Global energy grid?
The sun is always shining somewhere but this does doesn't sound feasible simply due to geo-political and infrastructure reasons.
Have any serious plans been put forward for this idea?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7079+MWh+%2F+265Wh%2Fk...
It's energy intensive, and uneconomic - which is why people are stringing HVDC links across bodies of water - Denmark/Sweden, Australia/Tasmania, NZ North/South Islands instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
Converting it back-and-forth to electricity isn't easy nor very efficient, though. Hydrogen is a bit easier, although still lossy. I'd say it's doable, and not as bad as it sounds, if you really have excess production.
inb4 compressed air supertankers.
That said, it will in most cases be less expensive to use it as close to the originating point as possible if you can find a need for it.
Not to mention global annual battery production amounts to less than 1 hour of the USA's national electricity usage.
(I would be surprised if this was viable even with my suggested measure, no argument there!)
I absolutely accept that this is a poor solution, and that I am quibbling over a factor of perhaps 500 at most when it’s short by a factor of ~250,000.
But what about electrifying a small collection of households by batteries that are replaced from a truck every N weeks, instead of building many miles of power lines through (perhaps flammable) wilderness?
Unless there are massive improvements in superconductive materials, of course.
If saharan electricity is the cheapest then nobody else can compete in hydrogen production.
The point of a global energy grid would be that there's always sun and wind somewhere on the planet and you would smooth out time-of-day differences in usage. The point is NOT to outsource your country's entire electricity production.
Ah yes, because the other countries will magically have the spare capacity (both in terms of generation and transmission)?
We already see this play out in Europe: nobody there wants to do anything about russia because they control the natural gas supply.
>The point is NOT to outsource your country's entire electricity production.
Maybe, but the effects are the same. If you can't produce enough electricity to make it through the night, that puts you in very vulurable position. Even if it doesn't completely shut down the country, it might cause enough unrest to topple the current administration (eg. if they're only leading in the polls by a few percentage points and there's an election in a few months).
I believe simongr3dal’s argument is the invisible hand of the free market, not magic.
Optimistically, solar resources are more evenly distributed than oil and gas, so no country can act like Russia; pessimistically, Russia isn’t the first country to exert influence by threatening to cease supply of its resources, and it won’t be the last; the optimistic response to which is that there are many ways to solve seasonal issues, for example the UK (personal familiarity, no other reason for this example) could plan 18-hours local storage and enough local production for winter rather than summer.