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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids around the globe, we can solve the load balancing problem with a very elegant and obvious solution

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Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game.

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...

> Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game

Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left. It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate internationally.

Shouldn't as in you suspect it isn't, or as in it really ought to not be?

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.

Every team thinks they are team humanity.

For some values of humanity

Doubt it, some just pretend

Some teams clearly think ”go team [our nationality/ethnicity/religion], screw everyone else”.

Even the political left (in the US, IDK about other countries) is pretty committed to the nationalist world order. Unless you mean the Marxist left, which doesn't really exist in the US.

China is big on UHV (1000kV) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

> 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

Yes, Brazil has some UHV lines. AFAIK, the US has one, Europe has a few, not only inside the EU.

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.

Europe uses them to transfer energy in states and between states. Mostly with AC but there are some DC connections.

Ultra-High Voltage seems to mean over 500kV. AC lines of this voltage in Europe are only in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/ — there's a legend if you click the button, but navy is > 500kV AC, and magenta is DC.

There's half a dozen lines over 500kV DC in operation and as many again under development and construction

I heard one of the problems is that since countries want to run the lines submerged, which is too expensive and/or challenging for other reasons (fields,...) for high voltage DC.

The ones in europe are submarine. AC has its own challenges under the sea.

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

It seems that in our country (The Netherlands) the bigger blocker is more the interconnections between local regions as opposed to transferring between larger regions such as countries. We have varying production from solar and wind. Now that means that each local connection to the main grid needs to be almost as heavy as the main grid whereas it used to be just one direction with very predictable usage.

Team humanity is too segmented at the moment. Unless the next Pan-whatever happens, it's just politically impossible.

Nationalism is often one-sided within individual countries. Their opponents have a lot in common across borders and should be more easily coordinated.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.

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...

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