> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance

not true. in standard HV-AC lines, power losses are ~10% per megameter. HVDC gets to 3-5%. So Nevada to Seattle would be at most 20% loss, and in practice 15%, and with HVDC closer to 7%.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...

> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance

Power transmission lines at 60Hz primarily have ohmic losses, which are linear with length of the conductor.

Interesting fact - Power transmission lines are long enough that the capacitive and inductive effects do matter a little bit, even though it's only 60Hz. That's why spacing between conductors is important. 3-phase lines will also rotate the order of conductors every so often to keep the average spacing between all pairs of lines similar.

I think you're over estimating losses for high voltage transmission lines. It's "only" 800 miles from the Mojave to seattle. In China there is a high voltage transmission line over 2000 miles long

> As a rule, if you're tempted to begin any sentence with "they should just..." -- don't.

Strongly agreed.

> Electrical signal attenuation increases with the square of the distance, so you'll lose ~95% of the power to heat loss in the wires if you try to power Seattle from solar in Nevada

What? HVDC lines are usually estimated to have 3.5% power loss per 1000 km. Since power transmission is done using power lines, the inverse square law doesn't really apply here.

> There are a lot of very good reasons why we haven't covered the desert in solar panels.

That does remain true however. Cost concerns, grid access concerns, environmental concerns are all good reasons.

Confidently, impressively wrong. Imagine how the power grid would work if there were 95% losses over 900 km.

Seattle is fine on power, you can pave the parts of the Mojave in California to power California instead (although tbh I think what we need most in CA is storage for when the sun goes down).

I think you can also reduce heat loss by cranking the voltage up, right? I imagine that's how current interstate/cross-country power deals work

I'll ignore your other points, because sibling comments are addressing them better. So here's something more unique:

> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.

This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.

With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.

Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.

Seattle isn't a good example, as they have been carbon neutral since 2005. They have lots of hydro power in the Pacific Northwest.

1% from a Dyson Sphere would be a better energy return than 100% efficiency from any conventional energy sorce. Similarly, 20% from solar is competitive with 60% from nuclear, 50% from coal, and is easily better than 100% from my neighbor Dan riding a bicycle powered electricity generator.

You can't cite efficiency percentages in a vacuum to imply they are a better or worse than alternatives, because those aren't percentages of the same kinds of things, and they don't tell you about the economics, production in absolute terms or EROEI.

They're blue, and nothing about coal would be less impact.

Coal starts with pulling down entire mountains to get to the coal. The whole process starts with environmental destruction and that's how it ends.

The thermal mass of the panels is no where near significant. Especially compared to a run away greenhouse effect we know coal to cause.

Definitely not. At global scale, the offset effects of solar installations outweigh albedo effects on the order of about 30x. [0][1]

  [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w.pdf
  [1] https://acs.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Net_Radiative_Forcing_from_Widespread_Deployment_of_Photovoltaics/2871685