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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

What about a global power grid? Whichever side is receiving sunlight would power the other side of the Earth. We've already got communication cables running worldwide, couldn't we add cables for transmitting power? Perhaps, electric cables will weigh orders of magnitude than optic fiber comm links, but would it be infeasible?

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You can't transport power that far without massive transmission losses. Communications cables use repeaters and fiber optics, so they don't have nearly the same problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#...

Why not use superconducting cables?

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182278-the-worlds-first-...

Because they're very expensive and require liquid nitrogen cooling? Which itself represents energy consumption, so instead of losing energy as resistive losses you're spending it on cooling.

What's more likely is some form of energy-to-liquid-fuels process that runs during times and places of excess energy. The fuel can then be stored, pumped, trucked etc to other locations. This already exists, it's just not price-competitive with fossil fuels.

Cooling benefits from insulation - the energy loss does not scale as an exponential factor, and levels off very dramatically (the deep sea is already very cold).

We're trying to avoid the deep sea getting hot, remember?

What about electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen during the day?

There's also the political issues to consider. You'd have to really, really trust the other countries you're relying on for the supply of electricity not to do something to mess with your economy. I could imagine it working politically in an area like the EU[1] or between the US and Canada, but across Asia or the Middle East there's likely to be too little trust.

An example with pipelines, Russia turned off gas pipelines into Ukraine in 2009 in winter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_ga...

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4486_en.htm

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-...

Wow, that was an amazing article. I learned a lot reading it. Thanks.

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