Comment by jmyeet

I watched a video recently that talked about how China is really the only country to have developed and built UHVDC power transmission. Some look at this and say how it's a failure of everyone else. My immediate thought was: "this solves aproblem only China has" and that turned out to be correct.

China produces most of its power in the west of the country between solar farms, the Three Gorges Dam and so on. Most of the population is 2000 miles away in the east of the country. For over a billion people, the cost of more efficient long-distance transmission make economic sense.

Someone asked "could Australia do this to transmit solar power from the West coast to the east coast in peak hours?". Technically? Yes. Practically? No. Why? It's obviously expensive with far fewer people but also all that space in between is uninhabited. So if you ever need to maintain it (which you will) you have to send people out into the wilderness to do it. China doesn't have that problem because it's not really unpopulated anywhere, at least not to the scale Australia is.

My point here is that you should always ask for something like this "what problem does it solve?" And the answer for more efficient long-distance power transmission is "almost nobody".

I think power grids are going to go in the other direction and become increasingly localized rather than nationalized.