It's risky to connect your grid to another country's. ex: Canada's grid is connected to the USA, but now the USA is being hostile to Canada.
To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#22Connecting the world sounds pretty utopian when the broader interconnectivity, like trade, that we do have is fraying at the edges and starting to crumble.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#23It's risky to connect your grid to another country's. ex: Canada's grid is connected to the USA, but now the USA is being hostile to Canada.
Moldova (+ Transnistria), Russia and Ukraine are also in a fight over gas deliveries that make up a significant chunk of Moldova's electricity.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#24It's risky to connect your grid to another country's. ex: Canada's grid is connected to the USA, but now the USA is being hostile to Canada.
Three countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are disconnecting from Russia literally in 2 weeks for that specific reason, so it's an horrible idea to interconnect everything in the current world.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#25An idea that looks good on paper but can be disastrous in reality.
Interconnected systems increase exposure to cyber threats.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#26Time 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…
That feels like a tilted assessment. The technical solutions can break down enormous walls, and very quickly. There are just some walls they can't - political, social, etc - and once the other walls have been leveled, we tend to get focused on those & lament.
Technology has been used to change the political landscape quite effectively. So far, I’ve seen it used to favor short term interests of small groups, but a sufficiently motivated organisation can do a lot toward a favourable outcome for the whole planet.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#27It's risky to connect your grid to another country's. ex: Canada's grid is connected to the USA, but now the USA is being hostile to Canada.
I mean, logistically speaking everybody is already depending on the US pretty much. So you could say this about every country in the world from one perspective or another.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#28An idea that looks good on paper but can be disastrous in reality. Interconnected systems increase exposure to cyber threats.
and small systems with no decentralized redundancy can fail catastrophically, what's your point?
We have have far more recent examples of the former rather than your hypothetical musings.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#29Ultra 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...
> Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game
Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left. It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate internationally.
Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
#30Huh - looks like Buckminster Fuller's idea might be relevant.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to access http://geni.org for more details, but here's the Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Energy_Network_Institut...