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This sounds like an in pipe(/cable) dream... First, you need that pair of cables for the UK (assuming your math and physics work out). Then you need at least 10
by donkeyd 3y ago
This sounds like an in pipe(/cable) dream... First, you need that pair of cables for the UK (assuming your math and physics work out). Then you need at least 10 times that for the rest of Europe. Then we have all those cables in the water, in different places at the coasts of sea bound countries. We need to then split all of it up and transport it inland into all those countries.
Even if the first part is even feasible, that second part is another world of hurt. Oh, and the part before the first part, where we fill Africa with solar to provide the world with electricity for 12-ish hours a day. The geopolitics of this all are going to be pretty much impossible to figure out and that's before any actual engineering can even begin to be done.
- ceejayoz 3y agoUndersea power cables are already very much a thing, and energy transport across the grid is also very much a thing; Europe already has it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...). You're describing normal, already implemented stuff with a sense of incredulity I'm not sure I understand.
- donkeyd 3y agoAt completely different scales than providing an entire country's energy needs through two cables. The UK currently has more than 2000 power stations providing balanced electricity throughout the country. The international transport is also for balancing, not for providing an entire country's energy needs from another country. You can't just connect 20 cable's from Africa to the European grid and expect it to work, that's not how the grid works. And I'm truly surprised that many people on HN seem to think it would. Source: I work in utilities and one of my current focus area's is creating software to help expand the net to cope with the addition of new renewable sources and EV charging stations. And even that is posing a massive challenge on a relatively small and local scale. I couldn't imagine the impact of this fantasy of just plugging in some cables from Africa somewhere. Edit: This incident is an example of how sensitive all this stuff is: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/green-shift-brings-blackout-risk-to-world-s-biggest-power-grid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/green-shi...
- londons_explore 3y agoDistributed power generation made sense when everyone used coal power plants - it was cheaper to ship trains full of coal than the power. But if you want a carbon-free grid, then you can't ship the light or the wind. You either massively overbuild generation and throw most of the power away, build huge amounts of very expensive storage, or you ship the power. Currently the world is headed towards overbuilding, but thats only because typically private companies build power generation, whereas power transport is mostly in the realm of governments, and governments are slower to act on market forces (and often aren't great at capital efficiency). The end result will clearly be a mixture of all 3, but we're going to see a lot more power movement in the next 50 years than we saw in the last 50 years.
- donkeyd 3y agoAll of that is correct, but I don't see how it's relevant to my argument that plugging a couple of cables into Europe is not a feasible solution and would take massive amounts of work in geopolitics, let alone the engineering to adapt the grid to make it possible.
- ryanmercer 3y agoAnd would be a heck of a terrorist target anywhere along its length.
- donkeyd 3y agoGood point, an important part of the resilience of the grid is the fact that there are hardly any significant points of failure.