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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

> How exactly do you propose to get that electricity from the desert to say Finland?

High voltage DC transmission works fine for this problem. All of the engineering challenges have been credibly worked out and priced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec). The main problems with this approach are political, in that it requires massive cooperation between many countries over very long time scales (decades).

Why is there a security risk with putting solar in the desert? It seems like a relatively easy to secure location, and solar cells are hardly high value-density targets for theft or vandalism.

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So you think northern African nations are going to let European nations station troops there and take over a big chunk of their land? That doesn't seem realistic, and seems rather imperialistic actually.

Letting the northern African nations provide the security is just plain folly, and also makes Europe completely dependent on these economically backwards and frequently hostile nations.

Why wouldn't an African nation want to charge rent to some European country for vast amounts of land that are otherwise literally worthless[1]? It's not like they're strangers to private company security forces that are basically just extrajudicial mercenaries. History says any company that wants to do this just needs to apply some bribes to the appropriate officials.

[1] In the sense that nobody is willing to buy it so it has no price.

Yeah, I'm sure it'll look just great that Germany or whoever is stationing the Wehrmacht in northern Africa, and no one will complain about that... /s

You really think that's a viable way to maintain the electric power supply for all of Europe? "What could possibly go wrong?!"

It won't be uniformed European troops. It will be Blackwater type mercenaries. They'll have an implicit license to kill and/or abuse any locals. That's how you do security for European companies in Africa.

You really think you should put the entire welfare and existence of the European continent in the favor of some hired Blackwater mercenaries? Are you f'in serious?

Yes, destabilized countries always act rationally on the global market. /s

The danger is political risk, not necessarily theft or vandalism. Any dependency on territory not under your own societal control can be used to hold you hostage and cannot be depended upon.

Forget the solar farm, easiest is to cut power lines. (explosives?)

Europe imports around 30% of its oil and gas from Russia. The pipelines between the east and west were originally setup during Soviet times.

Given how stable that has been it seems unlikely that a small African country, who will be getting a big chunk of cash from Europe, would do anything stupid.

They haven't been perfectly stable, though. We've seen since 2005 a few cases of oil and gas prices surging upwards as part of the Russia-Ukraine dispute (in 2005, 80% of all gas from Russia to the EU went through Ukraine).

Europe is currently highly dependent on Russia's natural gas for their electricity; I don't see this as worse. Indeed, better to diversify your power imports.

(Better still to generate locally, but not every country has the land available to do so).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...

So we resolve all regional conflicts and unify the world under one country. It's not hard.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. The Chinese are actively researching in the area of ultra high voltage DC transmission so that power can be distributed long distances from remote renewable resources. Even if the problem were as simple as a direct link from the Sahara to Finland, China has already built UHVDC transmission lines half that length. UHVDC technology is only improving with time and it's an exciting field to watch.

The economist had a reasonable article, though light on technical detail: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2171432...

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