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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

By very regularly, you mean ‘regularly tarpitted for a long time anytime there are a decent number of people near the work’? Bridge widening work on 101 has been delayed for decades by this in the Bay Area, CalTrain electrification was delayed by over a decade, etc. etc.

Most utility corridors are in the middle of nowhere and already established (and people stay away because of this), so reusing an existing corridor is relatively easy - unless it widens into someone’s yard. Then it’s a matter of how much money that person has.

For connecting previously not connected areas with a new line, especially if it goes through somewhere folks are living? Be prepared for the actual work making whatever you are doing to be a tiny tiny percentage of the time and costs involved.

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In most of the rest of the country we manage to build new roads and new transmission lines without the extreme issues you're describing. Over the last few years, I can think of hundreds of homes and businesses near me that were moved to widen existing roads or build new ones. A few people/businesses tried to fight it, they all lost quickly.

You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.

Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.

Or some random place in Ohio for that matter.

The regulatory hell that cities and states wealthy enough to afford it impose on themselves is not representative of the entire country.

Take a look at the map of existing and planned HVDC links and tell me again how this doesn’t apply? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current]

Europe is at least as regulation heavy as California.

I don’t think that map is either evidence in favour or against your position: HVDC has minimal impact, yes, but partly because you can bury the cables more easily, and buried cables are still more expensive.

HVDC is (I think) the only thing that can be used for underwater connections, so it’s used where the price makes sense. If the question is regulation we should also see all proposed and recent AC lines in Europe.

(Edited for clarity)

It is dramatically more expensive running HVDC under water than above ground, as the cables need to be incredibly tough even compared to buried land cables. I ran across a price quote that seemed like 10x the cost per km installed. If you can do suspended overhead cables, even cheaper. HVDC has pros/cons around the inversion/rectification on either end.

Yet essentially all planned or existing HVDC lines (at least ones notable enough for the map), are undersea cables.

Why would that be?

There are definitely undersea HVAC interconnects - https://www.nkt.com/products-solutions/high-voltage-cable-so...

They seem non-notable enough I had a hard time finding a good combined list anywhere.

I ran across plenty of references to HVAC being used for offshore wind turbines and the like too.

And they were the default standard (and still are for shorter runs and where the grid frequency matches). There are AC solutions for lack of grid frequency matching and the like.

I can’t find a list or easy map for major new on land grid connections - if you can find one, that would be great. Might be national security concerns or something?

Huh, TIL. I got the impression AC underwater was too high loss to bother with.

AC has a capacitance/inductance issue in any sort of run where it is surrounded by metal or metallic elements. Usually the runs are short enough and inconsistent enough it doesn’t matter. Metal shielding (required for undersea and most underground) and certain types of soils are pretty much terrible. That said, for ‘short’ runs of less than a couple hundred km, the cost of the HVDC inverter/rectifier drowns out the losses most of the time, so AC still wins most of the time. Sometimes there are still niceties around HVDC (like easier load management) that can still tip the scales.

If it’s a 1000km single run, the math is definitely different, but there aren’t a lot of those. If there are transformers, taps, generators, or other live equipment in the middle, those also change the equation, and in a grid environment, there are a ton of those.

Maybe because they can be implemented with only one pole/conductor for the underwater part. AFAIUI two poles go to the shore, where one pole ends in a metal-mesh underwater, using the salty sea as conductor until the remaining single cable reaches the other shore, where another underwater metal-mesh exists, and from that emerges the remaining piece of dual pole HVDC overland.

I know of at least one such solution between Germany and Sweden trough the Baltic Sea.

edit: This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable

It’s even easier to do that on land by the way. You’d use large Earth grounds, which also don’t corrode as badly as grounds in saltwater. And running it on land (minus permitting, right of way, etc) is dramatically cheaper as the cable itself also doesn’t need to be as sturdy.

I found this neat paper on HVDC grounds and interconnects too [http://b-dig.iie.org.mx/BibDig2/P13-0399/files/PESGM2013-001...]

The point is that right of ways and permits are super hard on land, which is why most of these are run via the sea.

Skimmed the 5 pages and saved to Tsundoku-stack.

One thing to consider here too, as I think we might be talking about two different types of situations.

Even in the US (which is very low density compared to most places), most people live in cities or denser suburban areas (80.7%). 97% of all land Area in the US however is Rural.

So you are right in that this is not a problem in most of the US (by land area), and this isn’t a problem in elections in those areas either - it won’t negatively impact enough individuals, and problem cases can often be routed around, because the pop density is low.

However, this IS also a problem for most of the US (by populations), as this directly impacts costs and infrastructure upgrades for the majority of the population in the US.

Europe is even denser, and some locations have just as bad if not worse regulatory environments, so it’s the same factors at play. Some countries in Europe excepted of course.

Not in Germany. We are great NIMBYs, elect greens and have the nicest Gartenzwergs.

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