This 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 ambitiou

This 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.)