Comment by jacquesm
6 hours ago
I don't think that is true. The bigger problem is the international cooperation required, as well as that such a system would be vulnerable to attacks.
6 hours ago
I don't think that is true. The bigger problem is the international cooperation required, as well as that such a system would be vulnerable to attacks.
" The cost of the electrical equipment that brings the offshore renewable energy from the wind turbines to the shore is in the same range as the cost of the wind turbines themselves. The future offshore grid will need tens of billions of Euros of investments in HVDC transmission infrastructure. For instance, Dutch-German transmission system operator TenneT has contracted 30 G€ for such connections in the North Sea. "
https://blog.sintef.com/energy/future-hvdc-grids-yes-please-...
Yes. Those links will be built anyway. Once you have them it isn't a huge stretch of the imagination that you could cross connect them. Check out a map of how many of those we have now, compare with two years ago or so and see how fast the buildout is. North-South links would take care of the seasonal variation and East-West links would lengthen the day.
> Those links will be built anyway.
Those links and the associated large costs, were not necessary in the past. I would like to note that, the amounts of electricity produced each year in Europe didn't change much for the past 40 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
I understand the low production costs of solar power, but in many discussions the associated costs of upgrading electric grid and building large scale electric energy storage systems are swept under the rug and not assigned to a electric grid dominated by solar power.
Like this BBC article, which compares costs of solar vs. nuclear, when the comparison should be costs of solar+HVDC+storage vs. nuclear.
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