Comment by danuker
3 years ago
> several square meter cross-section HVDC loops
Let's take one half-way around the world.
That's 1 sq m * 20000 km = 20000000 m^3. Let's take aluminum because it's cheap. 2.7 tons/cubic meter = 54 Mt.
Multiply by price: $2444 x 54M = $132B for just the wire. That's $16.5 per capita.
But you also need insulators, labor, machinery, design, and so on.
It’s not that high, if you consider that we consume 150 terra watt hours per year worth of energy. Even if we assume a (unrealistically) low cost of 1 cent per watt hour for transportation, it means we spend at least $1.5T to transport our energy per year.
Extremely cheap! Unfortunately global production is currently 64 Mt/year[0], so the world would need to sustain an increased production for a while. (Especially as square meter cross section is the order-of-magnitude answer, not an exact value).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...