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Comment by qoobaa | Hacker News Reader

It's a very good question. I always thought that it's because of technical difficulties when transmitting electricity over long distances, but it turns out we already do it well (HVDC). When you think about it on a continent scale: why not move all PV panels from Germany to sunnier regions of Europe like Spain or Portugal where you can generate twice more power with them (in average 200 W/m² instead of 100 W/m²). The answer is simple: we'd need to have a common grid across EU member countries, but such a thing doesn't exist and it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. It turns out the biggest issue on this planet is always politics.

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The amount of copper you would need to constantly convey electricity from the sunny side of the earth to the dark side would be absolutely massive. It is not an issue of common grids, as long distance high power transmission is done at many different voltages depending on the specific route, and has nothing to do with your mains voltage and frequency.

Current long distance power transmission is most often used as a way of 'balancing' production and demand between different types of plants; it is not intended or capable of transmitting the full power needs of the recieving area.

You can use aluminium instead of copper (see HVDC Gotland).

I didn't say it's just about "connecting countries with a common grid". Switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources is much more challenging than that. However, transmitting lots of power over long distances is doable and cheaper than many people think.

I know they run large (presumably) copper lines from Utah to California to pump out electricity. That can't have been cheap, how bad can it be to pump it trans atlantic? LOL

In Spain we have ridiculous laws that make it unfeasible to a layman to have solar power installed in the houses. It would be quite ironic setting up solar panels for Germany with our current situation.

That's interesting. How does it work in Spain?

In threads like this I always like to promote Gridwatch: http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

While there isn't a complete grid, the UK has connections to Ireland, the Netherlands and France, enabling a bit more balancing. You can see the UK is currently running on 60% CCGT and 25% nuclear, although the 10GW solar capacity can't be shown because there's no central real-time metering for it. That's quite an impressive amount given the total (net of solar) demand is 30GW. Two and a half "Drax" worth of power, invisibly distributed around the country!

HVDC is High Voltage DC, therefore grids aren't really important. The bigger issues are losses and costs

The question was if it's possible to use someone's else electricity when the sun isn't shining in your place. While it's technically possible and in many cases economically reasonable, you probably won't see countries giving up their electricity production and importing power from overseas - the main reason is politics.

We need to get over this. Let's find better politicians.

you probably won't see countries giving up their electricity production and importing power from overseas - the main reason is politics.

Importing a whole country's power consumption is probably a bit much in terms of required infrastructure (except for the microstates which already do this), but smaller links are already present and make economic sense. I don't think the politics of energy security are an obstacle if the price is right.

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