2 ms·
Recent and related, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513761 ("Undersea power cable linking Finland and Esto
by perihelions 1y ago
Recent and related,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513761 ("Undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia suffers damage", 112 comments)
It's been half a year and it still[0] hasn't been fixed yet.
How does anyone, really, imagine building planetary infrastructure where a trivial amount of asymmetric warfare can take the whole thing down?
[0] https://yle.fi/a/74-20164957 https://yle.fi/a/74-20164957 ("Fingrid said that the EstLink 2 connection should be back online on June 25, earlier than expected")
- ben_w 1y agoThe blog is suggesting 10 GW, which is well short of "the entire thing", and they also suggest a lot of redundancy. If you were to use a single cable for everything, that would be silly because no redundancy, e.g. "A volcano? On the mid-Atlantic ridge? Who could have foreseen this?" But at the same time, a cable big enough to carry the world's power is pretty big. I've done similar ballpark calculations, and to get the electrical resistance all the way around the planet and back down to 1Ω, you'd need almost exactly one square meter cross section of aluminium (so any anchor cable breaks first), and that would have so much current flowing through it that spinning metal cutting tools can't operate nearby thanks to eddy currents from the magnetic field.