Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization (whatever you wish to call it). No matter our technological progress since the Industrial Revolution this failure point appears to persist.
As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the system.
It’s been in vogue to hype up technical solutions (“more compute,” “yeah but when it gets better…” “we just need a few more years on this”) to all of these problems that deserve to be solved in the socio-political sphere. It’s often more effective to restructure a given systems’ relationships than to hope for magical boosts here and there.
Could be a bottleneck some ways. In other ways its an accelerant (think space race).
Like most things in nature you probably get the most out of "progress" (kind of a slippery word in itself) through some type of equilibrium rather than an absolute everyone must work together.
It can be even worse. When people are too deep into a particular technique they lose track of what the system needs. I've seen 500M intranet applications who were slower that handwriting on preprinted paper templates (which means network failures would increase productivity overall).
That feels like a tilted assessment. The technical solutions can break down enormous walls, and very quickly. There are just some walls they can't - political, social, etc - and once the other walls have been leveled, we tend to get focused on those & lament.
Technology has been used to change the political landscape quite effectively. So far, I’ve seen it used to favor short term interests of small groups, but a sufficiently motivated organisation can do a lot toward a favourable outcome for the whole planet.
IMO this is structurally a part of capitalism. Capitalism provides limited avenues for cooperation. If your problem doesn't meet those limits, capitalism can't solve it. This seems to arises because capitalism seeks to maximize a personal reward function, rather than a societal one.
A good example is car-dependency. Designing land use around car-dependency has a lot of rather painful externalities. Capitalism doesn't account for those externalities, and so decisions are made that are a net-negative (suburban sprawl, urban freeways, etc). These degrade everyone's quality of life & degrade the environment, but are optimal from a capitalist perspective (they enrich the individual decision maker).
Car dpendency is a bad example because it assumes that everyone has the same values and weighs the externalities the same. For me,
- Living in an urban space is a huge negative.
- Living in a suburban space is a mild negative.
- Living in low-density suburbs is a huge positive.
- Driving an electric car is a positive.
- Driving an ICE car is a negative.
- Riding a bicycle or walking is a positive if my knees aren't acting up. It's a negative if they are.
A more nuanced description of positive and negative externalities would give a fuller picture, but that's a basic assessment of my values.
I think you'll find the same for other examples of externalities. Corporate air and water pollution is a positive for a company (i.e., a company that disposes of waste cheaply). For people in surrounding areas, it's a huge negative. Different values for different populations
The issue with your assessment is that everyone includes the individuals.
The externalities associated with driving are probably -1 utility points for me whereas driving is +20 or even more.
I think that basically what you are saying only makes sense if society includes a bunch of people who do not benefit, when in reality that’s usually a fairly small group (e.g. in the US or UK the small number of homeless).
I think the whole problem with externalities is that even if everyone gains a private benefit from their choice, you can all be worse off due to the externalities.
To take your example, if you have a society of 30 people, each of whom drives, and gains +20 utility for driving, but -1 for each other car on the road, you get a net utility of -9 per person. But if any individual decides not to drive, their utility drops to -29, even as they provide a total benefit of +29 utility to everyone else by choosing not to drive.
It's obviously a lot more complicated than that. You have local externalities (noise, particulate pollution, health issues due to a more sedentary lifestyle, deaths and injuries due to accidents) and global ones (GHG emissions). Using public transport also subjects people to some negative externalities, if crime isn't controlled enough, or if people are noise. And you don't want a place that makes driving hard, but also has crappy public transit -- though usually, crappy public transit is a symptom of car-centric design, in my opinion.
But I think on balance, places where driving is discouraged in favor of other modes of transport are better off, and especially, a world where private automobiles are rarely used is better than a world where most everyone drives everywhere.
Ultra High Voltage transmission lines are a key component to load balancing the grid. Currently (no pun intended...) very expensive because so few countries do it (China (of course), then I think only Brazil?) but it means that power surges from renewables can be channeled to places which need to use it, without having to try and put the energy into storage. If team humanity can find the maturity to connect grids around the globe, we can solve the load balancing problem with a very elegant and obvious solution
Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game.
If there was team humanity - and we weren't still focused on "us" vs "them" and throwing feces at each other across imaginary geographical, religious and race borders - I'm confident we could solve the climate problem completely in 5-10 years. Not to mention what else (famine, diseases...), with motivation other than short-term profit...
Shouldn't as in you suspect it isn't, or as in it really ought to not be?
In either case, while a "sociological vacuum decay" into a more efficient mode of human collaboration seems at least theoretically possible (we've had some of these in the past: The invention of money, laws, nation states, organized religions, and other practically useful human fictions), if nobody can find a way to precipitate it, it remains just as unachievable as something even theoretically impossible.
Even the political left (in the US, IDK about other countries) is pretty committed to the nationalist world order. Unless you mean the Marxist left, which doesn't really exist in the US.
> In 2015, State Grid Corporation of China proposed the Global Energy Interconnection, a long-term proposal to develop globally integrated smart grids and ultra high voltage transmission networks to connect over 80 countries.[10]: 92–93 The idea is supported by President Xi Jinping and China in attempting to develop support in various internal forums, including UN bodies.[10]: 92
Yes, Brazil has some UHV lines. AFAIK, the US has one, Europe has a few, not only inside the EU.
Long distance power grids are only useful if you have huge generators localized away from the power consumers. So, mostly places with hydroelectric generators have them. It was never a matter of "maturity" or politics.
I heard one of the problems is that since countries want to run the lines submerged, which is too expensive and/or challenging for other reasons (fields,...) for high voltage DC.
There are of course issues with all undersea cables (AC or DC) in today's climate with cable cuts being so frequent. I wonder if it's easier to locate AC cables
It seems that in our country (The Netherlands) the bigger blocker is more the interconnections between local regions as opposed to transferring between larger regions such as countries. We have varying production from solar and wind. Now that means that each local connection to the main grid needs to be almost as heavy as the main grid whereas it used to be just one direction with very predictable usage.
Beware of talk about benefits without mention of drawbacks.
Connecting grids could significantly increase the fragility of the system resulting in higher risk of large-scale power outages. Some of you might have experienced the 2003 blackout in northeast North American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003), which luckily happened in the summer. Tail risks should not be swept under the rug.
Even a single widespread event could completely wipe out the benefit gained from connecting grids.
This is a general principle: making things bigger and/or more centralized tends to increase efficiency and decrease the frequency of failures but greatly increase the cost and severity of failures.
In computing think about, for example, centralizing identity management in the hands of a few large companies. These companies have large security teams and mature well built infrastructures, but a huge failure or a huge security compromise of, say, Google’s OIDC system, could be utterly catastrophic, paralyzing and destroying vast swaths of our digital infrastructure. Entire companies, services, or even sectors would be paralyzed or worse.
Small, decentralized, and diverse is overall more costly and experiences many smaller failures but is more robust for the long haul.
This is probably why life, having evolved over a billion years, is mostly this way. Giant super organisms and super-optimized monocultures are possible but fragile.
Our economies, having only existed for hundreds of years and being incentivized to only care about next quarter, tend to go all in on anything that makes numbers superficially better.
I remember we were at work and the power flickered and all the UPS's started beeping for about 10 seconds. Then it went back to normal. Then about 30 minutes later people looked at the news and saw a massive blackout. We were hundreds of miles away and that's all we felt but I had a relative tell me about walking a few miles home because the subways were down and the traffic lights not working made it even crazier.
Denmark is trying to do to Norway what Germany has done do the Swedish in that respect. I fully understand that the Norwegians want to cut the cable to the south.
I call German and Danish windmills bordering on greenwashing.
For any energy to be truly green, it must also be pragmatic. It's not green energy if it's so expensive ordinary households cannot afford to use it.
Id like to see you rejoice if your electricity bill went from 0.4kr to 8kr per kwH because your neightbour countries' "awesome green energy supply" fails to support its citizens needs.
This is not a constant occurrence fortunately but happens enough to anger the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.
They are already quadrupling the electricity cost with a myriad of taxes ( green, state, maintenance, municipality, what have you ) so this price hike due to failed windmills and lack of daylight at the neighbours' makes them look incompetent.
Sweden and Norway does not want to lower the taxes to leverage energy bills for the average tax payer because Germany and Denmark cannot get ther sh!t together, that's for sure.
“Connect” doesn’t have to mean “operate as a closely coupled synchronized grid”.
Using HVDC (which is more efficient over long distances anyway), adjacent grids basically appear as just another power plant to yours (and some early HVDC connections literally consisted of a motor coupled to a generator!), and grids ought to be able to stomach the sudden outage of one.
Three countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are disconnecting from Russia literally in 2 weeks for that specific reason, so it's an horrible idea to interconnect everything in the current world.
Wouldn't it be best to leave the connections open just in case? I get not wanting to give the Kremlin a big button that says "black out Estonia" but as long as they can also get juice from the EU grid too, what's the problem? I suppose it's an issue of grid synchronization? If so, DC links could be used on politically tenuous connections on the global power network.
That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem. It's a monopoly issue that would be less of a problem if a single or even a minority of players were not the largest producer.
At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas where you had to win the lottery of location or game of Thrones of imperialism.
I mean, logistically speaking everybody is already depending on the US pretty much. So you could say this about every country in the world from one perspective or another.
Connecting the world sounds pretty utopian when the broader interconnectivity, like trade, that we do have is fraying at the edges and starting to crumble.
The main issue with everyone agreeing is the one who disagrees often gains the advantage, especially if the control something they perceived more valuable then they are getting from being agreeable.
Europe and large parts of ASEAN already are pretty connected. Aside from connecting the three US grids next step would surely need to be connecting continents?
Quick google says it should be feasible. London to DC is about 5k km. Longest UHV DC seems to be just over 3k built in 2018 (over land) so maybe?
We already have hundreds of millions of people on connected electricity grids. Loss of a few interconnections would not lead to catastrophic failure of the whole system.
With an intercontinental power grid, the sun is always shining.
Of course, The Economist isn't worried about that, they really only care about how they can make money from it.
But for a technologist, there's always that messy real world to deal with. And for solar power, that reality is night. A world wide power grid could be constantly transmitting power to the dark side.
There is no way to make this idea work, or for that matter describe any plausible way to impliment it.
Its physicaly impossible to span the pacific and atlantic oceans. Other north south bottlenecks occur and then many of the ereas that could host grid scale solar, are poor, and therefore exporting there light,which is only going to bring 11 fully temporary part time jobs per
100000 inhabitents, who go home to huts, with no electricity, is not a good look anymore.
The real nitty gritty is rights of way for transmission lines.
India, Pakistan, Afganistan, Iran,
all in a nice neat row, you have my personal permission to build anything you want! and as an as an added bonus I will put in a word with China ,Russia, and Khazakistan, then quick climb up the pole, twist a few wires together and gzzzzzzzzitz*
and zam London to Bieging at the speed of light.
VS, distributed solar, wind, water, geothermal, power that serves local grids, just fine. Battery storage will get much cheaper, and the generating
equipment is only getting more efficient and cheaper.
The world grid will have to wait until we have some kind of fusion power and a super conducting grid, where power is in fact too cheap to meter and has demonstrably less impact than any other source.
I'd love to see this realized. However, given the issues we've been having with cables in the Baltic Sea in recent months, this would probably be a huge attack surface in case of any kind of conflict.
This is never going to be viable. Even existing short undersea cables are difficult (impossible?) to protect from sabotage, let alone one that would span an ocean.
Longer cables need to be thicker if you want resistance to be fixed.
If you want 1Ω then by coincidence a 40,000 km cable has a cross section of almost exactly one square meter. If you're putting a significant fraction of global power through that at any sane voltage, you can't use most cutting tools (or indeed electrical motors) near it because the magnetic field is too strong.
China is making enough aluminium that this is a plausible thing they may do as a "belt and road" type project.
Ok, you have the resistance for the cable. Now we need the expansion and contraction due to temperature, and also current, and gravity acting on downward upward sections. Then there is the minor issue of lowering 40km sections to the ocean floor, be a nice boat to work that! Exactly how much arc we gona put in the cable? as we drop it strait down the edge of the continental shelf.
And then there are undersea quakes and mega slides, which brings up, exactly what happens when
a live wire, that size breaks! When not if, and the gear to fix it, fast.
What else, oh ya! kinda cool, but the existing grid already acts like a motor winding that interacts with the earths magnetic field and charged particles coming from the sun. Might want to work that into all of the calcs.
Money!
There is a huge risk in even starting a full engineering study, due to the very real possibilty
of another technology bieng adopted and implimented first.
A project like this will have many considerations that don't fit into a Hacker News comment. I'd be surprised if a full analysis was less than 200 pages of detailed hard work, including performing actual research to answer questions such as "what exactly is the impact of a surface magnetic field of 0.34 teslas on the local water flow?" and "is marine life impacted by the local magnetic field exceeding Earth's natural field within about 10 km?"
I would be surprised if the very slow shift to Earth's poles has any impact, but yes, that too, even if only to rule it out.
Temperature, however, isn't one of those questions. Deep water has a near-constant temperature, and even if it didn't, solving for this is already well-studied for continuously welded railways.
Likewise, because it's underwater, we can make them in neutrally buoyant sections. Could even make them as two parallel and closely-spaced tracks, so it can built as an underwater railway that delivers its own power and transport during its own construction.
> due to the very real possibilty of another technology bieng adopted and implimented first.
Not hugely likely, IMO.
Long term I can see an argument for doing this as an orbital ring — basically the same idea but make it about π*200km longer so it can be 100km above ground everywhere, spin it so fast it's slightly above orbital speed, magnetically levitate hoops around it that are tethered to the ground and transmit power.
Buuuuut orbital rings are only at technology readiness level 2, so nowhere near ready to consider:
(For example, an orbital ring has to be build by thickening rather than lengthening to be affordable: it was conceived as a non-rocket launch mechanism, and bootstrapping it by having a thin version lift the material for making it thicker and stronger was a big part of the pricing when it was originally conceived).
Whereas a big fat metal wire is at the level of "do sufficient geological and biological surveys to make sure there's an actual route, and accept that the answer may in fact be 'no'" — we *definitely* know how to build a big fat wire (or many smaller wires). We just don't know if we *should*.
The tool of choice for cutting undersea cables & pipelines seems to currently be tankers dragging anchors across the seafloor. There's no economically viable protection able to withstand forces like that.
Eyeballing it, the cable I'm suggesting has a metal part about four times that anchor's cross section, let alone the chain's cross section. Even if it was bare metal (in the ocean, which would be madness all by itself), the anchor or the chain would break well before the power cable.
With a moderate layer of, say, concrete, that anchor wouldn't even be able to hook onto the cable as the arms don't go out far enough.
I cannot help but wonder what the answers are to these points:
> Norwegians are forgetting that domestically produced power is not always cheaper. Whenever the current in the cables flows towards them, it helps reduce high prices.
Norway could add some diodes to the cables so that it only imports and does not export.
> And even though Norway exports more power than it imports, that is fantastic for domestic energy producers. Norway’s state-owned power firms have been raking it in, which is one of the reasons the government can afford to subsidise household prices.
Wholesale prices would plummet if this energy had nowhere to go. Getting wholesale prices down seems to be the goal here, so why not keep the energy trapped and let the wholesale prices drop? If they wholesale prices drop, you would expect that to help pay for lower household prices.
These are not my actual views. I just feel that the articles' author did not address these points, so I decided to raise them here.
The Economist did address these, their basic argument is that trade is a win-win.
Usually when these win-wins go wrong they have the gains filtered off by a middleman or monopolist but in this case it seems the government uses the money earned to subsidize household bills which means they do get the benefit of trade.
Stopping the trade therefore means higher prices for domestic consumers. This is the basic point the article makes repeatedly.
It did not seem to directly address how one scenario is better than the other. The article felt like “do it this way; it is better and don’t worry how”.
I should stress that I am only saying this because I find the omission curious. I do not have any opinion either way at this time.
HVDC for long distance power sharing makes sense since it is generally more efficient than HVAC. On land, HVDC is more efficient beyond ~500km, but underwater, HVDC is more efficient beyond ~50km:
Beyond the efficiency benefit, HVDC easily handles transfer of power between grids operating at different frequencies. There are also several other benefits documented at that second link.
Forget connecting world’s grids first the governments should connect national grids. Like in Germany and Norway north and south grids are disconnected contributing to fluctuating prices.
That's a shtty take, centralization is almost always the most inefficient way to do things, and leads to multiple problems by implementation, specially around different cultures
What country A wants to do is totally different that country B wants.
Some western countries are freezing as they are investing hard in solar/wind plants, while China makes ton of carbon plants.
As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the system.
It’s been in vogue to hype up technical solutions (“more compute,” “yeah but when it gets better…” “we just need a few more years on this”) to all of these problems that deserve to be solved in the socio-political sphere. It’s often more effective to restructure a given systems’ relationships than to hope for magical boosts here and there.
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