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Comment by mayama | Hacker News Reader

One option I don't see brought up often, in addition to battery, is HVDC. Transmission loss for 1000km on HVDC is 4% according to wiki.

Continent wide grids could be created connected Europe, Asia and Africa. Storage requirements could be lowered with HVDC grid interconnect. India's One Sun One grid plan is to build a Asia Africa hvdc grid.

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This is being studied in the US, there is some detail about it in this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/how-tru...

The Pacific DC Intertie supplies power to Los Angeles from hydro dams in the PNW over HVDC lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

That's really cool, I didn't know India was doing that. I found this article a few years ago about a so-called "supergrid" that would produce a similar network across the globe.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build...

Yep.

If the people who run wild wonderful off grid (great channel) have taught me anything, it's that battery backup is essential.

How viable would that be in terms of maintenance? I presume it'd have to have a lot of failsafes or personnel that's assigned to some of the distant or at-risk grid sections, to keep things running smoothly and do repairs fast if something gets damaged.

That gets at an interesting point that if one country depends on energy from a far distant country for part of the day, then the defense of those power lines has immense geopolitical significance; similar to oil and gas pipelines.

Maybe the solution is to keep a lot of dirty petroleum or coal-based generation capacity around to use in an emergency or war, but don't actually use it.

As usual, there's a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.

With HVDC, would you be able to take advantage of the occasional solar storm?

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