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Hi Voltage transmission lines are completely necessary. Running on 48V would require ridiculously large cables over any significant distance. Is there a reason

• gabrielhidasy 2y ago
  I imagine the idea they were proposing is ~most energy being locally generated, 48v should be fine from solar panels to batteries. But I can't see that working on denser cities, or factories, or less sunny climates.
  • throwitaway222 2y ago
    This is what I'm referring to. Houses mostly, the reason we need such high voltage is because someone can turn on an oven and consume 5kw. But that oven only runs for 1 hour, or more averagely, 30 minutes. So in the context of 200kwh battery systems at EVERY house, and inverters at every house, that oven can easily run off the inverter, and the house would never need to pull down heavy wattage from the grid. In this scenario, the grid's variability goes down dramatically, thus, reducing the voltage requirements... Instead every house would have small solar and a trickle feed of, lets say 800w-1kw consistently during the day. Additionally, for places that have a shit-ton of sun, can do much better with microgrids and generators.
    • proee 2y ago
      Understood, but even if you are trickle feeding thousands of small houses with say 1kw(max) each, that still requires Megawatts of power. 1k*1k=1M. Therefore, you still need high voltage transmission lines to move this power from the source.
      • throwitaway222 2y ago
        Currently most houses have a instantaneous load requirement of 100kw (some much higher) which means your transmission line size / load requirements are going down 100 fold. That effectively allows us to "dismantle unnecessary high voltage transmission lines". Yes there will still be high voltage lines, (and even the lines that go right up to your property are typically 1000 volts or more, which qualifies for "high voltage")... but such a future of inverters and batteries would still reduce most of the infrastructure. Look, I'm not wrong about this, it just would require all houses to have their own inverters and batteries. I'm not saying this is GOING to happen, I'm just saying the requirements on the grid would be so damn small that having a PG&E would be hilariously expensive in this possible future. Instead you would have microgrids and much smaller scale power companies. If you all want to keep paying $1 per kwh (2026 pricing) by all means don't push for this kind of infrastructure change. If people want $0.01 per kwh again, this is the way to do it. At this point we're mostly paying for PG&Es infrastructure that makes sense in today's batteryless world. We don't have to keep paying that price. There are different futures and more competition possible.
        • aembleton 2y ago
          > Currently most houses have a instantaneous load requirement of 100kw What for? If I were to run a heat pump, car charger, oven and electric shower all at the same time that would be about 25kw
        • willglynn 2y ago
          Large single family homes have 400A 1Ø 120/240V service, which is 96 kW peak or 76.8 kW for NEC's definition of continuous. Most have 200A service or smaller, which is half that. What load do you imagine causes "most" homes to exceed 100 kW, and "some much higher"?
• hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  If anything, we should be running 1MV+ transmission lines to conserve copper and/or aluminum.