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

Cyber security is a huge concern irregardless of if the grids are national or international.

IMO the novel challenges are:

(1) too many borders with too many opportunities for corruption

(2) Coronal mass ejections become an even bigger issue than already (impact goes from regional to global)

(3) Literally only China is making enough aluminium for this, and nobody's making enough copper or superconductor

Longer cables need to be thicker if you want resistance to be fixed.

If you want 1Ω then by coincidence a 40,000 km cable has a cross section of almost exactly one square meter. If you're putting a significant fraction of global power through that at any sane voltage, you can't use most cutting tools (or indeed electrical motors) near it because the magnetic field is too strong.

China is making enough aluminium that this is a plausible thing they may do as a "belt and road" type project.

Has it?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-use-n...

I cannot help but wonder what the answers are to these points:

> Norwegians are forgetting that domestically produced power is not always cheaper. Whenever the current in the cables flows towards them, it helps reduce high prices.

Norway could add some diodes to the cables so that it only imports and does not export.

> And even though Norway exports more power than it imports, that is fantastic for domestic energy producers. Norway’s state-owned power firms have been raking it in, which is one of the reasons the government can afford to subsidise household prices.

Wholesale prices would plummet if this energy had nowhere to go. Getting wholesale prices down seems to be the goal here, so why not keep the energy trapped and let the wholesale prices drop? If they wholesale prices drop, you would expect that to help pay for lower household prices.

These are not my actual views. I just feel that the articles' author did not address these points, so I decided to raise them here.