[HN Gopher] To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the...
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To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-01-25 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Hb9lh
| yownie wrote:
| the real mvp
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load
| balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive
| because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think
| only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can
| be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to
| try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find
| the maturity to connect grids around the globe, we can solve the
| load balancing problem with a very elegant and obvious solution
| stop50 wrote:
| Europe uses them to transfer energy in states and between
| states. Mostly with AC but there are some DC connections.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Ultra-High Voltage seems to mean over 500kV. AC lines of this
| voltage in Europe are only in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
|
| https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/ -- there's a legend if you
| click the button, but navy is > 500kV AC, and magenta is DC.
| ta1243 wrote:
| There's half a dozen lines over 500kV DC in operation and
| as many again under development and construction
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| I heard one of the problems is that since countries want
| to run the lines submerged, which is too expensive and/or
| challenging for other reasons (fields,...) for high
| voltage DC.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The ones in europe are submarine. AC has its own
| challenges under the sea.
|
| This one for example at 600kV and 2.2GW
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link
|
| There are of course issues with all undersea cables (AC
| or DC) in today's climate with cable cuts being so
| frequent. I wonder if it's easier to locate AC cables
| alluro2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one
| losing game.
|
| If there was team humanity - and we weren't still focused on
| "us" vs "them" and throwing feces at each other across
| imaginary geographical, religious and race borders - I'm
| confident we could solve the climate problem completely in 5-10
| years. Not to mention what else (famine, diseases...), with
| motivation other than short-term profit...
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one
| losing game
|
| Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left.
| It shouldn't be too hard to coordinate internationally.
| lxgr wrote:
| Shouldn't as in you suspect it isn't, or as in it really
| ought to not be?
|
| In either case, while a "sociological vacuum decay" into a
| more efficient mode of human collaboration seems at least
| theoretically possible (we've had some of these in the
| past: The invention of money, laws, nation states,
| organized religions, and other practically useful human
| fictions), if nobody can find a way to precipitate it, it
| remains just as unachievable as something even
| theoretically impossible.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Every team thinks they are team humanity.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.
|
| There's some educational videos on YouTube on High Voltage DC.
|
| https://youtu.be/JH9-0AbR_1U?si=l57nkFt2YG5iLl3D
|
| North and South America could sell a lot of electricity to the
| east this way...
| iaaamatrumb wrote:
| China is big on UHV (1000kV)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
|
| > In 2015, State Grid Corporation of China proposed the Global
| Energy Interconnection, a long-term proposal to develop
| globally integrated smart grids and ultra high voltage
| transmission networks to connect over 80 countries.[10]: 92-93
| The idea is supported by President Xi Jinping and China in
| attempting to develop support in various internal forums,
| including UN bodies.[10]: 92
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Team humanity is too segmented at the moment. Unless the next
| Pan-whatever happens, it's just politically impossible.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Nationalism is often one-sided within individual countries.
| Their opponents have a lot in common across borders and
| should be more easily coordinated.
| spockz wrote:
| It seems that in our country (The Netherlands) the bigger
| blocker is more the interconnections between local regions as
| opposed to transferring between larger regions such as
| countries. We have varying production from solar and wind. Now
| that means that each local connection to the main grid needs to
| be almost as heavy as the main grid whereas it used to be just
| one direction with very predictable usage.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, Brazil has some UHV lines. AFAIK, the US has one, Europe
| has a few, not only inside the EU.
|
| Long distance power grids are only useful if you have huge
| generators localized away from the power consumers. So, mostly
| places with hydroelectric generators have them. It was never a
| matter of "maturity" or politics.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck
| in progress remains human, or political, or social organization
| (whatever you wish to call it). No matter our technological
| progress since the Industrial Revolution this failure point
| appears to persist.
|
| As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it's not the
| features themselves that matter, but the relationships between
| features that define the system.
|
| It's been in vogue to hype up technical solutions ("more
| compute," "yeah but when it gets better..." "we just need a few
| more years on this") to all of these problems that deserve to be
| solved in the socio-political sphere. It's often more effective
| to restructure a given systems' relationships than to hope for
| magical boosts here and there.
| ip26 wrote:
| That feels like a tilted assessment. The technical solutions
| can break down enormous walls, and very quickly. There are just
| some walls they can't - political, social, etc - and once the
| other walls have been leveled, we tend to get focused on those
| & lament.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Technology has been used to change the political landscape
| quite effectively. So far, I've seen it used to favor short
| term interests of small groups, but a sufficiently motivated
| organisation can do a lot toward a favourable outcome for the
| whole planet.
| hansonkd wrote:
| Could be a bottleneck some ways. In other ways its an
| accelerant (think space race).
|
| Like most things in nature you probably get the most out of
| "progress" (kind of a slippery word in itself) through some
| type of equilibrium rather than an absolute everyone must work
| together.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It can be even worse. When people are too deep into a
| particular technique they lose track of what the system needs.
| I've seen 500M intranet applications who were slower that
| handwriting on preprinted paper templates (which means network
| failures would increase productivity overall).
| wcoenen wrote:
| Another article from 2022 by the WSJ on that topic, titled
| "Building a Power Grid to Span the World":
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-a-power-grid-to-span-t...
|
| archive.ph link: https://archive.ph/dM2oM
| euroderf wrote:
| Extend the European synchronised grid to Northern Africa.
|
| Then you can think about deploying solar on a massive scale to
| parts of the Sahara.
| hkt wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
|
| tl;dr this is already proposed
| Hamuko wrote:
| I hope they plan to trench that cable if they actually go
| ahead with it.
| euroderf wrote:
| Indeed some such projects have been. I could not find
| sufficiently informative links expeditiously. But there is
| for example DESERTEC.
| 1over137 wrote:
| It's risky to connect your grid to another country's. ex:
| Canada's grid is connected to the USA, but now the USA is being
| hostile to Canada.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Moldova (+ Transnistria), Russia and Ukraine are also in a
| fight over gas deliveries that make up a significant chunk of
| Moldova's electricity.
| rvnx wrote:
| Three countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are
| disconnecting from Russia literally in 2 weeks for that
| specific reason, so it's an horrible idea to interconnect
| everything in the current world.
| guax wrote:
| That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not
| a connectivity problem. It's a monopoly issue that would be
| less of a problem if a single or even a minority of players
| were not the largest producer.
|
| At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas
| where you had to win the lottery of location or game of
| Thrones of imperialism.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >That seems like a problem of a single large provider and
| not a connectivity problem.
|
| No, it sounds like a problem of a belligerent super power
| next door.
| twodave wrote:
| I mean, logistically speaking everybody is already depending on
| the US pretty much. So you could say this about every country
| in the world from one perspective or another.
| davidw wrote:
| Connecting the world sounds pretty utopian when the broader
| interconnectivity, like trade, that we do have is fraying at the
| edges and starting to crumble.
| jonhohle wrote:
| The main issue with everyone agreeing is the one who disagrees
| often gains the advantage, especially if the control something
| they perceived more valuable then they are getting from being
| agreeable.
| guax wrote:
| Next people will want a interconnected communications channel
| between countries. Utter pipe dream.
| horrible-hilde wrote:
| the checks and balances will eventually be deregulated and
| forgotten.
| TaurenHunter wrote:
| An idea that looks good on paper but can be disastrous in
| reality. Interconnected systems increase exposure to cyber
| threats.
| yownie wrote:
| and small systems with no decentralized redundancy can fail
| catastrophically, what's your point?
|
| We have have far more recent examples of the former rather than
| your hypothetical musings.
| TaurenHunter wrote:
| Don't be a IYI, learn something:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not just cyber threats. Just ask Estonia how much electricity
| they are currently importing from Finland.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Don't put your infrastructure on the internet.
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| We already have hundreds of millions of people on connected
| electricity grids. Loss of a few interconnections would not
| lead to catastrophic failure of the whole system.
| ben_w wrote:
| Cyber security is a huge concern irregardless of if the grids
| are national or international.
|
| IMO the novel challenges are:
|
| (1) too many borders with too many opportunities for corruption
|
| (2) Coronal mass ejections become an even bigger issue than
| already (impact goes from regional to global)
|
| (3) Literally only China is making enough aluminium for this,
| and nobody's making enough copper or superconductor
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Huh - looks like Buckminster Fuller's idea might be relevant.
|
| Unfortunately, I can't seem to access http://geni.org for more
| details, but here's the Wikipedia link:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Energy_Network_Institut...
| metalman wrote:
| There is no way to make this idea work, or for that matter
| describe any plausible way to impliment it. Its physicaly
| impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans. Other north
| south bottlenecks occur and then many of the ereas that could
| host grid scale solar, are poor, and therefore exporting there
| light,which is only going to bring 11 fully temporary part time
| jobs per 100000 inhabitents, who go home to huts, with no
| electricity, is not a good look anymore. The real nitty gritty is
| rights of way for transmission lines. India, Pakistan,
| Afganistan, Iran, all in a nice neat row, you have my personal
| permission to build anything you want! and as an as an added
| bonus I will put in a word with China ,Russia, and Khazakistan,
| then quick climb up the pole, twist a few wires together and
| gzzzzzzzzitz* and zam London to Bieging at the speed of light.
|
| VS, distributed solar, wind, water, geothermal, power that serves
| local grids, just fine. Battery storage will get much cheaper,
| and the generating equipment is only getting more efficient and
| cheaper. The world grid will have to wait until we have some kind
| of fusion power and a super conducting grid, where power is in
| fact too cheap to meter and has demonstrably less impact than any
| other source.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic
| oceans
|
| There are already plans to connect North America and Europe
| with an undersea power cable.
|
| https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-most-ambitious-subsea...
| Zanfa wrote:
| This is never going to be viable. Even existing short
| undersea cables are difficult (impossible?) to protect from
| sabotage, let alone one that would span an ocean.
| ben_w wrote:
| Longer cables need to be thicker if you want resistance to
| be fixed.
|
| If you want 1O then by coincidence a 40,000 km cable has a
| cross section of almost exactly one square meter. If you're
| putting a significant fraction of global power through that
| at any sane voltage, you can't use most cutting tools (or
| indeed electrical motors) near it because the magnetic
| field is too strong.
|
| China is making enough aluminium that this is a plausible
| thing they may do as a "belt and road" type project.
| hkwerf wrote:
| I'd love to see this realized. However, given the issues
| we've been having with cables in the Baltic Sea in recent
| months, this would probably be a huge attack surface in case
| of any kind of conflict.
| BJones12 wrote:
| Does anyone remember the 2003 blackout [0] that left 55 million
| people in 2 countries without power for up to 3 days?
|
| With a worldwide grid we could make one a hundred times larger.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
| michaelmior wrote:
| This not a necessary outcome of connected grids though.
| Technology has advanced a lot in the past two decades.
| ryao wrote:
| Has it?
|
| https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-
| use-n...
| lxgr wrote:
| "Connect" doesn't have to mean "operate as a closely coupled
| synchronized grid".
|
| Using HVDC (which is more efficient over long distances
| anyway), adjacent grids basically appear as just another power
| plant to yours (and some early HVDC connections literally
| consisted of a motor coupled to a generator!), and grids ought
| to be able to stomach the sudden outage of one.
| itishappy wrote:
| Was a great time for stargazing, at least!
| k0stas wrote:
| Beware of talk about benefits without mention of drawbacks.
|
| Connecting grids could significantly increase the fragility of
| the system resulting in higher risk of large-scale power outages.
| Some of you might have experienced the 2003 blackout in northeast
| North American
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), which
| luckily happened in the summer. Tail risks should not be swept
| under the rug.
|
| Even a single widespread event could completely wipe out the
| benefit gained from connecting grids.
| api wrote:
| This is a general principle: making things bigger and/or more
| centralized tends to increase efficiency and decrease the
| frequency of failures but greatly increase the cost and
| severity of failures.
|
| In computing think about, for example, centralizing identity
| management in the hands of a few large companies. These
| companies have large security teams and mature well built
| infrastructures, but a huge failure or a huge security
| compromise of, say, Google's OIDC system, could be utterly
| catastrophic, paralyzing and destroying vast swaths of our
| digital infrastructure. Entire companies, services, or even
| sectors would be paralyzed or worse.
|
| Small, decentralized, and diverse is overall more costly and
| experiences many smaller failures but is more robust for the
| long haul.
|
| This is probably why life, having evolved over a billion years,
| is mostly this way. Giant super organisms and super-optimized
| monocultures are possible but fragile.
|
| Our economies, having only existed for hundreds of years and
| being incentivized to only care about next quarter, tend to go
| all in on anything that makes numbers superficially better.
| lizknope wrote:
| I remember we were at work and the power flickered and all the
| UPS's started beeping for about 10 seconds. Then it went back
| to normal. Then about 30 minutes later people looked at the
| news and saw a massive blackout. We were hundreds of miles away
| and that's all we felt but I had a relative tell me about
| walking a few miles home because the subways were down and the
| traffic lights not working made it even crazier.
| vinni2 wrote:
| Forget connecting world's grids first the governments should
| connect national grids. Like in Germany and Norway north and
| south grids are disconnected contributing to fluctuating prices.
| johnea wrote:
| With an intercontinental power grid, the sun is always shining.
|
| Of course, The Economist isn't worried about that, they really
| only care about how they can make money from it.
|
| But for a technologist, there's always that messy real world to
| deal with. And for solar power, that reality is night. A world
| wide power grid could be constantly transmitting power to the
| dark side.
| ryao wrote:
| The following seems relevant to any discussion of interconnecting
| the world's grids:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-use-n...
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| What about the cost on transmission of the power?
| ryao wrote:
| I cannot help but wonder what the answers are to these points:
|
| > Norwegians are forgetting that domestically produced power is
| not always cheaper. Whenever the current in the cables flows
| towards them, it helps reduce high prices.
|
| Norway could add some diodes to the cables so that it only
| imports and does not export.
|
| > And even though Norway exports more power than it imports, that
| is fantastic for domestic energy producers. Norway's state-owned
| power firms have been raking it in, which is one of the reasons
| the government can afford to subsidise household prices.
|
| Wholesale prices would plummet if this energy had nowhere to go.
| Getting wholesale prices down seems to be the goal here, so why
| not keep the energy trapped and let the wholesale prices drop? If
| they wholesale prices drop, you would expect that to help pay for
| lower household prices.
|
| These are not my actual views. I just feel that the articles'
| author did not address these points, so I decided to raise them
| here.
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