EDIT: Submarine power transportation is indeed on the list
Not transoceanic, but there are two projects currently proposed that will – when constructed – break the current record for the “longest undersea power transmission cable” (a record currently held by the North Sea Link at 720 km, or 450 miles.)
One of these projects is the Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project which aims to lay 3,800 km (2,400 miles) of cable and sell Morocco’s solar power to England.
There is, as of yet, not enough cable in the world to even begin this project. The company proposing the project is building factories to produce this cable.
The other is the Australia-Asia Power Link, which aims to provide Australian solar power to Singapore using a 4,500 km (2,800 miles) undersea cable.
Where the Xlinks project ran into a “not enough cable in the world” problem, Sun Cable’s AAPL has apparently been running into a “not enough money in the world” problem, as it has repeatedly gotten into trouble with its investors.
EDIT: But also, storage is scaling up
@ProfessorGumby@midwest.social provided a fantastic link to a lot of energy storage mediums that are already in use in various grids across the world. These include (and the link the professor provided gives an excellent short summary on each)
- Pumped hydroelectric
- Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
- Flywheels
- Supercapacitors
- And just plain batteries
Also, this wasn’t in the Gumby’s answer, but Finland’s Vatajankoski power plant uses a hot sand battery during its high-demand, low-production hours.
Hydrogen is projected to grow
@Hypx@kbin.social noted that hydrogen has advantages no other energy storage medium possesses: duration of storage and ease of piping/shipping. This is probably why numerous governments are investing in hydrogen production, and why Wood Mackenzie projects what looks like a 200-fold increase in production by the year 2050. (It’s a graph. I’m looking at a graph, so I am only estimating.)
Well the best solution is probably nuclear meeting the base load while solar helps with daytime peaks.
But otherwise pumped storage has promise. Have 2 reservoirs at different elevations connected by a turbine and pumps. When there is excess power durning the day, pump water to the upper reservoir. At night, let the water flow by gravity to the lower reservoir through a turbine and make power.
Transoceanic power transmission is just too expensive.
I’ll assume you are unfamiliar with the size of Singapore and the geography of the Northern Territory.
Singapore lacks the space for pumped storage. Singapore’s density is 8592 per square kilometre. Compare this to India at only 481 or the US at 37.
The Northern Territory in Australia is extremely flat and extremely arid, as such it lacks the topography to build water storage and the water required for it.
I doubt Singapore could meet its energy needs from solar even if every square centimeter was covered in solar panels.
But the point is, the pumped storage could be elsewhere in SE Asia rather than trying to transfer power from the other side of the planet.
Look, so solution is perfect. It is stupid to say “well that whole idea should be thrown out because it won’t work here.” That’s no different from anti-solar people saying we shouldn’t have solar because of clouds.
That’s possible. You will still need to have the generation somewhere, and if you are going solar then the Northern Territory is an ideal location as it has very little rain and abundance of sunshine.
I’m not suggesting your idea is invalidated by the example I give. I’m simply pointing out that in this example, transoceanic electrical transmission isn’t a bad idea.
When all things are considered in this specific example. The infrastructure cost is outweighed by the impracticality of Singapore generating solar energy.
The only way I can make sense of Lurker’s comment is:
maybe Lurker didn’t realize my edits to the post came after some people’s comments (my edits definitely came after your comment, derf). Lurker may have assumed you were dismissing the practicality of the Asia-Australia Power Link, mentioned in my edit but not in the original post.
Assuming the above, this is a miscommunication.
Assuming anything else, Lurker’s comment doesn’t make that much sense.
I know very little about this technology, so is there a theoretical maximum height to these water pump systems being used here? Could they not just build skyscraper sized towers of water?
They could, but that is expensive and a large tower doesn’t hold much water when compared to a dam. Also the force of that water would require an extremely strong structure.
Most of the water battery solutions use natural formations to contain the water at higher elevations for storage.
folks are used to battery tech being so important from cars due to energy density and weight being so important. But stationary energy storage can be simple. hydro-electric dams use water flowing downhill to generate electricity, and use excess electricity to pump water uphill. You can have a simple motor lifting a weight with a pulley as energy storage.
It’s never needed new technology to solve, it’s been intentionally held back so rich people can continue making money off all that oil extraction equipment and land leases they bought.
Probably not. Energy storage is probably the better idea. Check out this link and scroll down to this sections on types of grid energy storage. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/sustainable/grid-energy-storage.htm
Oh thanks for the link! This is a good one. According to the article we’re already using:
- Pumped hydroelectric
- Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
- Flywheels
- Supercapacitors
- And just plain batteries
And the article ends with,
“The price of storage is coming down. The price of solving the problems in other ways is going up. Pretty soon, these prices are going to cross,” notes Boyes, suggesting cost could spur the addition of storage to the grid.
Are those storage measures being used at scale? IIRC there’s large-scale battery storage in Australia, but I don’t know what is being done elsewhere.
I believe the article is arguing that we need to scale them up. Although: it mentions that the Tennessee Valley Authority already uses pumped hydroelectric storage at the foot of Raccoon Mountain (side-note, I know nothing about Tennessee, but somehow naming a mountain “Raccoon Mountain” confirms all of my stereotypes about the state), to supplement its grid during low-production hours.
The distance is simply too great, based on what I could find you can only transmit power for about 300 miles without it getting too costly. Sometimes it goes up to 450 miles and some islands do get power remotely.
But the distance of the Atlantic is around 3310 miles coast to coast if you want to transfer power between the US and Europe… so that’s out of the question. It’s much more economic to use solar during the day and use batteries (any sort, for example in Austria we pump water up the mountain in some places) for the night.
Yeah, the 450 mile one – the North Sea Link – is the “longest subsea interconnector in the world.”
I think over land, you can manage longer distances (China’s transmission projects go thousands of miles), but even those aren’t going the full 3310 miles it would take to cross the Atlantic.
Used EV batteries as power packs tied to the grid. Some neighborhoods are already getting these. They also work well as backup power when the grid goes down.
I think grid level or neighborhood level backup power is a great way to shore up the power supply without putting in bigger wires. Keep them topped up with off-peak grid power or local solar, and draw on them to offset the peaks as well as fill in for peer outages (assuming proper disconnect is installed for safety of the workers fixing power lines etc).
