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Long distance high voltage DC inter ties are a thing (there is one running from Washington to southern california), but very costly to build. If you have a tru
by walrus01 6y ago
Long distance high voltage DC inter ties are a thing (there is one running from Washington to southern california), but very costly to build.
If you have a truly ridiculous amount of free or almost free photovoltaics somewhere, you could theoretically crack hydrogen from seawater and compress it into tanks, ship it elsewhere (using hydrogen powered ships, hopefully) to be run through giant proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Right now its economics are prohibitively bad. But do the math if the electricity to run the cracking process was far under 1 cent per kWh...
- mschuster91 6y agoWith anything involving seawater, you'll run into the same issues as any desalination plant - where to put the enormous amounts of brine? Potable water is bad enough to electrolyze as there are lots of minerals in it, but salt water is a whole lot worse - and there are massive concerns about the toxicity of brine.
- yc-kraln 6y agoThis is more-or-less what the EU will be doing along the northern coast of Africa in the future.
- danpalmer 6y agoIn some cases even more than costly to build, they're an area of cutting edge research. The public assume that it's just a matter of building a "big wire", but the "big" here has to be so big to be effective that we're actually into the realm of new materials science. The idea of solar panels in Africa powering homes in Europe is probably unlikely to happen for a long time, and even if it did history has shown us time and again that a distributed network is far more resilient than a centralised one, and so the best solutions look a lot more like putting solar panels on every house.