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Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

Hopelessly naive, I know, but shouldn't there be a global grid to optimally distribute electricity from solar irradiation rather than laying idiotic lengths of cable for political reasons?

You want to connect the Pacific rim for that grid to work but I can easily imagine some intermediate "links" that seem to make more sense

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Current gang in Canberra/Washington would never do a joint infrastructure project with Beijing, so that Chile might as well go directly there.

If they can agree on carbon emissions, they could probably agree on some coordinated infrastructure. (It doesn't actually have to be common, rather coordinated.)

I am sure if politically unencumbered engineers were to sit down they would come up with more or less the same topology...

For sure. But PRC is the undisputed king of large scale infrastructure development in the 21st century, so that would be tantamount to Washington taking a back seat in a Beijing-driven project. Totally unacceptable optics.

There isn't even a nation-wide electrical grid in the USA. Having a global grid is a futuristic pipe dream.

Not a pipe dream because it is futuristic, but because it is geopolitical.

> Having a global grid is a futuristic pipe dream.

It's more like a series of tubes.

If we condition on people taking the energy transition seriously the past might not be a good predictor of the future. But whether there will be a strong pull towards "optimality" might depend on what is the total cost of sub-optimal alternatives. I would think that a well distributed grid would also minimize (beside losses) also storage costs and would also have various other redundancy benefits...

The US doesn't have a nationwide grid because of the technical requirement to use AC back when electrification happened (which requires phase matching or DC intertie between subregions), and because of the politics of who regulates the grid (which is why Texas still has its own grid.)

The AC requirement is a legacy historical issue; a nationwide DC grid could be built in the US tomorrow if the political issues could be solved (and if it made economic sense to rip out the legacy AC infrastructure, which it doesn't.)

It would seem to be more useful to connect more than just Chile and China (greater diversity of buyers and sellers of electricity), but maybe if China plans to consume the entirety of the cable's capacity, maybe a single point-to-point link actually does make the most sense in this case.

On the other hand, it's possible the cable will be under-utilized for half the day: when it's night time in Chile, they could buy power back from China, but will China have enough surplus? And is there enough demand in Chile (or its neighbors) to buy that much power?

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