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Comment by entropicgravity

3 years ago

HVDC is now a thing. Collecting solar in Northern Austrialia and sending it to Singapore over a 3800km long transmission line. Under construction now.

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entropicgravity

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fmajid  3 years ago

There's this incredible project to build a 10GW solar farm in Morocco (1/3 of UK peak consumption) and bring the power to the UK via HVDC cable. Amazingly they estimate only 10% losses despite being over 3800km long:

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?

And then there are pumped hydropower storage project like this one with a proposed storage capacity of 200 GWh and 1.5GW of power:

https://www.coireglas.com

In the worst case, couldn't the excess power simply be used in electrolyzers to generate hydrogen? They may not be very efficient but it's better than throwing free energy away.

  • rlpb  3 years ago

    > Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?

    The article covers this and explains why it's not enough. Provisioning time for the links exceeds projected generation capacity increases in the Scotland.

    • scythe  3 years ago

      It seems like the planning isn't so great, though. They expect to have another 4 GW of links by 2029, which is enough for the wind overshoot today, but there will be a lot more wind by 2029... so, double the investment and build 8 GW of links by 2029.

      1 reply →

  • Scoundreller  3 years ago

    The dumb thing is that electricity transmission and distribution are usually fixed. This already doesn't make sense because it's peak demand that drives the capex. Opex is peanuts.

    But the retail buyer doesn't usually see the negative/low electricity prices of high-supply+low-demand time periods for their "inefficient" uses that should still be economic.

  • blibble  3 years ago

    > Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?

    why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?

    • ErikCorry  3 years ago

      Strangely there already is one between Scotland and Wales and two more are proposed (see the article).

      I suspect NIMBYism is a big part of the explanation. Airborne AC links are efficient but ugly. Underwater AC links are tolerated by Nimbies, but inefficient. So you end up with underwater HVDC links.

      8 replies →

    • Reason077  3 years ago

      > "why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?"

      Because there are bottlenecks in capacity on the synchronous grid that restrict the amount of power that can be moved from north-to-south (or vice-versa).

      It works out better/cheaper/easier to bypass those bottlenecks with efficient undersea HVDC links than to try and build more terrestrial AC transmission lines.

NamTaf  3 years ago

To be clear, Sun Cable entered administration this week. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...

Scoundreller  3 years ago

Thank you. People laughed when I suggested an HVDC link between North America and Europe.

Nordstream 1 was 1222km, and Britpipe now, is 60km shorter.

Boston to Lisbon is 5100km. Churchill Falls (home of a giant hydro dam project in Labrador Canada which got screwed by Hydro-Quebec because the only via transit was through Quebec), would be just under 4000km subsea.

The transit contract expires in 2039 I believe...

  • gregoriol  3 years ago

    It wouldn't make much sense: eastern US/Canada and western Europe have about the same profile (same kind of wind/hydro/solar/... sources); it would make more sense to connect regions with different profiles, like the Scotland/England example of the article (high-wind/low-population to a high-population zone) or high-sunlight to a low-sunlight (like southern europe/northern africa to northern europe)

throwaway2037  3 years ago

"Under construction now."

Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

    projected to begin construction in mid-2023

And:

    In January 2023, Sun Cable went into administration, the equivalent of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

  • defrost  3 years ago

    The cable and power transmission parts of that scheme were sound - the routing across one of the more volcanic and faulted geological regions in the world was sketchy.

  • entropicgravity  3 years ago

    OK sure, that particular project may have been halted but it's not because of technical problems. And plenty of HVDC transmission lines have already been built. The key thing about HVDC is that it follows a dropping price curve similar to semiconductor manufacturing so prices will continue to come down.

hgomersall  3 years ago

The current problem, as I understand it, is the capacity to build HVDC isn't high enough to meet global demand.

  • adrianN  3 years ago

    That is true for almost every technology related to energy. We can't satisfy global demand for solar panels or wind turbines or batteries or other forms of storage either. We also can't satisfy demand for heat pumps or building insulation.