It’s starting to become increasingly common - there’s a project in the offing to run a cable from Morocco to the UK to take advantage of all that Saharan sunshine. There’s long been talk of stringing a few across the Med and building large numbers of solar farms across North Africa to speed up the green transition in Europe (at one point there was talk of worried insurance companies bankrolling such projects as climate change could bankrupt them). Eventually there will be a web of such cables into and across Europe shuttling energy around - excess British being stored in Norwegian HEP facilities, etc.
Transmission over long distances is much harder with power since you have to send it through cables that have some resistance; fiber optic cables are reflecting light that doesn’t degrade as quick.
I think this is doable, the only question is, at what cost? Losing a lot of energy is inefficient, but that’s only if you care about the efficiency more than the result (getting cleaner energy to a place that wouldn’t have it otherwise). There may be better solutions, but I appreciate the desire to get this going here.
Emperor@feddit.uk 5 months ago
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
(at one point there was talk of worried insurance companies bankrolling such projects as climate change could bankrupt them)
That would be a nice reset. Of course they’d be back pretty quickly, I just want them to check themselves since they’re ruining America.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I agree. They’ve also come a long way since the original cable were put in for communication in 1858.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
I wonder what happens if the cable that carries this much power breaks under water. And even if it doesn’t break the elecro-magnetic field around it is gonna be massive.
But anyway, other similar projects have either failed (plans to build such a giant solar-farm in Morocco) or have pivoted to “green” hydrogen as the energy transport medium.
Five@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
It’s also one of the many reasons power lines are typically aerial, and only underground at last mile locations when necessary. High electrical current experiences impedance due to the surrounding medium, and air offers the lowest impedance.