Comment by kragen
3 days ago
Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.
There's at least one HVDC cable connected to Netherlands, Norned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed .
As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
>Budgeted at €550 million, and completed at a cost of €600m
Amazing.
That's pretty good! Just a 10% overrun. By comparison, Hinkley Point C is now at "up to" £46bn from an initial £18bn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279
2 replies →
And to Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable
While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.
Thank you for the correction! That one is immune to quadcopters too.
Thank you for the correction! It's also immune to quadcopters.
As well as electricity to ammonia, ship it around the world by boat and then crack or burn it at the destination. or just use it as-is.
Yes, ammonia is another candidate.
Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.
Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.
> and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available
Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries.
Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that between drones and smart mines - we've never had a better chance of completely ruining our ability to do ocean based shipping during combat.
3 replies →
magnesium is the most explody of all those
9 replies →
Yes, it's easy to imagine cases where people go around sinking ships; narcosubs, Red Sea oil shipping, and Russian warships in the Black Sea are of course dealing with that threat currently, but as hostilities escalate it's likely to increase. But energy in the form of shipped fuel intrinsically provides some minimal level of such local resilience—for it to work, you need at least a stockpile of fuel big enough to last until the next ship is expected to unload, which is orders of magnitude longer than the milliseconds before a cable cut affects you—and can provide arbitrarily large amounts of it.
The metal fuels in particular have the merit that you can use them in precisely such mass-produced batteries rather than to produce thermal power. As I alluded to in my grandparent comment, aluminum-air batteries were mass-produced in the 01960s.
We have quite a bit of experience transporting hydrocarbons . . . .
We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
4 replies →
The Netherlands has “erected” multiple HVDC links
As long as we all realize you can’t 3D print precision-guided missiles without, well, the guidance bit.
The guidance bit should be quite cheap now though, compared to decades ago. Some combination of MEMS backed up with GPS.
And software. The Ukrainian drones largely run on the open-source Ardupilot.
GPS is fairly easy to jam, and despite the purported end of Selective Availability, unencrypted GPS can be turned off entirely without affecting US military GPS. Cruise missiles have been using terrain models for decades now, since well before GPS (a major reason high-resolution DTED used to be classified) which just requires a computationally cheap particle filter and appropriate sensors. We can expect belligerents in upcoming conflicts to maintain strategic stockpiles of the relevant electronics, which are more compact than even cocaine or fentanyl and therefore difficult to blockade.
Also depending on how many corners you're willing to cut. Half the cost but a 1% chance that it turns around and targets a friendly? Some countries would take that trade.
1 reply →
Ukranians are 3d printing millions of missiles in their basements?
They might use rotating wings to fly instead of jet turbines, but yes.
EDIT: To make things clearer, the word Missile is quite old, and predates rockets. missile is any object that is propelled somehow to hit a target. So even a stone launched from a sling by a caveman is already a missile. The other guy mentioned precision guided missiles though... and he is still correct in the word usage there.
I don't know, I'd say once you reach a certain amount of control over your flight path you stop being a missile. An aircraft isn't really "projected toward" something.
3 replies →
> ships full of iron
At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such.
Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum.
Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.
Yes, but remove the scare quotes; I'm talking about exporting those materials to people who burn them for energy, in most cases in batteries. The round-trip efficiency of that process is not great, but I think should be around 70% for aluminum, and better for iron and magnesium; and the specific energy (MJ/kg) for those metals is significantly better than for conventional hydrocarbon fuels.