3,800-km cable offers glimpse of a global power grid | Hacker News Reader

3,800-km cable offers glimpse of a global power grid

spectrum.ieee.org

27 pointsthunderbong10 comments

Isn’t is simpler to pump the energy into a market pool connecting Morocco to the Iberian peninsula and connecting Britain to mainland Europe through the tunnel with France?

Creating a cable to power a place thousands of km away seems rather inefficient compared to connecting the power stations to a grid of cables which already exists.

The Chunnel has nothing to do with power from France to Britain. Power cables are laid separately on the sea floor. They don't need, and have no place, in transport tunnel.

I also think it would better to use existing grids, but it may be easier to run direct cable than get all the pieces upgraded.

There is already quite a bit of long-distance industrial low-loss powerlines, some way older than most think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:HVDC_transmission_lin...

Recent and pertinent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAPEI

I wonder if the higher likelyhood of a 'hostile nation’ breaking the link is more of an issue now and makes the project less likely, protecting a 3800 km undersea cable is presumably impossible.

Globally there are other issues:

    The idea of intercontinental renewable energy is not limited to Europe. On the other side of the world, a company called SunCable has charted a path for an 4,300-km-long undersea cable that would deliver solar power from Australia’s Northern Territory to Singapore, dodging the islands of Indonesia along the way.

    SunCable’s experience has been rocky; the company entered and exited administration this year over a dispute between its financial backers.

This is back on again, apparently*, but Risk is a big factor - SunCable want to cross multiple fault lines through a notorious volcanic zone which introduces the "backup in event of failure" issues and magnifies the problem of single cable dependance.

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-05/tas-sun-cable-bell-ba...

I don’t think the idea is viable without a huge multinational simultaneous effort to build enough of it for there to be a lot of redundancy, and then an equally deep commitment to mutual defense of the infrastructure.

Not going to happen in today’s decoupling world. Batteries are a better investment.

I wonder how many gigawatts / terawatts a cable would need to carry before you can fit gunship patrols into the budget.

Also true for uranium, oil...

If it is going to be buried 700m under the sea floor, then it won’t get accidentally severed by ships anchors, at least.

Was Nord Stream buried?

> Was Nord Stream buried?

No, and neither is XLinks - the cable will be layed in sea upto 700M deep not 700M below the sea floor as the article stated.

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