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Comment by CompelTechnic | Hacker News Reader

One weird thought I had the other day: high voltage DC transmission lines are getting more popular. I wonder if it would be economical for a high voltage DC line to form a loop around the entire planet, so that the load can follow the sun through a complete cycle.

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This has terrifying geopolitical implications, so probably no-one will want to depend on it anytime soon.

It's no different than data links, which have mostly worked without political interference.

In general, your data does not have value to me to steal it. Not so with power.

Data has plenty of value, and is often copied without authorization, but putting that aside, nobody would be stealing anyone's power. It gets produced in one region, used locally, and excess sold to the next region, where the same thing repeats. You already paid for the power entering your region so you can't steal it and you'll sell it on if it makes sense to do so. This is already how gas pipelines work for example. It's shit with gas because the flow is one way and shutting off the gas is often done for political reasons but with solar you'd have your own production ramping up a few hours later if the neighboring region either shuts it off or uses a higher percentage of what they produced. Either way the metering happens at regional boundaries so there's no stealing involved - both sides of the meter need to be in agreement before any power flows.

> Either way the metering happens at regional boundaries so there's no stealing involved - both sides of the meter need to be in agreement before any power flows.

Play that out a bit. Suppose you have a 500MW or 1000MW transmission line. It normally has a 1% loss. Today, you notice that it has 1.25% loss. Maybe someone's stealing power. What do you do? Shut off the transmission line entirely?

At the demarcation points is where power is measured. If you have losses you can tell which side they are on, and then that side can decide whether they are worth investigating or not.

They really haven't.

If only a different species had reached our level of intelligence first... This would be a cool solution.

In the US alone this would greatly aid a transition to wind and solar:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/better-power-lines-wo...

>In the US alone this would greatly aid a transition to wind and solar:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/better-power-lines-wo...

For all the talk about inventing new batteries, I wish improving the existing grid would be more prominent in the conversation. High-voltage longer-distance power markets are something that can be built right now.

Loss is still an issue

If the loss is less than about 75% in the worst case (i.e. 100 watts of generated electricity supplying 25 watts to the consumer), the benefits of optimal panel location combined with the lower cost of solar makes it better than or equivalent to current baseload power supplies like nuclear.

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