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Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

pv-magazine.com

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Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#81

Post by ed25519FUUU »

noja wrote: post #62
philipkglass wrote: post #14

European Commission Joint Research Center Technical Reports: HVDC Submarine Power Cables in the World https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... According to table 1, losses for 800 kilovolt HVDC systems can be as low as 3.5% per 1000 km. That comes to 52.5% loss over 15,000 km. Losses should go lower at 1100 kilovolts (the highest voltage HVDC systems running today) but I can't find detailed los…

How does it compare to shipping batteries? Is there a way to move batteries efficiently?

Batteries are not nearly energy dense enough to ship. A ship would need more energy than is even stored in the battery just to make it across the ocean.

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#82

Post by mataug »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #80
mataug wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is ~50% retained more efficient than producing the solar power in Asia itself? Wouldn't it be better to generate this power in the deserts of the middle east, and the wide open plains of Central Asia and transmit that over shorter distances despite producing less power per solar panel ?

The whole point is that you can generate the power at different times. The deserts of the middle east get sunlight at a different time then South America. If we had a worldwide spanning power grid we wouldn't need to have a grid storage solution at all.

That's a good point, I can see how this could be better than battery based storage for night time. But I wonder if wind power coupled with some limited battery storage, geo thermal, and newer generation nuclear peaker power plants can solve this problem instead of laying a mega cable under the ocean.

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#83

Post by phreeza »

philipkglass wrote: post #14

European Commission Joint Research Center Technical Reports: HVDC Submarine Power Cables in the World https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... According to table 1, losses for 800 kilovolt HVDC systems can be as low as 3.5% per 1000 km. That comes to 52.5% loss over 15,000 km. Losses should go lower at 1100 kilovolts (the highest voltage HVDC systems running today) but I can't find detailed los…

I get (1-0.035)^15 ~= 57.5% retained, so even better than what you got, unless I am missing something?

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#84

Post by _Microft »

sudhirj wrote: post #69
CoastalCoder wrote: post #50

I'm curious about this from a security perspective. With oil, coal, and natural gas, a cut in the supply network doesn't necessarily have an immediate impact. Buffers exist in some parts of the distribution network: ships holds, rail cars, and storage tanks. With electricity, it doesn't seem like we have much infrastructure for buffering the supply. So cutting those cables might have an immediate and significant impa…

For one, the power cables seem to be thicker and better shielded than the fiber optic ones. That aside, I don’t think any economy will rely purely on imported power - backups in the form of natural gas plants or grid scale storage will likely need to form part of the mix - there’s already the chance of some cloudy or rainy days over the solar farms, so it’s unlikely there isn’t a contingency.

There was a study recently that used historic weather, solar irradiance data and energy use data and worked out that a certain mix of (over-provisioned) solar, wind and 3 hours of storage would have sufficed to provide energy during almost all hours of the studied decades.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#85

Post by dreamcompiler »

gberger wrote: post #27
streamofdigits wrote: post #24

Hopelessly naive, I know, but shouldn't there be a global grid to optimally distribute electricity from solar irradiation rather than laying idiotic lengths of cable for political reasons? You want to connect the Pacific rim for that grid to work but I can easily imagine some intermediate "links" that seem to make more sense

There isn't even a nation-wide electrical grid in the USA. Having a global grid is a futuristic pipe dream.

The US doesn't have a nationwide grid because of the technical requirement to use AC back when electrification happened (which requires phase matching or DC intertie between subregions), and because of the politics of who regulates the grid (which is why Texas still has its own grid.)

The AC requirement is a legacy historical issue; a nationwide DC grid could be built in the US tomorrow if the political issues could be solved (and if it made economic sense to rip out the legacy AC infrastructure, which it doesn't.)

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#86

Post by BenjiWiebe »

dukeyukey wrote: post #12
souenzzo wrote: post #4

Isn't cheaper turn the electricity into liquid hydrogen?! Hydrogen can be stored for months, delivered by car, tubes, ships, etc Do not have many losses across long distances

> Isn't cheaper turn the electricity into liquid hydrogen?! Creating hydrogen is about 80% efficient, so you do lose a fair bit in the process. > Hydrogen can be stored for months, delivered by car, tubes, ships, That's the thing about hydrogen, it's tricky to store for long periods of time. It leaks real easy. And liquid hydrogen isn't very dense, about 7% of that of water, so it's hard to ship it in bulk. And at th…

And if you do store it, it has a nasty tendency to weaken it's container.

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#88

Post by wffurr »

bduerst wrote: post #44
philipkglass wrote: post #14

European Commission Joint Research Center Technical Reports: HVDC Submarine Power Cables in the World https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... According to table 1, losses for 800 kilovolt HVDC systems can be as low as 3.5% per 1000 km. That comes to 52.5% loss over 15,000 km. Losses should go lower at 1100 kilovolts (the highest voltage HVDC systems running today) but I can't find detailed los…

Wouldn't you be better of having microwave relay satellites than laying wire? Test satellites for space-based solar power (SBSP) are already going into orbit as soon as next year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#In_the...

A giant cable seems less likely to be able to (accidentally?) be repurposed as a space-based death ray.

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#89

Post by dreamcompiler »

Projects like this would be easy if we had cheap high-temperature superconductors. Until then it's gonna be very expensive because it will require very high voltage (which means very thick insulation) and high I^2R losses -- even with the high voltage -- just because of the distance.

Re: Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable

#90

Post by jonnycomputer »

elihu wrote: post #11
throwaway10122 wrote: post #3

Doesnt China have it's own supply of deserts a bit closer to home?

Presumably it would be very useful to China to be able to buy power during their night time. It might also be beneficial to Chile to be able to buy power from China when the situation is reversed. Better interconnections mean you can get more benefit from cheap solar and don't have to rely on batteries.

Dammit, the sun is my battery! and the earth's tilt, spin and orbit is my load balancer!
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