To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
economist.com
economist.com
As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the system.
It’s been in vogue to hype up technical solutions (“more compute,” “yeah but when it gets better…” “we just need a few more years on this”) to all of these problems that deserve to be solved in the socio-political sphere. It’s often more effective to restructure a given systems’ relationships than to hope for magical boosts here and there.
Like most things in nature you probably get the most out of "progress" (kind of a slippery word in itself) through some type of equilibrium rather than an absolute everyone must work together.
I think this is backwards thinking.
Progress is meant to serve humans, humans are not meant to serve progress
People should not be expected to give up their identities, nations, freedom, or really anything else in service of progress
A good example is car-dependency. Designing land use around car-dependency has a lot of rather painful externalities. Capitalism doesn't account for those externalities, and so decisions are made that are a net-negative (suburban sprawl, urban freeways, etc). These degrade everyone's quality of life & degrade the environment, but are optimal from a capitalist perspective (they enrich the individual decision maker).
The externalities associated with driving are probably -1 utility points for me whereas driving is +20 or even more.
I think that basically what you are saying only makes sense if society includes a bunch of people who do not benefit, when in reality that’s usually a fairly small group (e.g. in the US or UK the small number of homeless).
To take your example, if you have a society of 30 people, each of whom drives, and gains +20 utility for driving, but -1 for each other car on the road, you get a net utility of -9 per person. But if any individual decides not to drive, their utility drops to -29, even as they provide a total benefit of +29 utility to everyone else by choosing not to drive.
It's obviously a lot more complicated than that. You have local externalities (noise, particulate pollution, health issues due to a more sedentary lifestyle, deaths and injuries due to accidents) and global ones (GHG emissions). Using public transport also subjects people to some negative externalities, if crime isn't controlled enough, or if people are noise. And you don't want a place that makes driving hard, but also has crappy public transit -- though usually, crappy public transit is a symptom of car-centric design, in my opinion.
But I think on balance, places where driving is discouraged in favor of other modes of transport are better off, and especially, a world where private automobiles are rarely used is better than a world where most everyone drives everywhere.
- Living in an urban space is a huge negative. - Living in a suburban space is a mild negative. - Living in low-density suburbs is a huge positive. - Driving an electric car is a positive. - Driving an ICE car is a negative. - Riding a bicycle or walking is a positive if my knees aren't acting up. It's a negative if they are.
A more nuanced description of positive and negative externalities would give a fuller picture, but that's a basic assessment of my values.
I think you'll find the same for other examples of externalities. Corporate air and water pollution is a positive for a company (i.e., a company that disposes of waste cheaply). For people in surrounding areas, it's a huge negative. Different values for different populations
https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/ — there's a legend if you click the button, but navy is > 500kV AC, and magenta is DC.
This one for example at 600kV and 2.2GW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link
There are of course issues with all undersea cables (AC or DC) in today's climate with cable cuts being so frequent. I wonder if it's easier to locate AC cables
If there was team humanity - and we weren't still focused on "us" vs "them" and throwing feces at each other across imaginary geographical, religious and race borders - I'm confident we could solve the climate problem completely in 5-10 years. Not to mention what else (famine, diseases...), with motivation other than short-term profit...
Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left. It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate internationally.
In either case, while a "sociological vacuum decay" into a more efficient mode of human collaboration seems at least theoretically possible (we've had some of these in the past: The invention of money, laws, nation states, organized religions, and other practically useful human fictions), if nobody can find a way to precipitate it, it remains just as unachievable as something even theoretically impossible.
There's some educational videos on YouTube on High Voltage DC.
https://youtu.be/JH9-0AbR_1U?si=l57nkFt2YG5iLl3D
North and South America could sell a lot of electricity to the east this way...
> In 2015, State Grid Corporation of China proposed the Global Energy Interconnection, a long-term proposal to develop globally integrated smart grids and ultra high voltage transmission networks to connect over 80 countries.[10]: 92–93 The idea is supported by President Xi Jinping and China in attempting to develop support in various internal forums, including UN bodies.[10]: 92
Long distance power grids are only useful if you have huge generators localized away from the power consumers. So, mostly places with hydroelectric generators have them. It was never a matter of "maturity" or politics.
Connecting grids could significantly increase the fragility of the system resulting in higher risk of large-scale power outages. Some of you might have experienced the 2003 blackout in northeast North American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), which luckily happened in the summer. Tail risks should not be swept under the rug.
Even a single widespread event could completely wipe out the benefit gained from connecting grids.
In computing think about, for example, centralizing identity management in the hands of a few large companies. These companies have large security teams and mature well built infrastructures, but a huge failure or a huge security compromise of, say, Google’s OIDC system, could be utterly catastrophic, paralyzing and destroying vast swaths of our digital infrastructure. Entire companies, services, or even sectors would be paralyzed or worse.
Small, decentralized, and diverse is overall more costly and experiences many smaller failures but is more robust for the long haul.
This is probably why life, having evolved over a billion years, is mostly this way. Giant super organisms and super-optimized monocultures are possible but fragile.
Our economies, having only existed for hundreds of years and being incentivized to only care about next quarter, tend to go all in on anything that makes numbers superficially better.
It does seem sensible to beef up resilience on large interconnects though agreed to mitigate cascading risk.
Quote: Summary of Thursday’s Electricity Prices:
Electricity areas 3 & 4 (Southern Sweden): SEK 2.5-3.6 average price per kWh, peak at SEK 8.
Electricity areas 1 & 2 (Northern Sweden): 17 öre and 9 öre per kWh, respectively.
[source| https://www.timber.exchange/news/details/in-depth/electricit....]
Denmark is trying to do to Norway what Germany has done do the Swedish in that respect. I fully understand that the Norwegians want to cut the cable to the south.
For any energy to be truly green, it must also be pragmatic. It's not green energy if it's so expensive ordinary households cannot afford to use it.
Id like to see you rejoice if your electricity bill went from 0.4kr to 8kr per kwH because your neightbour countries' "awesome green energy supply" fails to support its citizens needs.
This is not a constant occurrence fortunately but happens enough to anger the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.
They are already quadrupling the electricity cost with a myriad of taxes ( green, state, maintenance, municipality, what have you ) so this price hike due to failed windmills and lack of daylight at the neighbours' makes them look incompetent.
Sweden and Norway does not want to lower the taxes to leverage energy bills for the average tax payer because Germany and Denmark cannot get ther sh!t together, that's for sure.
With a worldwide grid we could make one a hundred times larger.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Using HVDC (which is more efficient over long distances anyway), adjacent grids basically appear as just another power plant to yours (and some early HVDC connections literally consisted of a motor coupled to a generator!), and grids ought to be able to stomach the sudden outage of one.
At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas where you had to win the lottery of location or game of Thrones of imperialism.
No, it sounds like a problem of a belligerent super power next door.
Then you can think about deploying solar on a massive scale to parts of the Sahara.
tl;dr this is already proposed
https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-a-power-grid-to-span-t...
archive.ph link: https://archive.ph/dM2oM
We have have far more recent examples of the former rather than your hypothetical musings.
IMO the novel challenges are:
(1) too many borders with too many opportunities for corruption
(2) Coronal mass ejections become an even bigger issue than already (impact goes from regional to global)
(3) Literally only China is making enough aluminium for this, and nobody's making enough copper or superconductor
Quick google says it should be feasible. London to DC is about 5k km. Longest UHV DC seems to be just over 3k built in 2018 (over land) so maybe?
One day solar energy will be shifted from Portugal to Shanghai & Moscow then across the Bering Strait to Alaska & New York.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to access http://geni.org for more details, but here's the Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Energy_Network_Institut...
Of course, The Economist isn't worried about that, they really only care about how they can make money from it.
But for a technologist, there's always that messy real world to deal with. And for solar power, that reality is night. A world wide power grid could be constantly transmitting power to the dark side.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-use-n...
VS, distributed solar, wind, water, geothermal, power that serves local grids, just fine. Battery storage will get much cheaper, and the generating equipment is only getting more efficient and cheaper. The world grid will have to wait until we have some kind of fusion power and a super conducting grid, where power is in fact too cheap to meter and has demonstrably less impact than any other source.
There are already plans to connect North America and Europe with an undersea power cable.
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/worlds-most-ambitious-subsea...
If you want 1Ω then by coincidence a 40,000 km cable has a cross section of almost exactly one square meter. If you're putting a significant fraction of global power through that at any sane voltage, you can't use most cutting tools (or indeed electrical motors) near it because the magnetic field is too strong.
China is making enough aluminium that this is a plausible thing they may do as a "belt and road" type project.
Money! There is a huge risk in even starting a full engineering study, due to the very real possibilty of another technology bieng adopted and implimented first.
I would be surprised if the very slow shift to Earth's poles has any impact, but yes, that too, even if only to rule it out.
Temperature, however, isn't one of those questions. Deep water has a near-constant temperature, and even if it didn't, solving for this is already well-studied for continuously welded railways.
Likewise, because it's underwater, we can make them in neutrally buoyant sections. Could even make them as two parallel and closely-spaced tracks, so it can built as an underwater railway that delivers its own power and transport during its own construction.
> due to the very real possibilty of another technology bieng adopted and implimented first.
Not hugely likely, IMO.
Long term I can see an argument for doing this as an orbital ring — basically the same idea but make it about π*200km longer so it can be 100km above ground everywhere, spin it so fast it's slightly above orbital speed, magnetically levitate hoops around it that are tethered to the ground and transmit power.
Buuuuut orbital rings are only at technology readiness level 2, so nowhere near ready to consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
(For example, an orbital ring has to be build by thickening rather than lengthening to be affordable: it was conceived as a non-rocket launch mechanism, and bootstrapping it by having a thin version lift the material for making it thicker and stronger was a big part of the pricing when it was originally conceived).
Whereas a big fat metal wire is at the level of "do sufficient geological and biological surveys to make sure there's an actual route, and accept that the answer may in fact be 'no'" — we *definitely* know how to build a big fat wire (or many smaller wires). We just don't know if we *should*.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/hxnyf0/w...
Eyeballing it, the cable I'm suggesting has a metal part about four times that anchor's cross section, let alone the chain's cross section. Even if it was bare metal (in the ocean, which would be madness all by itself), the anchor or the chain would break well before the power cable.
With a moderate layer of, say, concrete, that anchor wouldn't even be able to hook onto the cable as the arms don't go out far enough.
> Norwegians are forgetting that domestically produced power is not always cheaper. Whenever the current in the cables flows towards them, it helps reduce high prices.
Norway could add some diodes to the cables so that it only imports and does not export.
> And even though Norway exports more power than it imports, that is fantastic for domestic energy producers. Norway’s state-owned power firms have been raking it in, which is one of the reasons the government can afford to subsidise household prices.
Wholesale prices would plummet if this energy had nowhere to go. Getting wholesale prices down seems to be the goal here, so why not keep the energy trapped and let the wholesale prices drop? If they wholesale prices drop, you would expect that to help pay for lower household prices.
These are not my actual views. I just feel that the articles' author did not address these points, so I decided to raise them here.
Does norway really transfer power via DC? that can't be true can it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
HVDC for long distance power sharing makes sense since it is generally more efficient than HVAC. On land, HVDC is more efficient beyond ~500km, but underwater, HVDC is more efficient beyond ~50km:
https://www.electricaldeck.com/2021/08/comparison-between-hv...
Beyond the efficiency benefit, HVDC easily handles transfer of power between grids operating at different frequencies. There are also several other benefits documented at that second link.
Usually when these win-wins go wrong they have the gains filtered off by a middleman or monopolist but in this case it seems the government uses the money earned to subsidize household bills which means they do get the benefit of trade.
Stopping the trade therefore means higher prices for domestic consumers. This is the basic point the article makes repeatedly.
I should stress that I am only saying this because I find the omission curious. I do not have any opinion either way at this time.
What country A wants to do is totally different that country B wants.
Some western countries are freezing as they are investing hard in solar/wind plants, while China makes ton of carbon plants.