3 ms·

Well, duh. I don't think anyone thinks "sun strong -> good for solar" is bad reasoning. What is bad reasoning is ending your analysis there. What's the cost-be

by uoaei 4y ago

Well, duh. I don't think anyone thinks "sun strong -> good for solar" is bad reasoning. What is bad reasoning is ending your analysis there. What's the cost-benefit of installing heavy transmissions infrastructure for the desert? The shore? The sea and ocean? Everyone and everything who live there? How vulnerable is that infrastructure to natural and artificial disasters, and what costs do we bear to build resilience to those outcomes? Aren't surrounding communities also in need of strong consistent power? Why not move the power less distance (far less materials, less power losses) and serve a different population? The classic thought-terminating cliche of if we covered X% of the Sahara we could power the whole globe obviously ignores the act of moving that energy from one place to another, which is a huge endeavor, to say the least. Your argument is basically of the flavor "why is California still in a drought while the Mississippi river rages?"

desro 4y ago
Maybe we ought to think about water pipelines running from east to west...
- wahern 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_Development_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_D...
matthewdgreen 4y ago
I presume the existence of this project demonstrates that the cost/benefit analysis was done and the result balanced towards “benefit”. The most recent nuclear power plant built in England produces 3200MW and costs nearly $40bn so far. This cable will carry 10,500MW and costs $22bn. The latter number doesn’t includes the solar generation, but build costs for utility-scale PV are running less than $1/watt so 10,500MW of name-plate capacity would cost only another $11bn. Even at much lower capacity factors you’re still looking at less than half the cost per MW than nuclear.
- uoaei 4y ago
  Whose analysis, incorporating whose costs and whose benefits? Why are you assuming that the logic is reasonable and not asking these questions? What kinds of benefits would we see in the near future if we invested in providing power to places that could use it for development and not merely consumption?
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    Who's we? This sounds like another one of those silly "why do x when we could imagine doing something completely different" type of arguments for nothing and posited for no reason. "Don't build skyscrapers, build townhouses!" "Don't have checkstops, people die in car accidents anyway, instead we need to think about road safety" "Why build a huge energy project when small towns won't directly benefit in the next 5 years" You would assume that the considerations have been made because it's basically a massive engineering project, it hasn't been posted to hacker news for the purpose of gathering theoretical conjecture in step 1 of the planning process, and that's how massive engineering projects tend to work, along with other political effects that aren't necessarily logical reasoning experiments to begin with.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    Financially I assume the analysis was done by the people committing $22bn. Presumably the investment in the region will both spur local development (jobs and infrastructure) as well as other forms of development. The thing about solar is that people tend to overbuild it, since you need to ensure that there’s sufficient capacity even when it’s cloudy or the sun is low in the sky, so power near the generation sources should be relatively inexpensive when the sun is shining (and if more is needed, scaling existing solar plants will be much cheaper than building new infrastructure.) And then of course there’s the very real benefit that decarbonizing Europe will have on the undeveloped world, which is going to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.
  - msandford 4y ago
    It strikes me that developing a more renewable grid that decarbonizes energy in both Europe and Africa is one option. There's no reason the electricity can only go from Africa to the UK. It might well flow in reverse on windy nights. The other is that rich and middle class people in the developed world build their own little microgrids that can easily withstand primary grid outages with all the economic inefficiency that entails. Batteries are relatively scarce still and are far more equitably deployed to the grid writ large than only certain households. But of course perfect is the enemy of good which is why people are arguing about this online.
epanchin 4y ago
If the surrounding communities are in need of power, they’re likely to get it cheaper as a result of the UK building there. Hopefully they require a split of the power as part of the building conditions. If the desert supplied energy to the whole continent, it would free up other resources (eg gas) to power other countries. It’s a little different to your river analogy.

by uoaei 4y ago

desro 4y ago

Maybe we ought to think about water pipelines running from east to west...

wahern 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_Development_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_D...

matthewdgreen 4y ago

I presume the existence of this project demonstrates that the cost/benefit analysis was done and the result balanced towards “benefit”. The most recent nuclear power plant built in England produces 3200MW and costs nearly $40bn so far. This cable will carry 10,500MW and costs $22bn. The latter number doesn’t includes the solar generation, but build costs for utility-scale PV are running less than $1/watt so 10,500MW of name-plate capacity would cost only another $11bn. Even at much lower capacity factors you’re still looking at less than half the cost per MW than nuclear.

uoaei 4y ago
Whose analysis, incorporating whose costs and whose benefits? Why are you assuming that the logic is reasonable and not asking these questions? What kinds of benefits would we see in the near future if we invested in providing power to places that could use it for development and not merely consumption?
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Who's we? This sounds like another one of those silly "why do x when we could imagine doing something completely different" type of arguments for nothing and posited for no reason. "Don't build skyscrapers, build townhouses!" "Don't have checkstops, people die in car accidents anyway, instead we need to think about road safety" "Why build a huge energy project when small towns won't directly benefit in the next 5 years" You would assume that the considerations have been made because it's basically a massive engineering project, it hasn't been posted to hacker news for the purpose of gathering theoretical conjecture in step 1 of the planning process, and that's how massive engineering projects tend to work, along with other political effects that aren't necessarily logical reasoning experiments to begin with.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Financially I assume the analysis was done by the people committing $22bn. Presumably the investment in the region will both spur local development (jobs and infrastructure) as well as other forms of development. The thing about solar is that people tend to overbuild it, since you need to ensure that there’s sufficient capacity even when it’s cloudy or the sun is low in the sky, so power near the generation sources should be relatively inexpensive when the sun is shining (and if more is needed, scaling existing solar plants will be much cheaper than building new infrastructure.) And then of course there’s the very real benefit that decarbonizing Europe will have on the undeveloped world, which is going to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.
- msandford 4y ago
  It strikes me that developing a more renewable grid that decarbonizes energy in both Europe and Africa is one option. There's no reason the electricity can only go from Africa to the UK. It might well flow in reverse on windy nights. The other is that rich and middle class people in the developed world build their own little microgrids that can easily withstand primary grid outages with all the economic inefficiency that entails. Batteries are relatively scarce still and are far more equitably deployed to the grid writ large than only certain households. But of course perfect is the enemy of good which is why people are arguing about this online.

epanchin 4y ago

If the surrounding communities are in need of power, they’re likely to get it cheaper as a result of the UK building there. Hopefully they require a split of the power as part of the building conditions. If the desert supplied energy to the whole continent, it would free up other resources (eg gas) to power other countries. It’s a little different to your river analogy.