[ben_w]

> I always point at texas

Texas doing its own thing is, sadly, evidence against my personal favourite solution: a global power grid would, from a pure engineering perspective, be totally viable, and would mean you don't need any storage for stationary use — sun always shines somewhere on the planet, an a square metre cross section of aluminium is close to just one Ohm per 40,000 km, and that's only a few year's global aluminium for something that would easily last a century.

Unfortunately, Texas isn't even willing to join up with New Mexico, so this is unlikely to come to pass.

[nuancebydefault]

Did you calculate the price of that cable? Mind that you need at least 2 and both will dissipate some heat = loss.

[ben_w]

I calculated raw material cost at current pricing, which is both the best I can do and also wildly misleading — the scale is large enough to influence prices, as it either leads to new aluminium production (which means that when it is finished there is probably oversupply and thus lower cost aluminium on the world market) or it competes with existing demand while being built (driving up prices).

The wildly misleading number is about what China spends on coal in a couple of years: a few hundred billion.

Also, at 40,000 km you don't need two — that's all the way around the planet and back to the start.

Heat loss obviously depends on current and voltage choices; reasonable numbers say this still works out fine, given how much cheaper PV is compared to both storage and other production.

However, despite all that: if we can't even take baby steps like convincing Texas to play nice with their neighbouring states, something like this is only plausible on planets with a single world government, not Earth.