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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Having some cheap long-term energy storage option is one way to solve that problem, but another is better power grid interconnection. For instance, Chicago could get solar power from Chile in the winter time to buffer out the seasonal variability. Or if they didn't even want to have to maintain a smaller buffer to deal with day/night cycles, they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day.

Power losses would be significant, but probably not all that worse than doing local electricity-to-hydrogen-to-electricity.

To quote wikipedia on HVDC lines:

> Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

An infrastructure project like that would probably be hugely expensive, but so is manufacturing lots of batteries or doing large scale hydrogen production and storage.

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"they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day."

This is basically a proposal to power all of Americas at night using solar deployment in Australia? This is far outside the realm of technical and infrastructural feasability.

What about reliability? UK power connection to france has burned down a few months ago and it will take 2 years to fix, and it only moves like 2 GW

I would have thought so too, but there was a story awhile back about China working out a deal with Chile to import solar power from Chile via a trans-Pacific cable. Maybe it's just hype and nothing will actually come of it, but someone at least seems to think it's plausible.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...

Probably the way to handle reliability is to keep some of the fossil fuel plants in operational condition just in case. If everything is working properly they don't have to ever be used, but countries aren't under continual threat that their energy supply is going to be cut because someone damaged the cable (accidentally or deliberately).

How would you factor in Geo-political risks to this approach? Seems like we're trading dependency on oil producing countries with a dependency on "sunny and windy" countries. Arguably worse unless the grid is connected like a mesh. Quick google shows that 61% of oil is transported by sea.

Non-mesh power-grid interconnection is the equivalent of an oil pipeline with the geo-political downsides associated with it. Though maybe the dependency would at least be bi-directional in some instances.

I think the right way to mitigate the risk is to keep many/most of the fossil fuel plants around so that they can be brought online in an emergency (i.e. someone destroys a cable), but otherwise don't use them.

> Having some cheap long-term energy storage option is one way to solve that problem, but another is better power grid interconnection.

Nope, we tried this in Europe and you end up with a free rider problem where nobody but us invested sufficiently in renewables and decided to buy most of their gas from Russia instead, which led to them driving our electricity prices through the roof when the rug got pulled from under them by the war even though we did all the right things. It was clearly a mistake that we deregulated and connected to the European market and now everyone knows this with certainty.

The US already struggles to build transmission lines across state lines. Building across nations is basically impossible.

It's happening, though, so it's not impossible.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israel-cyprus...

There's a big gap between securing funding and actually completing large infrastructure projects. We have a bunch of cancelled nuclear power plants halfway through construction from NIMBYism, cost overruns, office changes, etc.

Except it happens all the time. Canada exports Gwh to the US every year. Laos is a big exporter too (mainly to Thailand I think), Paraguay to Brazil, and obviously around europe.

Sure there are some US-Canada connections but those take years/decades if they ever get approved

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/maine-voters-reject-q...

The other places are more authoritarian and don't need to deal with NIMBYism

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