if this was viable even with my suggested measure, no argument there!)
- manfredo 6y agoLiquid natural gas freightliners are also refillable. I'm not sure what you mean by this. A cargo ship filled to the brim with batteries still has orders of magnitude less energy as a ship filled with the same mass of natural gas.
- ben_w 6y agoGlobal annual battery production has to be first integrated with respect to time and then multiplied by the turn-around time to calculate global annual capacity to ship electricity by way of charged batteries. I absolutely accept that this is a poor solution, and that I am quibbling over a factor of perhaps 500 at most when it’s short by a factor of ~250,000.
- flgb 6y agoLNG tankers are today’s energy equivalent of station wagon full of tapes. In the future we might do the same by liquefying hydrogen (or ammonia) to distribute energy from renewable-rich countries to renewable-poor ones.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOK, shipping batteries between continents is far from feasible now. But what about electrifying a small collection of households by batteries that are replaced from a truck every N weeks, instead of building many miles of power lines through (perhaps flammable) wilderness?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bregma 6y agoRemember, lithium ion batteries are demonstrably effective bombs. Shipping big piles of bombs around is a well-established power distribution method, although not usually electrical power.
- inglor_cz 6y agoAFAIK even getting solar electricity from Sahara to European part of the Mediterranean basin would be extremely expensive, and this is peanuts compared to the cost of sending electricity over the Pacific. Unless there are massive improvements in superconductive materials, of course.
- imtringued 6y agoCouldn't they invest into hydrogen electrolysis? Hydrogen will grow in importance as an industrial energy input. If saharan electricity is the cheapest then nobody else can compete in hydrogen production.