Canada’s prime minister has expressed interest in exporting Canadian energy such as LNG to Europe, along with renewable energy. Other recent discussio...
  • TeaWithDani@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 days ago

    Yeah… ugh… no? Unless you invent a higher voltage transmission method, transferring electricity that far would be wildly inefficient. Its obviously possible, but why? It would be the most expensive electricity in the world.

    Hudson Bay electricity goes as far as New York, ~1750km with 10% losses. Getting that same electricity to say France would be 5000km and the article says 30% losses.

    Even Churchill Falls to Scotland is 3500km+.

    If you could up the voltage though, yeah its not a bad idea but we are dealing with 2x to 3x the distances we see in Quebec.

    Then what… a Russian sub can just turn the lights out in Western Europe?

    • m0darn@lemmy.ca
      0·
      4 days ago

      high voltage direct current

      Then what… a Russian sub can just turn the lights out in Western Europe?

      Europe would still have their own power generation… It would just improve generation/consumption mismatches. By island hopping you could shorten the buried lengths, to make replacing damaged sections easier.

      Happy valley goose bay to the tip of Greenland, up the coast to kulusuk, across to Iceland, then to faroe islands then maybe Shetland, Bergen, Stavanger etc.

      Seems like the sort of thing that isn’t unreasonable to study.

      • five_bucks@lemmy.ca
        0·
        3 days ago

        It’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be cheaper and more reliable to do a massive solar project in Northern Africa.

    • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
      0·
      4 days ago

      Apparently they power it from both ends. So the distance to maximum loss will be the halfway point. So very roughly about 16% loss from either end based on the HBE numbers you provided.

      Upping the voltage has limits because you’re actually powering repeaters along the cable.

      edit: Oop my bad. I thought this was about the proposed data cable. Not power.

  • Reannlegge@lemmy.ca
    0·
    6 days ago

    That feels like a draft of academic paper written before they found the sources to put in and pad it out a bit.

    I like the idea but the discussion or method section does not talk about how they plan on preventing damage to the cables over such vast distances, or how the electromagnetic forces may fuck up some of the sea life.

    • WilliamTruderung@lemmy.ca
      0·
      4 days ago

      The electromagnetic forces surrounding a 50 MW 1000 kV undersea power transmission cable are insignificant. If the cable is shielded by a copper mesh, no electric forces escape the cable, and at 50 amps (50 MW/1000 kV), the magnetic forces outside the cable are barely above Earth’s ambient magnetic field. Right outside the cable, the magnetic field is 100 microTesla, which is considered harmless to all biological processes, and at 40 cm distance, it is already well below the Earth’s ambient magnetic field of ~50 microTesla.