Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

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> But why would you lay it to UK when you could do US, hence supply sun energy at night? My estimates was about 40% loss tho.

This is a most wonderfully HN-ish of comments.

Someone mentions a mammoth infrastructure project, that's doubtless involved many hundreds of person-years of effort to realise, and with the scale and money involved everything from the business case through to the final engineering proposals would have been reviewed, vetted, considered, analysed, checked, and audited dozens of times over.

The reactive response is - why didn't they do something totally different?

FWIW, absent any research, my responses to that question included scale (it's huge, but still a much shorter distance), they could skirt the coast, so they wouldn't have to contend with a famously deep trench in the middle of the Atlantic, they'd probably been at this for some years and the USA leadership <sic> has been famously against renewables for 4 of the last 5 years.

With a few minutes research, I now know xlinks is a British start-up - so they'd probably not be interested to just be a deal broker for renewables between Morocco and the USA. A straight-line (routing around Iberia) path according to google from Morroco to Cornwall is ~ 2350km - so if they're citing a 3800km path it looks like they're staying close to the coast (as I expected). Morroco to the USA is ~6,000km (as the sardine swims) so even a direct route path would be twice the everything.

I can't find definitive answers about power cables over ocean trenches, but it looks like the (predominantly comms) cables that go that way are tiny - several cm diameter at most - and relatively lightweight. I'd guess they're a tested tech in those environments, have lots of existing redundancy, and are (relatively) inexpensive to re-run if they break.

In contrast, these 4 x power transmission cables are 150kg / metre, and no one has any long-distance experience with them. They'll be extremely expensive and time-consuming to repair or replace, and a failure of one of them will cause protracted, huge disruptions.

Senegal to Brazil is 3kkm, Marocco to US minimum is 4700km. So difference is comparable.

Essence of the question is why move energy up when you can across..? Don't even have to go over ocean - can do continental too.

p.s. I agree I could phrased the question differently, but you didn't have to go against the rules with your response.

p.p.s. I did LCOE maths for this before, but since you're an asshole I'm not bother to look for it now.

I think the problem is this is already on the edge of what is technically possible.

To provide power to the US it would presumably be easier to take advantage of US deserts and lay cables over land rather than cross-Atlantic. This avoids security and engineering problems as well as reducing transmission loss.

Also batteries mitigate the timing delay problem. Also these are not exclusive projects can do both if there is demand.

> To provide power to the US it would presumably be easier to take advantage of US deserts and lay cables over land rather than cross-Atlantic.

This would appear to be a much easier, more robust approach, yes.

Press pieces on the project cite Morocco's minimum 10-hours of sunlight a day, and their latitude is similar to the most southern parts of the USA, and certainly (given we're talking international trade here) there are large areas of Mexico that could offer similar climate.

> ... but you didn't have to go against the rules with your response.

Do you mean this one?

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

So the answer to the question 'why are they doing what they spent so much effort working out what was the best thing to do?' is self-evident, I would have thought. A combination of market need, feasibility of technology, timing, cost, etc.

Losing much more of the product (power), to go twice the distance, to a place with a comparable geography / climate arrangement (ie. cloudy / short day in the north, access to mostly clear / consistently long days to the south) might make commercial sense, but given no one's doing it, one has to assume that it does not.

> Marocco to US minimum is 4700km. So difference is comparable.

First, where are you getting 4700km from? Playing with google maps a bit here, and the closest I can get is 5100.

Second, Morocco to UK minimum distance (by sea) is 1900km - so those numbers can definitely be compared, but they're certainly not similar.

> p.p.s. I did LCOE maths for this before, but since you're an asshole I'm not bother to look for it now.

Well okay then.

Perhaps you should share it with xlinks. It's a $21.9 billion project, but they may be able to change the route now if it makes more sense to go to a different country.

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