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Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable
- h2odragon 5y ago> between 200 and 600 GW of photovoltaic generation capacity ... they do that across the pacific with HVDC; would that be a viable "earth braking system?" Daylight savings with teeth.
- throwaway10122 5y agoDoesnt China have it's own supply of deserts a bit closer to home?
- _Microft 5y agoPart of the idea is that the producer and consumer of the energy are on opposite hemispheres and at different longitudes. That means when its winter in China, it is going to be summer in Chile. There is also a considerable time difference between the places which helps to supply electric energy via solar power even while it is night in China.
- delecti 5y agoHonestly it's kinda brilliant. With a big enough global network of overbuilt solar capacity you would avoid the problems of the duck curve and weather limitations.
- mschuster91 5y agoIt's hard to build an actual network out of DC power, which is partially why AC power took over.
- dreamcompiler 5y agoIt was hard to build a DC network in 1900. It's easy today with modern power electronics, which Nikola Tesla didn't have. In fact building a DC network is somewhat easier than AC now because phase-matching is unnecessary.
- popinman322 5y agoLooks like DC power is more efficient for long haul cables. https://engineering.stackexchange.com/a/19759 https://engineering.stackexchange.com/a/19759
- dreamcompiler 5y agoThat's a good link. Summary: DC is always a bit more efficient than AC. The reason our grid is AC is because high voltage transmission is much more efficient than low voltage transmission.* But you don't want multi-thousand volt feeds coming into your house, so voltage conversion is necessary. If you don't have power electronics, you have to use magnetic transformers to convert between voltages, and magnetic transformers only work on AC. Thus our electric grid is mostly AC. Now that we have power electronics we can convert voltages without magnetic transformers, and AC is no longer a requirement except for backward compatibility. *unless you have superconducting cables
- vnglst 5y agoI was immediately thinking about early morning in Asia, still dark outside, everybody puts the kettle on. If these long distance cables really can transport energy efficiently it might solve some of the challenges with renewables!
- dukeyukey 5y ago> I was immediately thinking about early morning in Asia, still dark outside, everybody puts the kettle on. In the UK they actually have to plan for grid demand to skyrocket during ad breaks in certain TV shows because half the country puts the kettle on at the same time! In one episode of EastEnders, demand grew by 2290MW, nearly twice as large as any single UK nuclear reactor. https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/iconic-eastenders-episode-almost-brought-19943556 https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/iconic-eastenders...
- bryanlarsen 5y agoThe UK have 3000W kettles whereas in North America is stuck with 1500W kettles. Many kitchens in North America have 20A outlets, which should at least let us use 2000W kettles. Why won't anybody sell me a 115V/16A kettle with a NEMA 5-20 connector?
- elihu 5y agoPresumably it would be very useful to China to be able to buy power during their night time. It might also be beneficial to Chile to be able to buy power from China when the situation is reversed. Better interconnections mean you can get more benefit from cheap solar and don't have to rely on batteries.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoDammit, the sun is my battery! and the earth's tilt, spin and orbit is my load balancer!
- souenzzo 5y agoIsn't cheaper turn the electricity into liquid hydrogen?! Hydrogen can be stored for months, delivered by car, tubes, ships, etc Do not have many losses across long distances
- _ph_ 5y agoNot only are the hydrogen production facilities quite expensive, there is a huge loss in producing hydrogen from electricity and back. Also storage is expensive and has energy losses due to the compression work. And you need to transport the hydrogen over large distances. For the same amount of energy to be put into the Asian grid, you need at least 2-3x as many solar cells, if you go via hydrogen.
- Mvandenbergh 5y agoElectricity to hydrogen followed by conversion to liquid and cryogenic transport is about 65% lossy. That doesn't mean you would never do it given cheap enough input electricity but it's not the easy answer.
- dukeyukey 5y ago> Isn't cheaper turn the electricity into liquid hydrogen?! Creating hydrogen is about 80% efficient, so you do lose a fair bit in the process. > Hydrogen can be stored for months, delivered by car, tubes, ships, That's the thing about hydrogen, it's tricky to store for long periods of time. It leaks real easy. And liquid hydrogen isn't very dense, about 7% of that of water, so it's hard to ship it in bulk. And at the point you're piping it, well you may as well just pipe the electricity direct.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoAnd if you do store it, it has a nasty tendency to weaken it's container.
- ncmncm 5y agoThat tendency is usually exaggerated. At LH2 temperature and atmospheric pressure, it is not a problem. You get such troubles storing H2 at high pressure and temperature.
- politician 5y agoWhy not turn it into microwaves and bounce it via mirrors in orbit? Those cables are super expensive and there is a current shortage of cable manufacturing capacity globally.
- h2odragon 5y agoLess efficient; and it'd be an incredible weapon if it accidentally wandered off path.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoinverse square law
- shagie 5y agoThat applies to omnidirectional broadcast of power rather than beams.
- beecafe 5y agoYou can't make a perfectly straight beam due to imperfect optics (and diffraction/Huygens principle), so a beam will only reduce the loss by a constant factor, but the area of the beam still increases by n^2 as it propogates.
- posix_me_less 5y agoNo, EM radiation beam still obeys inverse square law.
- shagie 5y agoThe power loss when talking about cables is considered to be quite a bit at about 50% from napkin calculations. The power loss of beamed microwaves is a bit more. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2020.12.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2020.12.026 > Finally, the simulation of the long-distance high-power MWPT system can achieve 8.5 kW DC power with about 1% DC–DC transmission efficiency at the operating 2.45 GHz frequency and the 10 km distance away.
- mikece 5y agoWhat percentage of power is lost to line-loss at those distances? And if you are going to cover long distances you usually push up to 750kV or more: how long before there's an insulation breakdown somewhere along your 15,000km and you get some very energetic arcing and sparking underwater? Not to mention that it makes for an interesting asset to target (though only a few nations have the "tools" to attack power cable on the sea floor).
- mikeyouse 5y agoIt's on the order of 1.5%/1,000KM, so something like 20%-25% loss. Edit: a Chinese project with a 1.5%/1,000KM loss http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html
- dakial1 5y agoSo the cost (price) of energy in the other end (china) should be 25%+ (plus the expected ROIC) to make this endeavor worthwhile
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoAlso the cost of the infrastructure financing and depreciation - which I would imagine would be significant. But maybe not? Does anyone know what something like this would cost? I'm imagining A LOT.
- mikeyouse 5y agoChile is among the best places in the world for solar power, projects are being completed with power guarantees at costs under $0.03/KWh -- a 25% increase or even 50% increase would be pretty cheap power, according to the EIA still at least 1/3 cheaper than electricity from an incremental advanced nuclear plant. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
- elihu 5y agoWikipedia gives 3.5% loss per 1,000 km as a ballpark figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
- endisneigh 5y agoSeems more efficient to desalinate water using solar and export it to China
- philipkglass 5y agoEuropean Commission Joint Research Center Technical Reports: HVDC Submarine Power Cables in the World https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC97720/ld-na-27527-en-n.pdf https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... According to table 1, losses for 800 kilovolt HVDC systems can be as low as 3.5% per 1000 km. That comes to 52.5% loss over 15,000 km. Losses should go lower at 1100 kilovolts (the highest voltage HVDC systems running today) but I can't find detailed loss numbers on those systems. At 52.5% energy lost in transmission (47.5% retained), this is still considerably more efficient than making hydrogen via electrolysis, liquefying it for shipping, and then burning the hydrogen in the receiving country to generate electricity. This particular plan is breathtakingly ambitious and would no doubt cost a fortune. It may appear more attainable when (if?) the similar but smaller Australia-Singapore Sun Cable project gets built: https://suncable.sg/ https://suncable.sg/
- baybal2 5y agoThere can boosters on the cable
- lxe 5y agoIt's a power cable, not a communications cable.
- baybal2 5y agoThere is nothing preventing them to put more DC-DC up conversion mid-way.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoWhy would you use DC at all, and why would you put something in the middle? I don't think that makes any sense.
- baybal2 5y ago
- blocked_again 5y agoGovernments should stick to governence and stop doing stupid shit.
- simion314 5y agoLike what? Without government doing infrastructure probably most people would not have a electricity,water and a decent road in front of their home. Or how would we imagine an alternate reality where the governments are weak, so the industrial billionaires would be the ones deciding what infrastructure to build, what science to research, what level of education is needed etc. I can only see just a few roads , with taxes on them, electricity only in the city, education and hygiene only for the rich(in fact there were governmental/king laws that forced people not to shit everywhere).
- blocked_again 5y agoImagine a power generation company run by Joe Biden with his white House staff vs Elon Musk with his Tesla staff. Which stock would you buy? I bet the Biden company will go bankrupt in a few years let alone go public.
- pphysch 5y agoModern career politicians like Joe Biden are cut from a completely different cloth than the leaders that actually built America's infrastructure in the mid-20th century.
- oneplane 5y agoDo you really believe they will be going out there, researching, designing, and implementing anything? They are policymakers and all their job entails is making choices. That's it. And when you are in a country and the options you present has a huge effect on that country, then the government's job is to represent the people in making the choice do either do it or not do it. Then there are the lifelong politicians, those are mostly useless and more comparable to entertainers in an endless gameshow. It's the result of decades of min-maxing and targeting the lowest common denominator.
- mikece 5y agoWouldn't it be better to induce foreign investors to set up shop in Chile to take advantage of the really cheap and abundant electricity?
- pphysch 5y agoManufacturing supply chains in East Asia far outpace those in South America, and extending those across the south Pacific just to get access to cheap electricity does not seem economical.
- dakial1 5y agoIf electricity is all they need yes. But if we are talking about labor and source materials and export supply chain, then nothing (currently) beats China.
- dreamcompiler 5y agoNot to mention water, which is generally needed for business but which the Atacama desert doesn't have much of. https://www.mining.com/water-rights-under-scrutiny-in-chiles-atacama-desert/ https://www.mining.com/water-rights-under-scrutiny-in-chiles...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- boulos 5y agoDoug Stewart, now at VEIR (veir.com), had a company (Wattershed) that was doing undersea HTS cables about a decade ago. I think their first deployment was going to be inter island in Hawaii? Either way, this doesn't have to be hyper efficient. It just has to be better than "get lots of batteries". Like others, I'm more worried about redundancy / operational concerns than about power loss.
- ameminator 5y agoI dont think this makes much sense - even if the fundamental premise (sending solar energy under thousands of kilometers at massive initial and maintenance costs) had immediate economic merit, there are closer places like Australia. Even then, the fundamental benefit of solar energy is it's distributed nature. With something like nuclear power, however, there might be more use...
- syntheticcorp 5y agoAustralia already has a plan for this in the works to supply Singapore with solar from the outback. It’s called Sun Cable - see: https://suncable.sg/ https://suncable.sg/
- hjnilsson 5y agoI believe the purpose of this is to generate solar power at night. Australia won’t help China there since it is in a nearby timezone.
- streamofdigits 5y agoHopelessly naive, I know, but shouldn't there be a global grid to optimally distribute electricity from solar irradiation rather than laying idiotic lengths of cable for political reasons? You want to connect the Pacific rim for that grid to work but I can easily imagine some intermediate "links" that seem to make more sense
- gberger 5y agoThere isn't even a nation-wide electrical grid in the USA. Having a global grid is a futuristic pipe dream.
- streamofdigits 5y agoIf we condition on people taking the energy transition seriously the past might not be a good predictor of the future. But whether there will be a strong pull towards "optimality" might depend on what is the total cost of sub-optimal alternatives. I would think that a well distributed grid would also minimize (beside losses) also storage costs and would also have various other redundancy benefits...
- dane-pgp 5y ago> Having a global grid is a futuristic pipe dream. It's more like a series of tubes.
- pphysch 5y agoNot a pipe dream because it is futuristic, but because it is geopolitical.
- dreamcompiler 5y agoThe US doesn't have a nationwide grid because of the technical requirement to use AC back when electrification happened (which requires phase matching or DC intertie between subregions), and because of the politics of who regulates the grid (which is why Texas still has its own grid.) The AC requirement is a legacy historical issue; a nationwide DC grid could be built in the US tomorrow if the political issues could be solved (and if it made economic sense to rip out the legacy AC infrastructure, which it doesn't.)
- bryanlarsen 5y agoCasey Handmer calculated that it was cheaper to produce solar power in Boston for local use than it was to ship solar power from Arizona to Boston.[1] Solar power is 3X as expensive to produce in Boston, but HVDC lines are even more expensive. If it's uneconomical to ship from Arizona to Boston, then Chile to Asia seems even more problematic. Although in this case the submarine HVDC line is competing against batteries since Chile and China are in different hemispheres. I hope with they have an accurate prediction for battery prices in their business plan, because the prices of batteries are dropping precipitously. 1: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-electricity-is-local/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
- prostoalex 5y agoSource for cost is this document published in 2014 https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSOK.pdf https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO... I have no idea whether those are still reasonable estimates, just wanted to point to a possibility of price improvement.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoIt appears that Casey's source is this $40/MWh project being built by 8 Minute Energy, so he has 2020 numbers. https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-sola https://www.energy-storage.news/news/developer-8minute-says-...
- bryanlarsen 5y agoCasey is doing a green methane startup which depends on cheap solar for its viability, so I'm sure he has more accurate numbers, at least privately. The question is more of "when" than "if" his calculations are correct, since solar power prices are coming down a lot faster than HVDC line construction costs.
- jhawk28 5y agoI think the chile to asia is going to be cheaper than AZ to Boston because there is just ocean between chile and asia. It will be much more expensive over land and dealing with all the things in the way (roads, houses, railroads, tunnels, mountains...).
- justicezyx 5y agoEnergy exporting will be an interesting business opportunity from now on. With the deprecation of fossil fuel, majority of the nations on earth wont have the dirty, but easy option, any more. The clean energy tech is still way out of reach for most of these countries. Building electricity transmission appears an easier option. It's easier in the sense that almost everyone knows how to build and mange them, to some degree. But it will still be very costly. And if things go well, Africa might becomes the new source of electricity for its abundance of sunlight. Of course, like right now, they don't have any tech yet...
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago> The cable should be about 15,000km long and building a 1,300km cable would cost $2 billion. For being able to time-shift solar, that seems like a bargain. A recent internet undersea cable[0] cost $300 million for the entire project. [0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps-pacific-cable-welcomed-in-japan.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps...
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI'm curious about this from a security perspective. With oil, coal, and natural gas, a cut in the supply network doesn't necessarily have an immediate impact. Buffers exist in some parts of the distribution network: ships holds, rail cars, and storage tanks. With electricity, it doesn't seem like we have much infrastructure for buffering the supply. So cutting those cables might have an immediate and significant impact on the consumers. Perhaps this creates a disincentive for any of these powers starting a war. But it also seems like an extra attack surface for terrorism, extortion, or natural disasters.
- sudhirj 5y agoFor one, the power cables seem to be thicker and better shielded than the fiber optic ones. That aside, I don’t think any economy will rely purely on imported power - backups in the form of natural gas plants or grid scale storage will likely need to form part of the mix - there’s already the chance of some cloudy or rainy days over the solar farms, so it’s unlikely there isn’t a contingency.
- _Microft 5y agoThere was a study recently that used historic weather, solar irradiance data and energy use data and worked out that a certain mix of (over-provisioned) solar, wind and 3 hours of storage would have sufficed to provide energy during almost all hours of the studied decades. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
- jdmichal 5y agoI'm not sure where you're getting that "almost all hours" from? Here's the relevant figure, which seems to indicate hundreds to thousands of hours under your given scenario: Please note the logarithmic scale on the hours! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z/figures/4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z/figures/4 (Note the green lines are 1.5x generation, with three lines at different saturations for 0 hours, 3 hours, or 12 hours of storage.)
- thrawn0r 5y ago"global supply capacity of these cables is estimated at 4000 KM/p.a" https://youtu.be/iJunxkln578?t=423 https://youtu.be/iJunxkln578?t=423 seems like a bottleneck.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pelasaco 5y agoInteresting.. i thought it wasn't a good idea, based on this video (The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o) where is stated that Europe failed to do something similar connecting the North of Africa (Morocco and Algeria) to Europe (south of Spain).
- rektide 5y agoI would have assumed corona discharge would be worse in sea-water & made this basically infeasible. The air or sea-water around such high voltage cables gets ionized, even if a strong insulator is used (via quantum tunneling?). I would have thought this effect would be worse in sea-water but perhaps not.
- posix_me_less 5y agoSea water is highly conductive, with potential close to ground, so the high potential cable cannot be allowed to touch it. So the cable has to be well insulated from the water. Discharge can happen in this insulation, that's why it has to be thick enough.
- GDC7 5y agoThey have just overlooked that China has a solar area which is comparable (or just a tad inferior to Chile's). Gobi Desert. It's far easier to harness solar there and then push it onto the coast than building a 15,000km submarine cable
- ozborn 5y agoGobi dessert doesn't produce solar power when it is night in China, but solar power from Chile can supply China at night.
- rich_sasha 5y agoGobi is famously dusty, is that a factor? Also a lot of Chile is at high altitudes (thing Atacama), are PVs more efficient there?
- zardo 5y agoI don't think altitude affects efficiency, but it does effect the light intensity, particularly in ultra-violet.
- janmo 5y agoMost electricity is consumed in the early evening and during the winter. That's why such a cable would make sense because of the time difference and the inverted seasons.
- TheDudeMan 5y agoI went a little ways down the rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
- dreamcompiler 5y agoProjects like this would be easy if we had cheap high-temperature superconductors. Until then it's gonna be very expensive because it will require very high voltage (which means very thick insulation) and high I^2R losses -- even with the high voltage -- just because of the distance.
- theptip 5y agoThis idea has been floating around for a long time, I first encountered it as https://www.desertec.org/ https://www.desertec.org/. It's great to see an ambitious project that would test the viability further. There was a proposal to connect north Africa to Europe with HVDC lines, that seems a lot more feasible being only ~2000 km: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec#High-voltage_direct_current_(HVDC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec#High-voltage_direct_c... It's also a more compelling story when the connection is part of a "super-grid" that blends disparate energy sources from many countries, as this could even out a lot of the local fluctuations that make renewables challenging, and as other commenters here have noted, even better if you can pull solar from another timezone when your local solar cells are not producing anything. Given the level of infrastructure investment that China is deploying currently, it wouldn't surprise me to see many more projects like this emerging. (Though China has enough territory that they could reap the gains of HVDC-connected renewable generation without necessarily involving other countries.)
- msandford 5y agoWhat's strange about all this to me is the whole "duck curve" that we've heard so much about doesn't seem to be factored in. Or if so, perhaps I've misunderstood it. My understanding is that peak solar is maybe 10-4ish but peak demand is 3-9ish. Doesn't that mean you'd prefer to make investments ~5000mi (5 timezones) west of your main territory? Here in the US you could do a lot having the west coast pick up a lot of the evening demand for the east coast, but then you'd need floating solar/wind or whatever to pick up the demand for the rest of the country as the sun continues to head west.
- swarupberia 5y agoChina had presented its concept of a Global Grid to the UN in 2015. (https://reconasia.csis.org/global-energy-interconnection/ https://reconasia.csis.org/global-energy-interconnection/). They already have a ~3,200 km line at 1100KV UHVDC (https://www.reuters.com/article/china-power-transmission-idUSL4N244136 https://www.reuters.com/article/china-power-transmission-idU...) Losses are estimated at 1.5% per 1,000km. 3.5% is for 800KV UHVDC. Implies a 23% loss for 15,000 km, which is very efficient. For perspective, ~20,000 km is the half circumference at the equator. Geopolitics should not be a concern for such a global grid. We are already living with a globally interdependent submarine internet cable, in the same geopolitical environment. This transmission line is a natural step for a much faster adoption into a renewable future, than batteries. In battery tech, research investments have to compete on multiple pathways for the development of battery chemistry which are very divergent from each other. UHVDC components and technology require very few fundamental breakthroughs in science and technology, and massive strides have already been made. A good read from ABB on the state and evolution of UHVDC technology here -> https://library.e.abb.com/public/db368ad7692f4c129637d9a7effb502b/Whitepaper_UHVDC%20and%20UHVAC%20developments.pdf https://library.e.abb.com/public/db368ad7692f4c129637d9a7eff.... Do read the last two paras – “Conclusion” and “State of HVDC system and transformer technology”. TLDR: HVAC/UHVAC and HVDC/UHVDC are now almost fully interoperable to feed into each other at all voltage levels. Dielectrics supposedly the most complicated of the technology challenges also appears solved. With global political coordination, it should be easy to commit investments and policy frameworks to rapidly transform the world into a renewable reality.