[purplepatrick]

“ The total power draw in a "stage 3" system like this could get as high as 1.38 gigawatts”

New York City uses ~11MWh per day (i.e. a capacity of 458 MW). This means the above would amount to ~3x that usage. I don’t know much about this and may misunderstand something here, but this seems infeasibly high for a mobile system, no?

[XorNot]

If your plan is to dig tunnels for energy grids, then it's sensible because you're going to start at the energy producers. We build power plants in the gigawatt range [1] regularly - they're only suborning 12% of that output.

The biggest challenge is going to be extending cabling, though presumably the "tunneling cable" just becomes the transmission line.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_statio...