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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.

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Great point, you might dream of long range connections sending solar energy from the day into the night around the world.

But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?

That they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily.

This is a nice text on the underwater version:

https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...

If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred. We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.

You missed the point entirely. If you can distribute the energy you don't need the storage and the storage is the problem right now.

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