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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

>It's very smart on Saudi Fund's part... They would own the worlds largest solar, battery, and EV producer. They could cover a desert in panels and sell the cars and batteries across Europe/Asia, while providing the power as well. They would once again have the largest control of the world's energy.

I'm afraid I have to shatter this dream. There is a thing called Ohm's law, and it is not taught in business schools as I know... :)

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Supposedly you went to business school then? :-)

HVDC has losses at about 3% per 1000km, from Saudi Arabia to the center of Europe is less than 5000 km as the crow flies. Doesn't seem too bad to me.

Out of curiosity, I googled current HVDC lines, and was surprised at how rapidly it has started to replace HVAC for long-distance transmission. It now strikes me that getting a line from the peninsula to europe will be more of a political effort than a technical one, which is not the conclusion I was initially expecting.

I thought the losses were nonlinear and complex? IE 10,000km is not 30% loss

Actually, you should do better than 30% loss due to the non-linearity:

    1 - 0.97**10
    => 0.2625758731050719

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