Yeah but:

1. Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north.

2. There's this genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.

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nnevod 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

HVDC (and even the grid in general) doesn't transmit all that much power. The largest currently existing line - Changji-Guquan UHVDC link in China - transmits 12GW. It's significantly more than what an average long-range link of current grids transmits, yes. But is it a lot?

Looking from consumption side, my home city of ~1 million people has several coal-fired plants, producing 1.5 GW of electricity and about 5GW of heating. Plus an hydropower station producing 6 GW. Most of that is consumed by an aluminium plant, but nonetheless, it's also part of the city. So that's roughly 12GW on a cold winter day (I suppose we do want to make heating cleaner as well), and probably 6 GW in summer. Heat pumps could be used to reduce power consumed by heating, but even the air-source pumps are not cheap, and they don't provide much efficiency gain in the cold. Ground-source pumps are extremely expensive and reqiure heat replenishment or the ground will freeze - such is the balance here.

So, the world's largest link to power just one city, out of tens of them. It quickly gets prohibitively expensive.

The only realictic answer, it seems, is annual-scale storage. I hope that "dirt pile storage" works well enough and succeeds, batteries are just too expensive and material hungry, hydrogen is problematic to store well either and we don't seem to have good enough scalable direct carbon capture to synthesize methane or propane.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north.

Sweden is worse but it's still a significant issue in e.g. New York or Paris or Auckland.

> There's genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.

It's more than 1000km from the places that get cold to a part of the world where it isn't winter.

Suppose we ignore that it's winter in the US Northeast and Southeast at the same time and run HVDC 2000+ km to Florida because it gets an extra hour of sunlight. Long distance transmission can't be used to counter seasonal output and regional weather at the same time because one requires the generation to be spread everywhere and the other requires it to be concentrated closer to the equator. If we concentrate the solar in Florida to mitigate winter in New England then we're screwed when Florida is overcast.

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gpm a day ago | parent [-]

> it's still a significant issue in e.g. New York or Paris or Auckland.

No it isn't.

Wires still might be worth it, but these are all close enough to the equator that you can just over provision locally without issue if you prefer.

> It's more than 1000km from the places that get cold

Solar panels work better in the cold. The issue is with how far from the equator Sweden is, not how cold it is.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent [-]

> No it isn't.

In the US Northeast solar generates around four times as much in July as December. This is sufficiently bad when what you need is more power in the winter. Paris is a little worse. Sweden is significantly worse.

> Wires still might be worth it, but these are all close enough to the equator that you can just over provision locally without issue if you prefer.

If I need 25% more output in the month when solar has 75% less output, how much do I have to over-provision?

> Solar panels work better in the cold.

Places that need more electricity in the winter because they're cold are cold in the winter because they're further away from the equator.

	▲	gpm a day ago \| parent [-]
		> This is sufficiently bad when what you need is more power in the winter. Nope, it isn't. Solar is cheap and the costs are continuing to fall quickly. Generating 5x more power in the summer than needed is perfectly fine and just a nice added bonus. Wires are probably a good idea to reduce that number, but with how solar panels are dropping in price traditional forms of electricity generation (nuclear, fossil fuels, etc) just won't be competitive at that multiplier even without them. > Places that need more electricity in the winter because they're cold are cold in the winter because they're further away from the equator. Temperature has a lot to do with ocean currents. NY and Sweden overlap in how cold they are (taking the right parts of both). The southernmost point of Sweden is at 55.3 degrees north, the northermost point of NY is at 45.0 degrees north. They aren't even close to overlapping in how far north they are.

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belorn a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wires and HVDC transmissions are nice, but they have a fairly large downside. They are major infrastructure projects that cost a lot of money and they don't produce any energy. Adding that cost to the solar panels makes them significantly more expensive, and solar/wind farms owners are not exactly willing to bear that cost.

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buzer a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You don't need to colocate the solar, but you need to make sure you can get that power when you actually need it.

During crisis nations are going to restrict exporting electricity and prioritizing their own residents. Electricity that is generated in Germany is not going to warm up Nordic countries if Germany doesn't let it.

Wires are also susceptible to sabotage, especially undersea ones (which are the current major connection points to Europe).

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hardlianotion a day ago | parent [-]

The issue is more the other way at the moment. Norwegian prices can get high as they are exposed to German demand over the interconnector.

	▲	buzer a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, that is the current situation but if the Nordic countries started relying on solar from central Europe (especially Finland since it doesn't have the hydro capacity Norway & Sweden have) things could get ugly during crisis. The GP essentially framed overprovisioned solar as solution to anyone who might rely on nuclear without taking in account realities in many countries.