[sandworm101]

>> getting a decent amount of PV at night as a consequence.

Ring the equator with solar panels and then run cables north/south to wherever it is needed, providing consistent supply 24/7. It works well enough in Dyson Sphere Program.

[LorenPechtel]

Sure, if you can push infinite power through a wire with zero losses. Doesn't work so well with reality constraints.

I've never played DSP but I'm thinking of Factorio. Night falls equally across the world so you have to provide power from somewhere else at night or let your stuff go dark (which can actually be sane--I've put up radars with solar without any backup--it will show you the spread of the nests fine.) You have to start with burning wood or coal for power, solar comes before adequate storage. Thus if you go the solar route there's a range where you have solar, some storage and some steam. Unfortunately, while the game correctly prioritizes solar over steam it puts steam over storage. Thus the efficient approach is to put your steam behind a switch that keeps it isolated until your storage drops low enough. I've had a couple hundred megawatts flowing through one of the starter tech poles--it doesn't melt?!

[ben_w]

Sure, maths says it's fine.

Only takes a few hundred billion USD of aluminium for that ring to have a cross section of a square meter, which is enough to lower the resistance to 1 Ω.

Of course, only China actually produces enough aluminium for this, and you'd want to divide it between several cables both for redundancy and because putting 2 TW though one cable at any plausible voltage will give it a surface magnetic field strong enough to prevent most tools working on it, and the political issues are going to be huge, but on paper it's fine.

[matrix2003]

I mean, storage might be an easier option ;)

There are many alternatives, but I have a 10kWh LiFePO4 pack that is sufficient for my house 95% of the time.

There have been great strides recently in battery recycling and new chemistries. Not to mention alternatives to batteries.

To me this seems like one of those problems that seems impossible until the economics start driving innovation. I think we are heading in the right direction.