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The sun is on 100% of the time. The only reason that renewables can't provide us with reliable power is because of our human political problems: we can't relia

The sun is on 100% of the time. The only reason that renewables can't provide us with reliable power is because of our human political problems: we can't reliably cable up the always-sunny areas of the planet to the areas where people live, because the governments in the always-sunny areas are unstable.

orra 3y ago
Well, it will also cost an estimated £16 billion, to build two high capacity electricity transmission lines from Morocco to the UK. You can build a lot of capacity locally for that price.
- marksbrown 3y ago
  Or a tiny portion of a railway! Do you have a citation for that 16 billion?
  - orra 3y ago
    It's the Xlinks project. This is where I got the 16bn figure: <https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-subsea-cable-power-electricity/ https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-s...>. This source says £20 billion, but half is for the cable, and the other half the solar farm and other expenses: <https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cable https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cab...>. Reporting is a bit inconsistent. My point is, transmitting electricity extremely long distances has its own downsides (construction costs & power losses), even if we assume Morocco gets a fair deal out of this. And this project is "only" 7% of UK electricity supply. What of the rest? What of other countries? Saying "export" and "import" doesn't solve all the problems of intermittency (unfortunately).
Moldoteck 3y ago
Where's always sunny 24hr/day all year around? Or how much storage do we need to cover the night use? How much will it cost to build all this + transmission cables for all this power without big energy loss?
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Where's always sunny 24hr/day all year around? The aggregate combination of the Sahara, the Gobi, and the Great Australian desert, Arizona, the Namib, the Atacama Desert. > How much will it cost to build all this + transmission cables for all this power without big energy loss? For a 1Ω resistance over the entire grid, assuming it was made of aluminium, 40,000 km long, material cost is about $239 billion. (But on this scale the number is essentially imaginary, as the real answer is "how much do governments value the opportunity cost of the other things they could get people to do other than make a factory to make aluminium").

orra 3y ago

Well, it will also cost an estimated £16 billion, to build two high capacity electricity transmission lines from Morocco to the UK. You can build a lot of capacity locally for that price.

marksbrown 3y ago
Or a tiny portion of a railway! Do you have a citation for that 16 billion?
- orra 3y ago
  It's the Xlinks project. This is where I got the 16bn figure: <https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-subsea-cable-power-electricity/ https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-s...>. This source says £20 billion, but half is for the cable, and the other half the solar farm and other expenses: <https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cable https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cab...>. Reporting is a bit inconsistent. My point is, transmitting electricity extremely long distances has its own downsides (construction costs & power losses), even if we assume Morocco gets a fair deal out of this. And this project is "only" 7% of UK electricity supply. What of the rest? What of other countries? Saying "export" and "import" doesn't solve all the problems of intermittency (unfortunately).

Moldoteck 3y ago

Where's always sunny 24hr/day all year around? Or how much storage do we need to cover the night use? How much will it cost to build all this + transmission cables for all this power without big energy loss?

ben_w 3y ago
> Where's always sunny 24hr/day all year around? The aggregate combination of the Sahara, the Gobi, and the Great Australian desert, Arizona, the Namib, the Atacama Desert. > How much will it cost to build all this + transmission cables for all this power without big energy loss? For a 1Ω resistance over the entire grid, assuming it was made of aluminium, 40,000 km long, material cost is about $239 billion. (But on this scale the number is essentially imaginary, as the real answer is "how much do governments value the opportunity cost of the other things they could get people to do other than make a factory to make aluminium").