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But the whole point of 100% renewables is that you rely on imports when there little domestic production. It's not true that international power connections are
by bjourne 5y ago
But the whole point of 100% renewables is that you rely on imports when there little domestic production. It's not true that international power connections are tiny. In the Nord Pool market which integrates the Scandinavian and Baltic countries electricity markets over 5 GW is at this moment being exported/imported.
- littlestymaar 5y agoIf you rely on import for renewable, you better hope that you neighbors are not too much into the same kind of renewable… For instance, there are not that many independent wind cells in Europe so entire regions are deprived from wind at the same time. In a 100% wind scenario, you'd need to transport electricity from say Portugal, Spain and France to supply Germany, Denmark and Sweden. And we're talking about >100GW here, 5GW is tiny. Making such electricity transfer possible would require a huge overhaul of the European links.
- bjourne 5y agoFrance regularly exports 10 GW+ to its neighbouring countries. Transnational HVDC lines is not a difficult problem.
- littlestymaar 5y agoThat one order of magnitude off though… There's no technical issue, the grid just isn't designed in such way and you'd need enormous investments to get there. It's nothing money can't buy, but it's a hell lot of money: extrapolating from existing submarine HVDC project in Europe[1], connecting great Britain to mainland Europe alone would cost a few dozen billions. Want to connect the whole Europe like this, you'd have to pay a few hundred billions. [1]: http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC97720/ld-na-27527-en-n.pdf http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JR...