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Comment by Moldoteck | Hacker News Reader

Elephant in the room is renewables can't provide the same security/constant power as nuclear/fusion. Even more, I'm not sure it's even possible to cover all our rising needs with renewables only in combo with batteries and hydropower, especially when accounting that not all areas are good for renewables. And there are different challenges too like space needed to provide that amount of energy+storage, managing when that equipment should be replaced and so on. I'm genuinely happy France managed to perform needed maintainance on their nuclear plants so that (in theory) they will import much less from Germany in the winter, or potentially even export and also happy they succeeded to push nuclear as net zero technology

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The sun is on 100% of the time.

The only reason that renewables can't provide us with reliable power is because of our human political problems: we can't reliably cable up the always-sunny areas of the planet to the areas where people live, because the governments in the always-sunny areas are unstable.

Well, it will also cost an estimated £16 billion, to build two high capacity electricity transmission lines from Morocco to the UK. You can build a lot of capacity locally for that price.

Or a tiny portion of a railway! Do you have a citation for that 16 billion?

It's the Xlinks project.

This is where I got the 16bn figure: <https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/sectors/energy/uk-morocco-s...>. This source says £20 billion, but half is for the cable, and the other half the solar farm and other expenses: <https://sifted.eu/articles/xlinks-morocco-uk-electricity-cab...>.

Reporting is a bit inconsistent. My point is, transmitting electricity extremely long distances has its own downsides (construction costs & power losses), even if we assume Morocco gets a fair deal out of this.

And this project is "only" 7% of UK electricity supply. What of the rest? What of other countries? Saying "export" and "import" doesn't solve all the problems of intermittency (unfortunately).

Where's always sunny 24hr/day all year around? Or how much storage do we need to cover the night use? How much will it cost to build all this + transmission cables for all this power without big energy loss?

> Where's always sunny 24hr/day all year around?

The aggregate combination of the Sahara, the Gobi, and the Great Australian desert, Arizona, the Namib, the Atacama Desert.

> How much will it cost to build all this + transmission cables for all this power without big energy loss?

For a 1Ω resistance over the entire grid, assuming it was made of aluminium, 40,000 km long, material cost is about $239 billion.

(But on this scale the number is essentially imaginary, as the real answer is "how much do governments value the opportunity cost of the other things they could get people to do other than make a factory to make aluminium").

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