Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are (mostly) mistaken. The UK mostly imports from the continent, and occasionally exports. I have never caught an instance of simultaneously importing from France and exporting to the Netherlands (or vice versa). I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it is clearly not common. The direction of flow might change over a relatively short time frame due to changes in the production of solar or wind energy. With these and other production and load changes, some apparently illogical or inefficient things might happen for short periods of time as it is the best way of handling the dynamic grid.

Also, I know nothing about the state of interconnects between France and the Netherlands. HVDC under the quite narrow English channel might well be the most efficient route.

On the contrary, at the time I wrote the original comment, and as I write this, exactly this situation was occurring. Take a look at the map and see for yourself - perhaps it is still happening when you read this.

I also specifically remember 9 years ago during my aforementioned undergraduate report obtaining spreadsheets from the UK National Grid with time segments containing the direction and amount of power transferring via each interconnect (you're going to have to take my word for it... my copy of that data is long gone). These also showed exactly what I described, power being imported and exported simultaneously.

I expect there is a reason for this, perhaps arbitrage but maybe more likely some minimum power has to flow to keep connected sensors/relays/whatever from misbehaving, or some other engineering reason.

Is it possible that the interconnects between France and the Netherlands are already at capacity, and therefore the losses from going 'via' UK are less than the energy we'd need to expend to bolster that capacity?

Possibly, but that seems unlikely to me; I expect there are already loads of interconnects just via normal pylons (but I don't actually know).

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