At $4M per km, a 4,300 km HVDC cable would cost a staggering $17.2 billion to import 1.75 GW of energy. Interestingly, building a Shin-Kori equivalent nuclear plant [1],[2] on a nearby island [3] would be significantly cheaper. If they can afford such a cable, it raises the question of whether it's even the best solution in the first place. [4]
I could easily imagine them doing this, and another similar one to India or twice as far to Kenya, and getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.
(OTOH, as I'm not a grid or marine engineer, I am ready to be mocked for suggesting an underwater cable may last a century).
1) That is a pretty huge cost when wholesale cost of solar is only a few cents to begin with.
2) That equation ignores the time value of money, which is absolutely relevant. A dollar spent today is not the same as a dollar saved 100 years from now.
But it seems unlikely that this kind of private capital would be available for such a nuclear project. Nor would the expertise or industrial capacity be the same.
>> getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.
Ring the equator with solar panels and then run cables north/south to wherever it is needed, providing consistent supply 24/7. It works well enough in Dyson Sphere Program.
Sure, if you can push infinite power through a wire with zero losses. Doesn't work so well with reality constraints.
I've never played DSP but I'm thinking of Factorio. Night falls equally across the world so you have to provide power from somewhere else at night or let your stuff go dark (which can actually be sane--I've put up radars with solar without any backup--it will show you the spread of the nests fine.) You have to start with burning wood or coal for power, solar comes before adequate storage. Thus if you go the solar route there's a range where you have solar, some storage and some steam. Unfortunately, while the game correctly prioritizes solar over steam it puts steam over storage. Thus the efficient approach is to put your steam behind a switch that keeps it isolated until your storage drops low enough. I've had a couple hundred megawatts flowing through one of the starter tech poles--it doesn't melt?!
Only takes a few hundred billion USD of aluminium for that ring to have a cross section of a square meter, which is enough to lower the resistance to 1 Ω.
Of course, only China actually produces enough aluminium for this, and you'd want to divide it between several cables both for redundancy and because putting 2 TW though one cable at any plausible voltage will give it a surface magnetic field strong enough to prevent most tools working on it, and the political issues are going to be huge, but on paper it's fine.
There are many alternatives, but I have a 10kWh LiFePO4 pack that is sufficient for my house 95% of the time.
There have been great strides recently in battery recycling and new chemistries. Not to mention alternatives to batteries.
To me this seems like one of those problems that seems impossible until the economics start driving innovation. I think we are heading in the right direction.
I don't know if anyone would mock you, but no, it won't last 100 years. Not without a whole lot of work and a lot of things going exactly right for a hundred years.
Also, why, on earth, would anyone in Kenya need solar energy from Australia? It has some of the best wind resources on the planet in the Rift Valley alone. Not to mention its own ridiculously high levels of solar available. And all that before we've even talked about the expense and difficulty of laying such a line. Add in unparalleled mineral availability in Africa and the Chinese building out manufacturing in Kenya. (Heck, all over the EAC actually.) I just have a hard time even seeing storage batteries as much of a problem for Kenya in the near future.
You need places like Singapore. Where the resources are unequal to the need for this whole thing to make sense.
There are nuclear power plants today in operation for 70 years, and whose life can be further extended. Considering our knowledge and safety today, it's not improbable that a nuclear power plant constructed today would last a century too, with regular maintenance.
The strangest part of this is that the cable will be run to Darwin, which isn't connected to Australia's national grid.
So the city's electrical grid will be connected to a foreign country 4,300km away before it's connected to the Australian grid (approx. 2,100km away by road).
Do you have a reference for that $17.2 billion cost? I've seen figures between 24-30 billion USD for the whole project -- solar farm, batteries, local infrastructure to supply Darwin and the subsea cable to Singapore. That would make the economics of this look merely stupid rather than insane.
Sudong Island is fairly important for the Singaporean Armed Forces as a forward landing strip for the SCS. In fact, the SAF is in the process of expanding the military presence and use of Sudong Island [0]
Lazarus would be a horrible place for that kind of thing. It would destroy a nice, relatively untouched spot of nature that’s got a lot of biodiversity.
Singapore does use islands for this kind of thing, but this would be better placed on Jurong Island (which is already entirely industrial) or perhaps Pulau Tekong (which is currently for military use only). Alternatively, land reclamation is not unknown to Singapore, and there’s already big land reclamation plans underway in the coming years.
> they do not use liquid sodium. They are PWRs. Rickover would spin in his grave.
Except for the early days of the (one-off) USS Seawolf, before its liquid-sodium reactor was replaced by a LWR. But yes, the KOG would surely come roaring out of his coffin screaming, "WTF are you idiots doing — wasn't once enough?"
Forget about the nuclear plant, the interesting thing here is geopolitics.
Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia back in the day straight up. The US equivalent would be "Hey Detroit, you're a mess, you're no longer part of the US, you're now the city state of Detroit"
So that means pragmatically Malaysia is about as far away as New Jersey from New York City (i.e. very close by). They're this more western gem completely surrounded on all sides by Muslim countries e.g. Indonesia as well. And now drawing this loooonnnggg power line past all these places to the Aussies.
Clearly the geopolitical pressure must be massive if they are spending this vast sum, which COULD BE much less, just to bypass all the neighbors. Not that the US understands Singapore geopolitics very well - whenever a Singaporean such as the tik tok CEO is hauled in front of congress they get grilled on which part of China they're from.
It is very useful to me, even though I know some webdev. For projects where you need to expose majorly python functionality on the web, and don't want to add whole other dimension and toolkits to your python code, this is brilliant.
This is very dangerous point of view, which will lead to a lot of suffering.
Humanity managed to lift vast majority of itself from abject poverty, grow enough food for everyone, prevent children mortality - unimaginable 100 years ago.
And this is called modernity, which if reversed will bring back hunger and misery.
That's a very human centric point of view you show. Also if you look at anything but GDP it's a much more complicated picture, happiness certainly hasn't been on a never ending upward trajectory. We've also made life miserable for so many animals. We are currently in the sixth mass extinction. We are the sixth mass extinction.
Recognizing a problem does not imply a solution. Do I think it's reasonable or realistic to go back to pre agricultural revolution? No.
Is modernity a reckless party with finite resources? Yes.
We want to have and do a lot of stuff that we absolutely don't need. For example, going to the canaries on holiday. It doesn't even make us happy most of the time. We can get rid of that and still be a long way from misery.
Modernity has poisoned our waters, created and unleashed novel sicknesses upon the world, harnessed the atom in order to destroy life, and hides behind medicine as if that excuses all of it.
Yeah it's like we're currently stuck in a local minima in regards of environmentalism, and we can choose to go forward and try to improve using technology, or go backward and improve it by impoverishing ourselves.
I'd argue that our actual minima is around 1950s, which means we are halfway forward to be able to geoengineer ourselves to a better earth than if we're not here at all. But it may be a futile hope.
For many years I believed in our ability to engineer our way out of this one. I'm an engineer by profession, and so are you I assume. It certainly shapes the way we view the world.
If we continue our current growth of energy use, we'll be using the entire luminosity output of the Milky Way galaxy in 1000 years. Color me skeptical, but I say that won't happen. So something will have to give, and that's never ending growth. There are a lot of humanshttps://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/ecological-cliff-edge/ and increasingly fewer other animals. Extinction rates are up a thousand fold to the background and accelerating. Geoengineering like so many other ideas in this space are the lie we want to believe that there is a way forward that won't involve fundamentally changing our way of life. Let's just keep doing the same thing we have been doing, a way that is demonstrably causing the sixth mass extinction, but this time with ~sustainable growth~ ~green energy~ ~carbon offsets~ ...
The number of humans is going to plateau and start gradually declining by the turn of the century; that should put an end to the endless growth assumed in whatever model assumes that ludicrous use-of-entire-Milky-Way-luminosity prediction.
Slime molds in pitri dishes are famous for using up their resources and then plateauing ..
Sustainable growth is like saying humane torture. An oxymoron and a lie. Sustainability is all about an equilibrium and long term circular processes, how can that be compatible with ever increasing resource usage, aka growth?
Our financial and societal systems are built on growth, we define prosperity in terms of growth. A traded corporation isn't considered successful when it earns as much as last quarter, it needs to earn more every quarter, ad nauseam.
Depends on FAA involvement in each launch. In case of an airline FAA controls each flight for hours. In case of a rocket launch, most trouble comes from "don't go in that area" type of commitment, plus investigations of something went wrong.
Given that each airline can keep hundreds of machines in the air at any one time, and rocket launches happen weekly at best, paying 10% of the overall fee does not look fair.
Would be happy to know what aviation specialists think.
The point is general for all living things, though:
> air pollution, climate change, deforestation, food, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing. On most of these fronts, things are worse today than they were in the distant past. But on all of them, progress has been made recently, and we’re on a better trajectory than most people assume—even though that rarely makes the end-of-the-world headlines dominating the news.
I'd really like to believe that and that it's not just a change in the fourth derivative. And at least half the global population hasn't even started properly consuming yet...
Hydro is very terrain-dependent, solar and wind can't do baseload, so for baseload nuclear is still best applicable in most parts of the world. Nuclear saves a lot of lives by displacing other, way more dangerous baseload operations. [0]
