51–60 of 106 posts
An 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.
Ultra 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…
Long distance power grids are only useful if you have huge generators localized away from the power consumers. So, mostly places with hydroelectric generators have them. It was never a matter of "maturity" or politics.
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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.
An idea that looks good on paper but can be disastrous in reality. Interconnected systems increase exposure to cyber threats.
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…
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There's half a dozen lines over 500kV DC in operation and as many again under development and construction
I heard one of the problems is that since countries want to run the lines submerged, which is too expensive and/or challenging for other reasons (fields,...) for high voltage DC.
This one for example at 600kV and 2.2GW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link
There are of course issues with all undersea cables (AC or DC) in today's climate with cable cuts being so frequent. I wonder if it's easier to locate AC cables
Time 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…
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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.
Extend the European synchronised grid to Northern Africa. Then you can think about deploying solar on a massive scale to parts of the Sahara.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe... tl;dr this is already proposed