To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#2Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#3Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids around the globe, we can solve the load balancing problem with a very elegant and obvious solution
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#4Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids aro…
Europe uses them to transfer energy in states and between states. Mostly with AC but there are some DC connections.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#5Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization (whatever you wish to call it). No matter our technological progress since the Industrial Revolution this failure point appears to persist.
As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the system.
It’s been in vogue to hype up technical solutions (“more compute,” “yeah but when it gets better…” “we just need a few more years on this”) to all of these problems that deserve to be solved in the socio-political sphere. It’s often more effective to restructure a given systems’ relationships than to hope for magical boosts here and there.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#6Another article from 2022 by the WSJ on that topic, titled "Building a Power Grid to Span the World":
https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-a-power-grid-to-span-t...
archive.ph link: https://archive.ph/dM2oM
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#7Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids aro…
Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game.
If there was team humanity - and we weren't still focused on "us" vs "them" and throwing feces at each other across imaginary geographical, religious and race borders - I'm confident we could solve the climate problem completely in 5-10 years. Not to mention what else (famine, diseases...), with motivation other than short-term profit...
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#8Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids aro…
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.
There's some educational videos on YouTube on High Voltage DC.
https://youtu.be/JH9-0AbR_1U?si=l57nkFt2YG5iLl3D
North and South America could sell a lot of electricity to the east this way...
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#9Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids aro…
Europe uses them to transfer energy in states and between states. Mostly with AC but there are some DC connections.
Ultra-High Voltage seems to mean over 500kV. AC lines of this voltage in Europe are only in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/ — there's a legend if you click the button, but navy is > 500kV AC, and magenta is DC.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
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