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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

Really thrilled to see my country (Nigeria) proposing a sub-Saharan electrical grid…when the mofos in charge can’t even supply stable electricity in their country yet.

This project will not succeed due to corruption and incompetence…you can trust Africans on that.

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Wait. Those aren’t as mutually exclusive as you make it out to be.

Bigger grids are more resilient than smaller ones, not the other way around. California and Texas have fairly isolated grids for roughly the same amount of people. Compared to the Midwest or the Northeast or Southeast, larger population areas, their grids fare far worse despite having on average better weather.

Nigeria has 200 million people, which is an order of magnitude larger than Texas. I don’t think serving a slightly bigger population is going to help their situation.

More people, but significantly less users, and less intensive users. People in nigeria largely aren't charging electric cars, running laundry dryers, or have much industry that requires as much electricity as the industry in california and texas. In fact, I would guess that the electrical power consumption in Nigeria would be far less than either state, and the overall number of people wouldn't be as big of an impact. Any major infrastructure investments now would pay huge dividends to the people in the future. You don't plant trees because you need shade today, you plant trees because you need shade in 20 years, and that's what I think the goal is here, to prepare africa for a major technological and per capita consumption leap in the next two decades. If they start building today, with many partner countries, it'll prepare the region to succeed better.

Some rudimentary Google research on my end shows the Texas power grid serving about 10x as much power as the Nigeria power grid.

California is part of the WECC, it is not isolated at all.

The Southwest region is certainly geographically isolated; however California is doing its best to fight that with connections such as with the PNW, but those are long distance and California is still susceptible to power outages from a few weak links .

“California currently has 18,170MW (18.2 GW) of interconnections to neighboring states in the Western Interconnection, equivalent to approximately one-third of its annual peak electricity demand.“

In my view, 33% of annual peak is not weakly interconnected. Granted that number is from 2003.

I work on hydro electric plant control systems not transmission planning so I can’t say what industry insiders would call weakly interconnected, but on the systems I have worked on one or two ties is weakly interconnected and dozens is not.

https://www.electricpowergroup.com/Downloads/pFinalCAElecGen...

Bigger grids might be more resilient, but that doesn't really help all that much when dealing with sabotage like in South Africa. When you have people deliberately destroying infrastructure to get contracts for fixing it, it becomes difficult.

China is involved; it's a "do ut des" scenario in which China gets resources and Africa gets low cost energy. That's the reason I'm sure it will work, and it's one of the chances the West royally missed there. Now it's all up to China, Russia and possibly Turkey.

> "do ut des"

For those interested, this is Latin for "I give, so that you may give [presumably in the future]".

More on topic, for the project to succeed the Chinese would need to be left in charge of operating the grid, which is likely to run into political difficulties. Building it isn't enough.

> For those interested, this is Latin for "I give, so that you may give [presumably in the future]".

Yes, apologies for not specifying it. About the topic, I guess that the chances to obtain cheap energy, which would be vital for further industrial development in the areas involved, could convince local leaders to not mess with the projects, also with the perspective of cashing in public political support when time comes.

> I guess that the chances to obtain cheap energy, which would be vital for further industrial development in the areas involved, could convince local leaders to not mess with the projects, also with the perspective of cashing in public political support when time comes.

That approach hasn't worked out for other African infrastructure, including already existing infrastructure. And one of the biggest ways to build political support is to promise to confiscate what non-Africans have. "Expropriation without compensation" is a major political slogan in South Africa. Things are similar elsewhere.

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