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We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance

• Pakdef 4y ago
  Are you saying that CA isn't very sunny?
• l1n 4y ago
  Because their value prop is to generate synthetic fuel instead.
  • goethes_kind 4y ago
    You need synthetic fuel anyway to act as energy storage/buffer.
• jonatron 4y ago
  https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ not Libya, but Morocco.
• toomuchtodo 4y ago
  HVDC or interconnects (losses are tolerable with enough renewables generation, considering existing curtailment), battery storage, and renewables generated ammonia for on demand combustion (chemical storage) will meet these needs. "Build, Baby, Build", with my apologies to Sarah Palin. Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly. https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-dominate-interconnection-queues-outstrip-us-capacity-berkeley-lab https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do... > There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW. > Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.” https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13-2022.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...
  • walrus01 4y ago
    If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low it's also possible to use electrical heating elements to store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time (for building heating purposes). Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.
    • toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Absolutely. California alone is curtailing enormous amounts of renewables, hundreds of thousands of MWh/month (depending on the season). That is literally clean energy being thrown away (which, depending on system design, is variably tolerable; you're balancing cost, transmission congestion, and renewables offsetting fossil combustion). More transmission, more batteries, more storage, more load shifting (both temporal and geographic)? All of the above. https://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx https://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx
• oceanplexian 4y ago
  On one hand it’s an interesting engineering challenge, but I am always perplexed how covering hundreds of square km of an ecosystem with glass is “good for the environment”. It sounds like something future generations will shake their heads at while trying to dispose of all the toxic waste.
  • walrus01 4y ago
    I'm not saying pave over the mojave desert with PV, exactly, rather that a dry salt pan or ecosystem that has an absolute minimum of flora and fauna would be preferable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin creating massive hydroelectric dam reservoirs also has ecological costs in terms of toxic waste it would surely be preferable to the percentage of electricity right now that is generated using gas, heavy fuel oil and coal.
    • StrictDabbler 4y ago
      Unfortunately the inhabitants of the Mojave turned down a major solar power project last year because of ecological disruption", aka "this wouldn't be pretty on our nature hikes." Perhaps we can use the Salton Sea? It is at least acknowledged as a truly destroyed ecosystem.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • gonzo41 4y ago
        I am sort of a nimby, but there's nowhere wild to protect anymore. Thanks Starlink! I am less and less sympathetic to groups standing in the way of clean energy production because of any aesthetics issue. However, I don't live there so I won't judge, though a wind farm got knocked back near where I live because it'd look like a windfarm and it was the greenies who knocked it back.
  • goethes_kind 4y ago
    Matter of interpretation. Is humanity at all good for the environment? Some would say no. Solar is clean and deserts are mostly, well, deserts. And climate change seems much worse than having a tiny bit of our deserts being used for PV farms.
• dangerlibrary 4y ago
  • walrus01 4y ago
    I read the article, I disagree with the concept of using PV to generate artificial hydrocarbon fuels in general, as not a great business plan. It's not the best use of the technology when we should be bypassing that entirely. Go use excess PV to pump water uphill back into a reservoir or something if you need energy storage, not drive a complicated process to make artificial hydrocarbons to store in a tank and burn in an engine.
    • dangerlibrary 4y ago
      Until energy density of batteries improves by a couple orders of magnitude, we're at least going to need hydrocarbons to fly planes, no?
      • walrus01 4y ago
        maybe, but it's also a national embarrassment that most of the major population centers in the US Northeast seemingly cannot be connected by 350 km/h high speed rail such as what China has very rapidly built since 2010. Flights of 1-2 hour duration between many locations in North America should be replaced with rail in most scenarios. either the political will or budget to do this apparently does not exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
        • chroma 4y ago
          It's clear that the US cannot build high speed rail. Since 2009, California has spent tens of billions on HSR and has nothing to show for it. There are too many hurdles to overcome. Existing rail lines have turns that are too sharp for HSR, so the government must use eminent domain to take people's property. Construction is delayed by environmental reviews. There are issues with noise. You have to build train stations in urban areas where real estate is ridiculously expensive. Smaller towns along the route can threaten to block or delay the rail line unless they get political favors. And so on. The easiest way to improve transport in the US would be to abolish the TSA and go back to pre-9/11 screening. That would reduce the time needed to arrive before a flight, making flying more competitive for shorter distances. When electric planes are introduced, they'll most likely be for shorter flights at first (since battery tech won't have the range for cross-country or cross-oceanic flights). Then we'll have similar travel times as high speed rail, similar environmental impact, and more flexibility than HSR (since it's easier to fly more/fewer planes to various airports than to build new tracks).
• bequanna 4y ago
  > The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable Climate benefits aside, how in the heck is this an improvement over the current situation? Long-term I really don't think it is prudent for Europe to rely on potentially unfriendly nations to provide them with energy.
  • walrus01 4y ago
    realpolitik would tell me that a scenario where europe was highly dependent on libya (or morocco, or other north african countries) for electricity would be vastly preferable to a scenario being dependent upon russia for gas pipeline supplies. if sufficiently threatened europe could summon enough political will to require libya to do its bidding through threat of sanctions and adverse action against it, worst case, military force to set up a cooperative libyan puppet regime. the balance of the size of the economies and population of western europe as a whole vs libya is very different than western europe vs russia. not exactly something that can be done with a nuclear armed state the size of russia.
    • silvestrov 4y ago
      There is sun enough in Spain and Italy (and even France and south Germany) that we don't need Morocco/Libya. Also: heat and dusty environments are really bad for efficiency. Better with a place where it rains once in a while. Today at 13:00 more than 38% of electricy in Germany was produced by solar panels! https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
      • walrus01 4y ago
        that is a very good point and of course as much as possible should be generated domestically first. If you open a high res aerial view of any random french or german city right now and look at the roofs of how many warehouses and huge structures are presently covered in PV, versus how many could be covered in PV if we really wanted to, for instance.
• conradev 4y ago
  > if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics. One such project being built currently: https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plus-storage https://www.mortenson.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-solar-plu... More notable than the 950MW generation is the 2400MWh of batteries
• metalliqaz 4y ago
  But the point of this article is that they extract carbon from the air to make hydrocarbon fuel, which can be transported using our existing infrastructure...
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    This is Hacker News, not "Hackers who read the article News"
    • shusaku 4y ago
      “I had a preconceived notion about the article, control-f searched for it, didn’t find it, so I wrote a comment”
• thejarren 4y ago
  Just to add to this conversation a bit, did you know Singapore is running power wires to gather solar from Australia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
  • bigcat12345678 4y ago
    """ The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023 """ Being developed
    • tren 4y ago
      I think it has a good chance of happening with Mike-cannon Brookes and Andrew Forrest pushing it along. I hope it's better protected than the internet subsea cables, those things get cut about once per year.
      • cycomanic 4y ago
        Cut internet cables is just a matter of statistics, there are simply a lot of these cables so a even individually rare events happen relatively often. Submarine fibre cables already carry significant electrical power for the amplifiers and are well armored, I doubt that elictricity cables would be much better. The issue is typically ships ignoring no-anchor areas, that's also why most of these cuts happen in more unregulated regions.
  • incompatible 4y ago
    Remarkably, this was being planned even while Australia had an anti renewable energy government, which was more interested in promoting the coal industry. Yet as the maps make clear, Australia with its climate, location, and low population density, is potentially a solar energy superpower.
    • walrus01 4y ago
      Australia and its policy on coal mines and such seems like a bizarre version of USA Republicans. It's like English-colonialism Texas.
• ben_w 4y ago
  A global grid was my favourite solution until recently. The problem is that it needs the combined cables to have cross section in the order of a few (3?) square meters (at 640 kV), and that in turn is in the order of 52 years of global copper production (we make more aluminium than copper but Al is a worse conductor). Using even higher voltages makes everything much easier, and the cables’ combined cross sections may need to be less (depending on how much lower the maximum demand at night is) or more (depending on future increases in daytime demand). Downside is that’s still order-of a few trillion dollars, close to the same as the cost of 36 TWh of batteries (i.e. global overnight only), and we’re likely to make those batteries anyway for the electric cars and when their condition deteriorates enough to be taken out of the cars they're still good enough for grid storage.
  • walrus01 4y ago
    I don't know of any long distance HV AC or DC transmission lines that use copper. It's all aluminum already.
    • tclancy 4y ago
      I’ve heard it’s all ball bearings but that may be outdated.
      • dotancohen 4y ago
        Meaning that coal transported by train is still a major energy source? Globally that is still accurate unfortunately.
        • adrianmonk 4y ago
          It's a reference to the movie Fletch. The main character is an investigative reporter. In one scene, he poses as an airplane mechanic. The real airplane mechanics are not very convinced, and he tries playing it off by saying, "It's all ball bearings nowadays." https://youtu.be/SjJYNZirQCU https://youtu.be/SjJYNZirQCU
  • 4y ago
• phkahler 4y ago
  >> I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power. Since they want to use solar/electricity to produce hydrocarbon fuels, there is no need to transport electricity. Make the fuels where the sun shines. Maybe build a pipeline or two out of the desert. I think it might be viable for aircraft even if ground transport eventually goes all electric.
  • jp57 4y ago
    But it seems they need places with ample sunshine and water to electrolyze. That rules out the American west, the Sahara, etc. If they can use seawater, then arid coastal areas could work.
    • walrus01 4y ago
      They use vast amounts of seawater, storing the leftover brine, or crystallized salt in huge quantities will become a problem. Existing medium sizee drinking water desalination plants already create a huge amount of brine.
      • labawi 4y ago
        Why would you store it, instead of mixing it back in the sea? I guess you would need some pipes and pumps to move it away from your inlets, but that seems comparatively cheap.
        • walrus01 4y ago
          because shoving all that brine back into the sea in the general area of the desalination plant causes a localized ecological disaster and dead zone of marine life
          • labawi 4y ago
            As said, use some pipes and pumps to move it away. Don't forget to dilute (again, use pipes and pumps or whatever you prefer).
• worik 4y ago
  > and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are The point of the article is to make synthetic hydrocarbons, so no, do not need HVDC so much.
  • walrus01 4y ago
    My point was that maybe we should transport the electricity to where it needs to be used over high voltage long distance lines, rather than running an artificial hydrocarbon fuel generation process, storing it in tanks or pipelines, and then sending it to where it needs to be used, and feeding it into combustion engines.
    • tomxor 4y ago
      The article also pointed out that even with future cost reduction from scale etc, some things just don't work well running off electricity, the energy density of hydrocarbons is very hard to beat unless you go nuclear... and for things like planes, baring any massive technological breakthroughs, it's probably gona have to be hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future... so synthesising those fuels by short circuiting the carbon cycle in a post "dig unreplenishable shit up from the ground" era, is pretty attractive.
• bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-electricity-is-local/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
  • Retric 4y ago
    The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power. A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
    • bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Moore's law will eventually stop, too. But people have been predicting the end for 50 years and it still looks like it has at least another 10 to go. It seems quite clear that solar costs will continue to drop exponentially until the end of the decade, which is all the author's assumptions need. Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the land.
      • Aeolun 4y ago
        I mean, it is our best/easiest bet for future power generation. I can totally see why more money keeps being pumped into it. Either more efficient panels, cheaper panels, or simply a greater manufacturing capacity are all fine for securing the energy needs of the planet. And we won’t have to worry about running out anytime in the next billion years or so.
• influxmoment 4y ago
  This kind of energy infrastructure is only build in China at the moment. High voltage DC, solar& battery manufacturing, solar installation, new nuclear plants
• kurthr 4y ago
  At current prices, it's already worth fully solar individually... just expensive up front. Batteries and transmission are so expensive it's worth just installing MOAR solar. Connecting to the grid would be $1k/year so (depending on rate of return) it takes ~20years to pay off, which is right around the warrantee period. Where I am there are ~5 peak solar equivalent hours in mid summer and ~0.5 hour on a rainy winter day. If I need 10kWh/day, then I need to install ~20kW at $500/kW, with 30kWh of battery for <$5k, and <$3k for dual 6.5kW inverters for 240V at 50A service. During the summer I charge my neighbors electric cars, but it's not worth paying the connection fee to hook up. I think the grid tie solar fees are so high because the power companies would rather be getting the money for installing solar and batteries.
• kragen 4y ago
  The article we're commenting on is about a moderately efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are: you manufacture methane in the sunny place and then ship it to where the load is, either through a pipeline, through a liquefaction terminal, or after an additional process step such as hydroxylating it into methanol. This also provides long-term grid-scale energy storage. In a lot of cases, though, it might be cheaper just to build ten times as much solar panel capacity in the not-very-sunny place where the loads are as to build HVDC transmission lines or gas pipelines.
  • thatcat 4y ago
    Piping ch4 would lead to release from all the inevitable pipe line leaks and limit the reduction in carbon emission.
    • kragen 4y ago
      I think it would reduce the reduction in carbon emission by some percentage, but since we're talking about direct air capture rather than point-source capture, it wouldn't limit the reduction in carbon emission.
      • pawsforthought 4y ago
        Methane’s much higher global warming potential (versus carbon dioxide), implies that there’s a threshold of methane leaks above which the warming would be worse than if you did nothing at all.
        • dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
          Doing the math, methane is around 30x worse than CO2. So say you pulled down 30 units of CO2 and 1 unit of Methane leaked (3%), you’re back to square one. Not to mention the Methane will be burned into CO2 again so this closed cycle isn’t so closed. This study suggests up to 9% is leaked currently: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/03/24/methane-leaks-much-worse-estimates-fix-available/ https://news.stanford.edu/2022/03/24/methane-leaks-much-wors...
• WalterBright 4y ago
  Europe would then become the vassal of whoever is running Libya with their hand on the circuit breaker.
  • lenkite 4y ago
    No worries - There will be another NATO "freedom/democracy" mission as soon as that occurs.
• candiddevmike 4y ago
  States will be trading fresh water for clean energy
• stefan_ 4y ago
  Even places that are not very sunny get a preposterous amount of sun energy per square meter and solar is in any case to be synergistically combined with wind energy. This is a total non-concern, nobody needs to start building in Libya of all places.
• jvanderbot 4y ago
  Not really. The author proposes that hydrocarbons are in fact a reasonable transport / storage mechanism. That's the bulk of the meat here. > "Terraform Industries’ synthetic natural gas process is not particularly complicated or difficult to achieve. We intended to make it easy to scale and deploy. If Europe had enough solar power deployed, even at current European solar prices, we could synthesize desperately needed natural gas at lower cost than transoceanic liquefied natural gas (LNG) importation, which is the next best option." Also, low solar costs are in fact a reason to just build out where demand is, rather than do a lot of transporting. Actually, that's covered in the article. In the first few paragraphs. > "On the chart above, the US south west receives around 5.2 kWh/kWp, while notoriously dreary England receives only 3.2 kWh/kWp. Does this mean that Britain should import solar power from north Africa? Not quite. > "At 30% cost reduction and three years per doubling of production rate, Britain’s cost will match Los Angeles’ in less than six years. There are a few parts of the world, particularly at extreme northern latitudes, where solar power is truly painful, but they are few and their population is low, compared to the billions who live in generally sunny-enough locations. When their local cost of solar falls to the point where synthetic atmospheric CO2-derived hydrocarbons are cheaper than importing it from (probably) the Middle East, demand will increase substantially. "
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    I've seen people saying "Alaska shows that nuclear is needed, as wind/solar don't work well there." They don't mention that the average power level on the largest grid in Alaska is just 600 MW. And Alaska is densely populated compared to, say, the northern half of Canada.
• intrasight 4y ago
  "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981 We deliver everything else by road. We should deliver power by road. The roads are already there. Once most long-distance trucking is done by robot (~10 years me thinks), there will be plenty of bandwidth. We need "standard units of power" (Sups) that are interchangeable with and usable with everything that produces and consumes power. The interfaces should be standardized. The internals can be proprietary.
  • dhritzkiv 4y ago
    I don't know if I quite understand this idea, but why road and not rail, or something more purpose built? High production locales and high demand ones are most likely to be spread across long distances
    • intrasight 4y ago
      Rail is indeed appropriate too. In fact better and we should have more of it. But I say no to "special purpose" and thus to transmission lines too. They are ugly and inefficient and we'd need to invest trillions, as these analysts are saying. Just makes no sense when we can instead use rail and road. Invest those trillions in better rail and road. And people in those "high production locales" I'm sure would rather have rail and road than transmission lines. Am I missing something? It seems so obvious to me.
      • badpun 4y ago
        I'd MUCH rather have transmission lines behind my window than a busy rail or road, generating noise, pollution, congestion and danger.
  • Mil0dV 4y ago
    This is undesirable in the same way shipping water via trucks is a lot less efficient than using pipes. For some use cases where electricity doesn't work, trucks with e.g. methane could work. For everything else it's just way to inefficient to convert, store, transport and then convert it again. Same issue with hydrogen - from source to force applied in a car, it's 22% efficient, compared to 79% for an EV.
• natch 4y ago
  For places and times without sun there are other solutions such as natural gas. We are not trying to entirely eliminate all uses of fossil fuels for energy; just reduce them drastically where practical. There is also nuclear (longer time scale), hydro, wind, batteries, and transmission lines, among others. You can cherry pick any one of these alternatives to criticize. Of course every solution has its issues. But they can each be used as needed to suit the situation.
• katkatkatkatket 4y ago
  >The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe It really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of back-of-the-envelope maths, and this idea raises some very fun questions. How big would the power line be, if the UK (where I live) was powered entirely by solar panels in the African desert? The UK's average instantaneous power consumption is around 100GW. Assuming a capacity factor of 5 (which is probably far too low), the power transmission system needs to handle at least 500GW. The current (and somewhat unproven) state of the art in power transmission operates at 1000kv, and can carry 5GW per pylon system. We would need 100 of those operating in parallel. As each of those has a minimum separation corridor of 100 meters, we would need to persuade all of the countries along the route to give us a 4000km x 10km strip of land, as well as the approx. 150sq km of land needed for the panels themselves. This leads to another fun question - if you want to install 150sq. km of solar panels in the desert and still have enough useful life left in the panels when you're done, how wide does the road need to be to carry all of those, and how many trucks will you need working that several thousand km route?
  • katkatkatkatket 4y ago
    I'm out by two orders of magnitude on the amount of desert solar needed to power the UK. It's more like 13000 sq km, comprising approx. 7e9 solar panels. If they weigh 30kg each, and two-trailer road trains are used to transport them, that's 2e5 truck loads. The sheer scale of this logistical problem dwarfs any other feat attempted.
    • tuatoru 4y ago
      OK, but that's just an organisation problem. The technology exists.
      • katkatkatkatket 4y ago
        If it's not economically or practically feasible, then no, the technology doesn't exist.
  • 4y ago
• bernardlunn 4y ago
  Yep & check out: https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Or storage. Like this article is essentially about replacing fossil fuels with synthetic fuel. There are many alternatives to that of course. But the mind boggling economics of synthetic fuels becoming cheaper than fossil fuels at some point are what is interesting here. I listened to a podcast a while ago with a person involved with a company that is going to be importing 8GW of power to the UK from Morocco with high voltage dc cables. One of the interesting challenges is that the cable factories he needs to produce the cables currently only output around 1500 miles of cable per year. The distance he needs to cover is closer to 3000 miles. And the current plan calls for at least four such cables, so 12000 miles. More factories are needed. Those cables impact the cost proposition of course. Producing and laying cables is a capital intensive business. It's still worth doing but local production is just a lot cheaper. The actual plan is for this stuff to compete with nuclear power. Moroccan solar power is so reliable that it does not really drop much in the winter. And it's about half the price of nuclear. Local solar generation is a lot cheaper than that of course but in the UK that needs to be supplemented with other energy at least part of the year. Casablanca is actually at the same latitude as San Francisco. Most of the US is further south than places like the UK, Germany, etc. where solar power is pretty effective despite being so far north. That means the US has longer winter days and less severe seasonal drops in solar generation. In short, people are overly pessimistic about solar in the US. Most of it is pretty well situated for decent solar generation around the year. It's just going to require a lot of solar panels to compensate for seasonal drops. Unthinkable if you think in terms of current prices and shortages. But the nature of exponential growth is that that is not going to stay that way for very long.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Germany cancelled projects in Africa with HVDC cables up-continent when solar panel cost dropped to the point that they can just buy enough local panels to meet power needs. Siting panels in the desert is kind of stupid. The high temperatures make them less efficient, and degrade quicker. They would better be floated on reservoirs, constructed for the occasion if necessary. Nobody doesn't like more reservoirs, or shade for the reservoirs they have. The reservoirs could be kept full by desalinating water when power demand is lower.
  • 4y ago
• ehnto 4y ago
  There is another such project going on now, to connect Australian solar farms to Singapore via a deep sea connector. Of course Singapore would have a hard time placing enough solar to power their city, Australia on the contrary has vast swaths of land it can't and doesn't need to populate or farm (at this stage). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-australia-project-awarded-major-project-status/12506516 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
• locallost 4y ago
  One of the points of the article is the exact opposite. Some places get less sun, but overall the disparity between the haves and havenots is a lot less than for fossil fuels. That it's decentralized is one of the strengths of renewable energy. Amory Lovins referred to this as "no instrument plays all the time, but the orchestra creates beautiful music". Not to mention that countries want to be energy independent, which would be another improvement to the situation we are currently in.
  • rocqua 4y ago
    I wonder if depance between countries helps avoid wars. It certainly raises the costs, which prevents war being profitable.
    • jabl 4y ago
      See the German 'Ostpolitik', currently crashing down in flames, why that might not work out that well.
      • rocqua 4y ago
        Making wars unprofitable doesn't prevent all wars. That approach is stupid. However, making war less costly (for the victor) could well cause more wars. I believe that before WW I many a war of conquest was initiated by states hoping to profit. WW I was thought by many states as another great chance to profit, but it turned out that mechanization of logistics, and artillery, meant the toll of war was much lower. Besides, the 'ospolitik' was more about building relationships and mutual respect than an attempt to affect the cost-revenue analysis of war.
• uhtred 4y ago
  > The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable I thought we were trying to move away from being dependent on other countries for energy
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Look at how well Europe's dependence on Russian gas is going.
• JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  Solar fans really want to cover entire countries in panels, instead of just building nuclear power "We just need the political will to destroy another nation" is what you just said. Look carefully. We can't reliably move power on America' three grids, but you want the world wired up Peaks aren't local. If Germany is peaking, so is all of Europe. There isn't a bunch of other stuff to draw from. People start by assuming that the rest of the world can cope, but that is not how Europe works today. Look into why Germany keeps having to sell power for negative prices. It's like believing that in a heavy rain storm, you can just give your excess water to your neighbors. But you can't: they have excess water too. During a drought, they have nothing to share.