[ben_w]

Big fat wire to somewhere which isn't in a blizzard.

Or just build the metal foundry in the non-blizzard-prone area in the first place, because the blizzard takes out power lines even if there was a nuclear reactor on the other end.

I've done the maths, and I'd it wasn't for geopolitics, China makes enough Aluminium to make an HVDC grid so thick that it would have so little resistance that they could usefully connect every grid in the world for a cost of 250e9 USD for the Aluminium.

Scaled down to just the USA, no international stuff, it's something you can easily do if someone convinces Trump or Musk to delete any internal obstruction.

[actionfromafar]

Your last sentence sounds optimistic. Load-bearing "easily". Any convincing needs to demonstrate that also the "libs are owned".

[ben_w]

If they need to make it a culture war thing, they could just call it the Keystone pipeline of electricity, or the Trump Powerline, or similar.

(As a non American, I may be misjudging this: I don't care too much about US culture wars, they don't connect to me any more than the US or Chinese sports teams whose names I don't know).

You may be correct that I am over-optimistic, though for what it's worth my optimism is not universal to all of the aspects of Musk let alone Trump (mostly pessimistic about him), and not with regard to other greenhouse gas emissions besides electrical, heating, and transportation.

[haccount]

"Thousands of miles of big wires are free"

Why don't we just assume that power will be free and infinite and plug our grid into that assumption? We can even write it down on the socket and paint it green, based on how these arguments always read out that's the only thing needed to maintain electrified high tech society.

[ben_w]

Me: "world for a cost of 250e9 USD for the Aluminium"

You: "Thousands of miles of big wires are free"

If anywhere's going to get mixed up between "250 billion dollars" and "free", it's going to be politics.

[haccount]

>"If we buy nuclear power plants on Temu we can have a 1GW reactor for $1000, but most likely it will be on sale (lucky us!) so it's actually more like $400 per reactor. And if we use green thorium then the fuel is $2.50 for ten years"

I reconstructed your argument to be in favor of nuclear power, and because I mentioned Temu as a source it actually have an infinite amount of more ties to reality than your story did.

Wow no wonder people like to argue for green energy if it's this easy to make up arguments for it

[ben_w]

You've done as bad a job of that as GPT-2. Not ChatGPT, just 2.

You can very easily look up the resistivity of aluminium, which will tell you that if you want a loop around the equator to have a resistance of one ohm over that length, it needs to be about a square metre cross section. You can look up the density and the cost, too. You get around 250 billion dollars depending on the exact market price when you were looking it up.

[haccount]

You suggest buying 100 million metric ton of aluminium when the global annual production is 70 million. And magically you'll get it delivered as a pre-installed global power grid as opposed to ingots.

Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?

[ben_w]

> You suggest buying 100 million metric ton of aluminium when the global annual production is 70 million.

How do you think aluminium works, that you burn it? These things last multiple decades, and even then the wires are still around, it's mostly the rest of the stuff you need to maintain — one of the recent-ish fires in California was that the tower on which the wire was strung wore through, the wire fell off, sparked, the wood caught fire.

At the scale I'm describing, even if you spread it over 2,500 parallel paths (which you should, not just for redundancy but also because of the magnetic field it produces if you don't), the aluminium looks like a structural member rather than looking like a wire.

> And magically you'll get it delivered as a pre-installed global power grid as opposed to ingots.

You keep putting words in my mouth. I very specifically and deliberately noted that I was just talking about the aluminium material cost itself.

Also, at this scale, you can basically process the ore directly into the metal in a trench in the ground that (1) becomes your wire immediately as you've finished processing it and (2) supplies the energy to the next section you want to electrolytically extract.

Aluminium is unusually good for this specific task, compared to other metals.

> Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?

Not at this scale, no.

If you're drinking at Starbucks, not only are you paying for the rent of the shop to give you somewhere to drink it and the time of the staff to prepare it and clean the place after you (and the seat and cup, if you sat down and got a ceramic cup rather than a disposable take-away), you're also enriching Starbuck's shareholders.

At this scale a grid is an international strategic decision even though it's theoretically in the zone where a corporation could afford it, and the surprise extra costs are the opportunity costs and the political capital gained or spent on proposing the thing on the one side, and of encouraging or allowing it on the other.

The USA right now is terrified of China, and only China can make enough aluminium; having a global grid creates a trade opportunity for those with something to gain, and a new risk factor for those with something to lose. America has stuff to lose, most of the world has stuff to gain.

So, if you want a Starbucks comparison, it's the cost of coffee from the point of view of Starbucks itself, not as a customer.