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by carapace 2195 days ago
Bucky Fuller had the idea to just connect the world's electricity grids together. He called it "World Grid" I think.
2 comments

Geography may also be a problem. Running a gigawatt cable from sun-soaked Australia anywhere in SEA is enormously expensive. Instead, packaging the energy into carbohydrates produced from waste water (cleaning it in the process) and waste CO₂ may be much more economical and convenient. You can likely produce the best quality Jet A fuel or octane 98 gasoline with little other fractions by tuning the synthesis process (unlike an oil well which gives you a mix you can't control).

Beside that, a transatlantic jet, let alone a Falcon 9, won't ever fly with battery power. You still need highly energetic fuels where power density is at a huge premium.

The need to fly commercial liquid-fuel planes beyond the near/medium future far from certain. To my understanding we could quite easily use electric ships for most trans-oceanic cargo, and supplement it with some rail tunnels/bridges crossing from the UK, over the Faroe Islands, to Iceland, Greenland, Baffin Island, and Québec. The only tectonic "issue" would be crossing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge on Iceland.

Sure, it'd be quite a large civil engineering feat, but the speeds would be hard to beat. It'd be just a 12h ride from London to NYC, assuming TGV's top speed of 575 km/h.

A potential alternative could be to use a low-flying plane and deploy a series of HVDC-fed buoys/platforms straight across the Atlantic for fast-charging.

You're right about the Falcon 9 though.

Not even power density but also the ability to get lighter as you go farther.
That’s more efficient, but difficult politically and logistically.
How would that be more efficient? The transmission loss would be outrageous between the summer and winter hemispheres. Compare that with transmission loss for LNG tankers at the moment, effectively 0 even with the occasional leak in transit.
1) The main loss for LNG wouldn’t be transit, it would be efficiency during synthesis.

2) Any inefficiency during transit of LNG isn’t leaks, it’s the fuel burnt moving it around.

3) The cost of building high efficiency LNG power plants wherever you need power is another cost that should be considered.