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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

China is way ahead in long distance power transmission.[1] Some of the ultra-high voltage DC technology comes from ABB, so it's available from non-China sources. This isn't technically that hard. It's a land acquisition problem where some little landowner on the route can block the project.

Maybe forget trying to get to Texas and go east to Illinois, and feed Chicago and points east.

[1] https://new.abb.com/news/detail/10464/abb-enables-worlds-fir...

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"No" isn't necessarily an answer. In the UK for example the law creates "Necessary Wayleaves" which basically say well, society decided we need electricity, and the power transmission company says it needs to put something here to achieve that, so tough, now your freehold has a Wayleave on it that you can't remove saying they can have access and put things on your land. You get paid compensation automatically, but you don't get to say "No".

You can go to tribunal (like a court) but "Too bad, now nobody gets any electricity" isn't one of the options they have, so unless you're going to show that they had another better route open to them the tribunal will just rule against you.

It is similar in Germany. Probably just a necessity if you have high population density and want to get anything done.

But then there are in some cases whole municipalities or larger units of administration (usually driven by citizens) against new power lines, and they can prevent them... and that is a current problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

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