Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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> The bottleneck is the grid.

Sure the grid is a bottle neck, but it is a bottle neck that can be fixed. Aging infrastructure is the problem, not the grid per-se, it just happens to have older and less well maintained segments.

> The Grid has to match the production and demand

No, the grid transports power from places where it is generated to places where it is consumed. Whether the consumer is local or remote is not that important other than that you'll incur some more losses.

Demand matching is the job of powerplants that can change their output power quickly.

> and at times that is why CA gives away electricity to AZ and pay for AZ for consuming its electricity.

That's because there simply is an excess of power in CA and shedding it to AZ is cheaper than shunting it locally.

> A tanker with LNG is much more flexible and denser form of energy than photons to electrons..

Of course it isn't. That LNG tanker needs a port and it needs a plant to convert the LNG to electricity. LNG is hamburger, electricity is steak.

> Once electrons out they need to be consumed asap!

There also exist load leveling measures using superconducting loops, these are used for windfarms whose output can change very rapidly especially when they're on the end of anemic grid infrastructure (remote location), these can be used for solar as well.

Electricity may be more flexible for domestic consumption but it's damn hard to ship electrons to Japan or Europe from the US.

That's true but we don't need to, energy markets are large enough over the distances that we can ship those electrons.

And 'damn hard' is not the same as impossible, there have been studies done on how to ship electricity from Africa to Europe.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-north-africa-...

That's not quite Japan or Europe from the US but it would be intercontinental. The biggest hurdles are political rather than technical. For the really long haul (say, US to EU) I doubt it would be economical, but as a way of leveling the day/night difference it would be an awesome way to make solar power more feasible for base load generation.

Long before that happens though we'll see windfarms in the Atlantic and in the Pacific.

But we do need to ship energy across markets over long distances. There's nothing on the horizon that is going to end that need.

Energy is still largely in the domain of geopolitics. Russia can turn off gas shipments to Europe. Qatar can be blockaded. Entire governments can veer towards collapse threatening supplies (Venezuela). Coalitions may decide to forcibly remove another nation's supplies from the market, as was the case with Iran.

That leaves international energy markets inherently inefficient and susceptible to disruption (not the SV kind). When those disruptions occur, the ability to quickly ship vast quantities of energy becomes absolutely vital.

This has been best demonstrated during periods when OPEC refused to supply certain countries because of their ties to Israel. The ability to quickly shift supplies from non-OPEC sources around the market, due to the fungibility of oil and the ease of shipment, kept the lights on across much of the world.

A fair counterpoint to this argument is the reduced dependency on energy produced by potentially hostile powers that could come about with the advent of renewables like solar and wind. However, as technology improves to allow electricity transmission across greater distances (like, say, the Mediterranean), do we really reduce dependencies on potentially hostile nations? Electricity isn't fungible if it can't be transmitted to the markets where gaps are created by geopolitics.

If, say, Tunisia decided to cut off France from a hypothetical trans-Med grid, would France be able to find enough energy from neighboring grids with excess supply? I don't know.

So long as energy decisions are inherently political, the market needs the ability to ship energy quickly and on-demand to fill gaps created by the whims of politicians and autocrats.

Finally, I'll note that the Allies won World War II in large part because of their superior ability to ship energy wherever it was needed in any theater of operations and moments when those supply chains broke down often led to significant Axis advances and prolonged the war, such as Eisenhower's difficult decision to deprive Patton of gasoline in order to keep other parts of the Allied advance moving across Europe.

> But we do need to ship energy across markets over long distances.

In the case of that LNG tanker, yes. But for electricity the majority of it is consumed relatively close to where it is generated in the case of renewables and waste as the source. There is an obvious economic incentive to transport it across larger distances if and when feasible but for now there does not appear to be a huge need for this. For natural gas and coal fired plants the distance tends to be much larger, but this goes for any fossil fuel production / consumption setup.

To your other points: it is exactly this independence of geopolitical factors that make renewable energy so attractive.

If there ever is another war in Europe (this could easily happen) I suspect that it will be fought with fossil fuels rather than electricity as the dominant power source for prime movers so in that sense not much will change.

My point is that renewables aren't independent of geopolitical factors.

Sure, but they are much less dependent on those factors than fossil fuels.

It's actually much cheaper to ship the solar / wind production than it is to send the LNG energy equivalent making this all a moot point.

However, we could cheaply ship electrons to Russia, after that it's just a question of displacement. Aka, does energy from powerplant X get sent east or west. Net result you can send elections from US to EU for vastly less than you might think.

Granted, there is no such undersea cable today and US and Russian grids are limited in those areas, but the undersea distance is not actually that far relative to other undersea projects.

> the undersea distance is not actually that far relative to other undersea projects.

Undersea HVDC lines are nothing like the undersea fiber optic cables. The problem isn't whether or not we can create a cable like that, it's the transmission losses that long-distance power lines have. Even for HVDC you're dealing with ~3.5% loss per 1000km.

Shipping electrons over the oceans is only going to be a "question of displacement" when we have superconducting lines, but right now those need to be chilled with liquid hydrogen or nitrogen along the entire length of the cable... Meaning the infrastructure and operational costs are even more than the cost of the lost electricity.

It's 51 miles from US to Russia.

On both sides there are people who use power. Now if 100,000 houses in Russia get power from the US and zero changes Russia could then supply ~100,000 houses with power outside of Russia. Now sure, you need the right substation setup to get this to work out, but a modern grid can quickly route power in response to both changing demand and internment supply.

US already sends and receives power from both Mexico and Canida, and Russia and EU have similar relationships. We don't do this with Russia because there is so little demand in those areas. But, the artic is rapidly warming so that may change fairly soon.

Those areas in Russia/US are sparsely populated and I suspect demand is not that high to justify an undersea cable. Plus there are geopolitical issues like accusing Russia of US election interference and then expecting to sell electricity to the Russians.

Yea, there are very good reasons why we don't do this now.

But, in terms of current technology it's viable even if economically/politically it's not.

Conversion would actually be quite expensive, the United States uses 60 Hz and Russia 50, so you're not just looking at a voltage step-up/down but also a frequency change and that's quite hard.

Long-distance transmission is done with DC, and converted near consumers to 50/60 Hz AC at the appropriate voltage.

Long distance power transmission is almost always done using DC power, so the phase of AC power is mostly irrelevant.

I like Iceland's solution for this. They import bauxite and export aluminum to use their geothermal electricity as a resource. Perhaps there are other electricity-intensive operations that could be used to consume surpluses?

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