4 ms·

South Australia gets rather more sunshine than the regions of the world where people actually live.

• Gwypaas 5y ago
  With the exponential lowering of the costs of wind power, solar and storage that band should increase every year right? South Australia is 25 to 37 degrees south. The longest HVDC line (in China) is 3300 km, that is 30 degrees. So now based on existing HVDC lines and South Australian circumstances we can say that we should reliably be able to supply somewhere up to 55 to 67 degrees from the equator, in general. Do you know what is at 66 degrees north? The arctic circle. That is how far north we end up. This is not even considering that closer to the poles have much better wind resources, especially in winter time. So, the 4 million people living north of the Arctic circle might have a harder time. But it would seem that it is a trivially easy to solve edge case when the rest of the world has a solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#Human_habitation This of course discounts any geopolitical concerns, which makes it harder. But on a US or EU continental we easily have the technology today.