Under sea power cables

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If the problem with Solar power is that energy can’t be easily stored why don’t we build big power cables under the sea from areas where there is a lot of sun, ie around the equator, especially the Sahara. My thinking is that we have big communication cables connecting the U.K. and US, why could this not work for power?

My initial thoughts are bandwidth/ capacity issues and politics/geopolitics

In: Engineering

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It is very inefficient to transmit power over distance. Most power stations are within a few dozen miles of their most consumers. Sending power across entire oceans would be so inefficient that it would be easier to just use other power storage systems (batteries, pumped hydroelectric, flywheels, you-name-it).

Anonymous 0 Comments

The way this question is worded does not really make sense..

There are many under sea cables in use right now for all sorts of communication pirposes… And if you mean underwater solar panels, well sunlight does not penetrate very far into the ocean.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s financially and functionally unfeasible. The cables running under the ocean are mostly, if not entirely, fiber optic cables. They’re basically flexible glass that can bounce around a beam of light you shine into it. You can pulse that light in specific patterns to send data, and they’re really useful over long distances since they don’t have many losses. They can not transmit power though, only data.

Running a conventional cable over that distance would be a waste. Regular cable that’s made of something like copper creates losses the longer the cable is. When you’re talking a distance of the Atlantic Ocean, and then the distance to somewhere like the Sahara, between your power source and the receiving end, you’d barely get any power, if you did get any at all. There are relatively long cables, but nothing that long. It’d be likely billions of dollars in construction just for the cable, and then billions more for the solar farms and wouldn’t produce as much power as just regular stations or more local solar farms.

It’s much more practical to build your power source closer to where it’s needed. And if you want to go full renewable, it’d be more effective to just diversify your portfolio with a mix of things like wind, hydro, geothermal, and solar. Even more practically you could generate a very steady and very environmentally clean base load using nuclear and invest in smaller scale storage and renewables for the fluctuations in your load.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They do exist already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed – NorNed is a 580-kilometre long high-voltage direct current submarine power cable between Feda in Norway and the seaport of Eemshaven in the Netherlands. The NorNed cable is a bipolar HVDC link with a voltage of ±450 kV and a capacity of 700 MW

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink – The Basslink electricity interconnector is a 370 km 500 MW high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cable linking the electricity grids of the states of Victoria and Tasmania in Australia, crossing Bass Strait, connecting the Loy Yang Power Station, Victoria on the Australian mainland to the George Town substation in northern Tasmania.

Others are there and more are being developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Submarine_power_cables and this is the longest one: 3800 km between Australia and Singapore – https://www.suncable.sg/

Anonymous 0 Comments

Distance, the further the distance between two points for electricity transmission the more expensive it is to build the cables and other structures needed, in addition power is lost in transmission over very long distances most of the power would be lost.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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