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Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China H
by kragen 1y ago
Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.
- Gravityloss 1y agoThere's at least one HVDC cable connected to Netherlands, Norned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed . As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
- ViewTrick1002 1y agoAnd to Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.
- kragen 1y agoThank you for the correction! That one is immune to quadcopters too.
- hydrogen7800 1y ago>Budgeted at €550 million, and completed at a cost of €600m Amazing.
- pjc50 1y agoThat's pretty good! Just a 10% overrun. By comparison, Hinkley Point C is now at "up to" £46bn from an initial £18bn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279
- jillesvangurp 1y agoWhich is a fair comparison because 700MW is a smallish nuclear reactor and that cable should last a long time.
- kragen 1y agoIt's good in its adherence to the budget (almost) and maybe its absolute price: €600M for 700MW is €0.86 per watt. That might sound terrible when compared to current mainstream solar panel wholesale prices of €0.11/Wp, but solar plants in the Netherlands have a capacity factor of only about 10% IIRC, so that is €1.10 per average watt, not counting balance of plant, permitting, etc. The cable may not run at a 100% capacity factor but it'll probably be over 50%. Still, if module prices continue falling, even at poor capacity factors lime 10%, it'll be increasingly hard to justify paying such high prices to move energy around the continent; local overprovisioning and storage will be cheaper even if Norway is willing to produce the energy for free.
- kragen 1y agoThank you for the correction! It's also immune to quadcopters.
- lukan 1y agoShips carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well. Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
- harperlee 1y agoDiesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.
- trillic 1y agomagnesium is the most explody of all those
- Retric 1y agoBut still not explosive at scale. It’s a surface area issue, a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water but a 100t cargo of magnesium sinking in a harbor would be a huge fire.
- pfdietz 1y ago> a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water No it doesn't. Magnesium metal burns because the boiling point of magnesium is just 1091 C, so extremely reactive vapor is readily produced. But it would be very hard to heat it that high in water unless it was ignited first. It will then continue to burn under water.
- Retric 1y agoMaybe I should have clarified burning, as in “Why does burning magnesium explode when sprinkled with water?” https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33167/why-does-burning-magnesium-explode-when-sprinkled-with-water https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33167/why-does-b...
- davedx 1y agoThe Netherlands has “erected” multiple HVDC links
- kragen 1y agoI appreciate the correction.
- dgfitz 1y agoAs long as we all realize you can’t 3D print precision-guided missiles without, well, the guidance bit.
- pfdietz 1y agoThe guidance bit should be quite cheap now though, compared to decades ago. Some combination of MEMS backed up with GPS.
- kragen 1y agoAnd software. The Ukrainian drones largely run on the open-source Ardupilot. GPS is fairly easy to jam, and despite the purported end of Selective Availability, unencrypted GPS can be turned off entirely without affecting US military GPS. Cruise missiles have been using terrain models for decades now, since well before GPS (a major reason high-resolution DTED used to be classified) which just requires a computationally cheap particle filter and appropriate sensors. We can expect belligerents in upcoming conflicts to maintain strategic stockpiles of the relevant electronics, which are more compact than even cocaine or fentanyl and therefore difficult to blockade.
- e_y_ 1y agoAlso depending on how many corners you're willing to cut. Half the cost but a 1% chance that it turns around and targets a friendly? Some countries would take that trade.
- pfdietz 1y agoLike the Apex boats in Operation Dragoon. https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/apex-boats-the-unlikely-and-dangerous-naval-drones-of-world-war-iis-operation-dragoon/ https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/apex-boats-the-unlikely-... "On the landing beach at Baie de Pampelonne, most Apex boats exploded against the obstacles. Nevertheless, one ran aground, and one sank. A third reversed course and turned back out to sea before exploding near Sub-chaser #1029 and severely damaging it." One could argue all those Mk 14 torpedoes that malfunctioned and went onto circular paths also counted.
- globalnode 1y agoAs well as electricity to ammonia, ship it around the world by boat and then crack or burn it at the destination. or just use it as-is.
- kragen 1y agoYes, ammonia is another candidate.
- fred_is_fred 1y agoUkranians are 3d printing millions of missiles in their basements?
- speeder 1y agoThey might use rotating wings to fly instead of jet turbines, but yes. EDIT: To make things clearer, the word Missile is quite old, and predates rockets. missile is any object that is propelled somehow to hit a target. So even a stone launched from a sling by a caveman is already a missile. The other guy mentioned precision guided missiles though... and he is still correct in the word usage there.
- Dylan16807 1y agoI don't know, I'd say once you reach a certain amount of control over your flight path you stop being a missile. An aircraft isn't really "projected toward" something.
- Retric 1y agoCruse missiles have a great deal of control over their flight. “Kamikaze aircraft were pilot-guided explosive missiles, either purpose-built or converted from conventional aircraft.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
- Dylan16807 1y agoIf I look at the number of 90 degree turns a cruise missile can make and compare it to an airplane I wouldn't rate it very highly. > However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted. So for a quadcopter that's a pretty negligible amount of time. And not all that much for tiny planes either.
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- specialist 1y ago> ships full of iron At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such. Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum. Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.
- kragen 1y agoYes, but remove the scare quotes; I'm talking about exporting those materials to people who burn them for energy, in most cases in batteries. The round-trip efficiency of that process is not great, but I think should be around 70% for aluminum, and better for iron and magnesium; and the specific energy (MJ/kg) for those metals is significantly better than for conventional hydrocarbon fuels.