3 ms·
What 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 b
by mikece 5y ago
What 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...
- Cerium 5y agoBased on this [1] citation from the HVDC article on Wikipedia, losses are about 3.5% per 1000 km at 800 kV. That would correspond to losses in the range of 40-50% for the 15,000 km cable in question. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#cite_note-24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#ci...
- patrickk 5y agoOne challenge will be to get enough supply of submarine power cable to make this a reality. The Morocco-UK proposal (mentioned in the bottom of the article) involves the UK company literally setting up a new factory specifically to produce more cable, doubling the global output in the process. And that project is about 4000kms or so compared to 15,000 for this one. So supply will be slow to spin up to those levels.
- anter 5y agoWell, luckily Chile is the largest copper producer in the world