3 ms·
For 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
by sudhirj 5y ago
For 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.)
- _Microft 5y agoThanks, I'll have another look!
- CoastalCoder 5y agoWhat you say makes sense to me. OTOH, I get the impression that some of our infrastructure has a financial incentive to eliminate any reserve capacity. E.g., that snowstorm in Texas last(?) winter. So I'm curious if having any non-trivial amount of electricity supplied by a usually-reliable mechanism becomes a long-term risk.
- sudhirj 5y agoThere's actually some automatic de-risking with renewables because of their semi-unpredictable nature. If you have a coal, gas or nuclear plant that runs reliably, some executive will get a bonus if they cut costs by shutting off all the redundancies. If you cost-cut redundancies with renewables, though, you'll hit a cloudy or non-windy day before bonus time comes around, and then you'll have a new executive who gets a bonus if they have reasonable redundancies. So there's some resiliency that comes from intermittent renewables, like having a chaos monkey always running on the grid.
- onecommentman 5y agoThey would need to be thicker and better shielded. Sharks might very well be attracted to any EM generated and attempt to bite the cables. https://www.oafrica.com/broadband/sharks/ https://www.oafrica.com/broadband/sharks/ Still sounds fairly fragile, but no more vulnerable I suppose than undersea fiber optic cables. But there is no alternative routing or satellite backup in this power transmission case.