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Comment by a1371

2 days ago

An initially-stupid-sounding idea I heard a while back was running power cables through the ocean floors between America and the rest of the world. It's apparently feasible and the big benefit of it is that at the grid peak hour when the sun is not shining in Europe, they can get cheap solar from America and vice versa

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a1371

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pbmonster  1 day ago

Yeah, ultra high voltage DC power lines have something like 3.5% loss per 1000km. American sun belt to European sun belt is at least 6000km, so you just gotta eat the 20% loss. Same ballpark as pumped hydro storage.

6000km sounds like a lot, but the Chinese have built a 3000km UHVDC line delivering 12 GW, and putting down submarine communications cables this long is complete routine today. Would be interesting how much aluminium/lead/copper such a project would take. EDIT: found a supplier that specifies a 1GW cable at 7000 tons per spool. A spool is 130km of cable, so that's 350 000 tons of cable per GW for the transatlantic link. So just the raw aluminium is around a billion dollars per GW.

Anyway, first we have to properly connect those two sun belts to the rest of their own continental masses with UHVDC, then we have a lot of political problems to solve, and then we can check battery prices...