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To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

economist.com

41–50 of 106 posts

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#41
Beware of talk about benefits without mention of drawbacks.

Connecting grids could significantly increase the fragility of the system resulting in higher risk of large-scale power outages. Some of you might have experienced the 2003 blackout in northeast North American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), which luckily happened in the summer. Tail risks should not be swept under the rug.

Even a single widespread event could completely wipe out the benefit gained from connecting grids.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#42

There is no way to make this idea work, or for that matter describe any plausible way to impliment it. Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans. Other north south bottlenecks occur and then many of the ereas that could host grid scale solar, are poor, and therefore exporting there light,which is only going to bring 11 fully temporary part time jobs per 100000 inhabitents, who go home to huts,…

> Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans

There are already plans to connect North America and Europe with an undersea power cable.

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-most-ambitious-subsea...

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#43
post #22

Connecting the world sounds pretty utopian when the broader interconnectivity, like trade, that we do have is fraying at the edges and starting to crumble.

Next people will want a interconnected communications channel between countries. Utter pipe dream.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#44
post #41

Beware of talk about benefits without mention of drawbacks. Connecting grids could significantly increase the fragility of the system resulting in higher risk of large-scale power outages. Some of you might have experienced the 2003 blackout in northeast North American ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 ), which luckily happened in the summer. Tail risks should not be swept under the rug. Even…

This is a general principle: making things bigger and/or more centralized tends to increase efficiency and decrease the frequency of failures but greatly increase the cost and severity of failures.

In computing think about, for example, centralizing identity management in the hands of a few large companies. These companies have large security teams and mature well built infrastructures, but a huge failure or a huge security compromise of, say, Google’s OIDC system, could be utterly catastrophic, paralyzing and destroying vast swaths of our digital infrastructure. Entire companies, services, or even sectors would be paralyzed or worse.

Small, decentralized, and diverse is overall more costly and experiences many smaller failures but is more robust for the long haul.

This is probably why life, having evolved over a billion years, is mostly this way. Giant super organisms and super-optimized monocultures are possible but fragile.

Our economies, having only existed for hundreds of years and being incentivized to only care about next quarter, tend to go all in on anything that makes numbers superficially better.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#45
post #29
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shouldn't as in you suspect it isn't, or as in it really ought to not be?

In either case, while a "sociological vacuum decay" into a more efficient mode of human collaboration seems at least theoretically possible (we've had some of these in the past: The invention of money, laws, nation states, organized religions, and other practically useful human fictions), if nobody can find a way to precipitate it, it remains just as unachievable as something even theoretically impossible.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#46
post #24

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.

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.

That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem. It's a monopoly issue that would be less of a problem if a single or even a minority of players were not the largest producer.

At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas where you had to win the lottery of location or game of Thrones of imperialism.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#47

There is no way to make this idea work, or for that matter describe any plausible way to impliment it. Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans. Other north south bottlenecks occur and then many of the ereas that could host grid scale solar, are poor, and therefore exporting there light,which is only going to bring 11 fully temporary part time jobs per 100000 inhabitents, who go home to huts,…

> Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans There are already plans to connect North America and Europe with an undersea power cable. https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-most-ambitious-subsea...

This is never going to be viable. Even existing short undersea cables are difficult (impossible?) to protect from sabotage, let alone one that would span an ocean.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#48
post #46
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem. It's a monopoly issue that would be less of a problem if a single or even a minority of players were not the largest producer. At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas where you had to win the lottery of location or game of Thrones of imperialism.

>That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem.

No, it sounds like a problem of a belligerent super power next door.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#49

There is no way to make this idea work, or for that matter describe any plausible way to impliment it. Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans. Other north south bottlenecks occur and then many of the ereas that could host grid scale solar, are poor, and therefore exporting there light,which is only going to bring 11 fully temporary part time jobs per 100000 inhabitents, who go home to huts,…

> Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans There are already plans to connect North America and Europe with an undersea power cable. https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-most-ambitious-subsea...

I'd love to see this realized. However, given the issues we've been having with cables in the Baltic Sea in recent months, this would probably be a huge attack surface in case of any kind of conflict.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#50

Does anyone remember the 2003 blackout [0] that left 55 million people in 2 countries without power for up to 3 days? With a worldwide grid we could make one a hundred times larger. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

Was a great time for stargazing, at least!
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