I did some fast back of the napkin math on the idea of sahara solar + electrified shipping + sodium ion batteries. A lot depends on the, as yet, fully disclosed pricing of sodium ion batteries but the trend in pricing, and capacity, is clear and the price point may have already happened to make this viable. One thing is clear though, even if my napkin math was massively optimistic and it isn't economically feasible now it will be shortly and at that point energy production around the world is potentially disrupted. Ships can pull in and feed the grid directly or offload containers and onload empty ones to make the trip back for cheap, clean, renewable power. It is looking more and more viable to ship electrons like we do for oil and that is a major game-changer.

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idontwantthis 5 days ago | parent [-]

That's both amazing and hilarious just like filling a plane with hard drives is both insanely effective and just plain insane.

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jmward01 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Just to put the market into perspective, the UK was looking to build an undersea cable to push power from Morocco but canceled it [1]. That cable would have provided somewhere around 8% of the power to the UK and the whole project was slated to cost 25bn pounds (~$33b USD). Imagine sahara solar shipping could provide that but also supply (cheaper) to Spain, Italy, etc. As the tech gets better and cheaper the Americas could become customers too. Suddenly Timbuktu becoming an energy hub for the world doesn't sound as crazy as, well, it sounds.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/uk-morocco-renewable-energy-xlink...

	▲	LtdJorge 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We already have too much solar in Spain, I don’t think we need to rely more on it. Even worse if it’s coming from a strategic enemy.

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manquer 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

AWS Snowmobile exists , I wouldn’t call filling a truck (or a plane) with hard disks insane .

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eichin 3 days ago | parent [-]

mmm, it was discontinued in 2024 - so maybe amazon decided it was insane (well, insufficiently economic?) after all?

	▲	manquer 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Less demand these days, In 2015 when it launched there was lot more drive to move to the cloud, lift and shift was the industry mantra. By 2024 the kind of orgs with >100 PB have already moved to cloud or have no plans to do so. The current solution is we can bring our own devices and reserve ports on a AWS Data Transfer Terminal. It costs $300-500/hour USD for a 100 GbE bandwidth so not really cheap. While AWS is stopping doing devices for migration (not economical at low volumes these days). They however still support physical transfers so customers can pack their own planes so to speak with hard disks to the AWS terminal.