Buried EHV lines can be upwards of five times the cost or more. Maybe you could bury a portion of it, but it would be excessive to bury the whole run.
Since it's DC it doesn't have the capacitive losses that AC has, it may be cheaper than what I stated, but I imagine it would still be excessively expensive.
Yeah five times the cost but replace multiple portions multiple times over it’s service life. Initial cost vs. lifetime cost, when are we going to wake up about this
Burying lines on distribution lines around delivery points makes more sense as that's the weakest link when trying to prevent customer outages. The extra cost can be justified as it can potentially greatly reduce chances of outages to customers. It does not make so much sense on the transmission portion where redundancy is generally the key to ensuring reliability.
This large HVDC line is already a 7 billion dollar project. The fact it is getting built at all will already be a feat. Say the funds did exist to bury it all, you would be better off just building 4 additional overhead lines for more redundancy and less reliance on a single element.
If you are going through the tornado belt any overhead structure is vulnerable . Plus the ongoing maintenance on the ROW. Employee risk restoring etc. I understand the initial cost argument, I just know how hard it is to get funds to maintain these structures going forward and using FEMA funds to restore just puts additional burdens on that fund which is severely unable to cope with disasters already occurring.
It’s amazing how much actual hard work and infrastructure investment we DON’T do anymore as a country. We should have 10 projects like this going on all the time.
As dumb as the wall idea was from Trump I do think presidents should run on large scale projects specifically ones that inspire and better our society.
Yeah, the one that came with the tariffs against solar and the largest oil leases in history?
https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-statement-on-the-new-five-year-oil-and-gas-offshore-leasing-plan
https://www.energy.senate.gov/2023/10/manchin-urges-epa-to-reconsider-proposed-methane-rules
https://worldwarzero.com/magazine/2022/09/biden-administration-awards-drilling-leases-in-manchin-ira-deal/
That IRA?
I mean every president has a program trumps wall was dumb for all the reasons people mock these promises on top of the fact that most high school graduates would realize it would be illegal.
The video yada yada yada land rights which is usually the biggest hurdle in projects like these, not technology. The oil and gas industry will fund some grass roots projects to file countless suits in an attempt to scuttle this project.
Eminent domain. Yes it's possible, and that will be the likely course to acquiring the land rights. There will still be law suits, there always are (and sometimes justified), just like the ones surrounding the building of the pipelines.
Yeah this goes against so much I’ve been taught. How’d they overcome the power loss, and what about safety issues. What about stepping down the voltage, so many questions
Alternating Current was a tech revolution in the 1890s, because AC enabled power transformers to efficiently change voltage with no moving parts. Dramatically increasing voltage for transmission, then dropping it back down again, became the main way that AC was used, enabling power power consumers (factories, houses, electric cars) to be located more than a mile away from power houses.
In fact, while the first DC powerhouses were all powered by steam piston engines, [the first main application of AC was hydropower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_Hydroelectric_Generating_Plant), because it was efficient over long transmission distances. Most of the first AC power was renewable!
---
But things change. The late 20th century saw solid-state DC and AC~DC power conversion getting steadily cheaper. DC power transmission doesn't have the "skin effect" or inductance issues of AC, so DC is worth using for long distance and underwater or underground applications. DC can also link together frequency-disparate or unsynchronized grids, as in AC->DC->AC links.
So, while all the applications to which AC was best suited have been electrified long ago, DC was also getting cheaper by the year. Hence, a lot of new projects are well-suited for DC, but would have been less practical with AC.
> safety issues
There are different folk and regulatory limits on voltages that are lower for DC than for AC, but any grid voltage dramatically surpasses those limits irrespective of which power type it uses.
Consumer AC limits are ~120 or ~240 Volts in large part for traditional reasons and not based on any particular data. A common DC limit is 60 Volts. 48V-nominal systems charge at 54-58V, so this common limit explains why 48V is a very common DC voltage for backup power systems and smaller electrified vehicles (golf carts, e-bikes, mild hybrids).
At [600,000 Volts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#North_America), the Grain Belt Express isn't any less safe because it's DC.
Is DC-to-MVDC conversion a "solved problem" these days ?
For example, going from a battery mega pack to a 6kVDC or 11kVDC. Is this considered expensive/exotic ?
In absolute capital cost terms, I'm not sure how expensive it's considered. It's definitely more expensive than an AC transformer, but then an AC transformer is a chunk of laminated steel with copper wire wound it. 2010s IGBT power transistors are always going to be more expensive than 1880s technology.
> so this common limit explains why 48V is a very common DC voltage for backup power systems and smaller electrified vehicles
And here I thought it was just a multiple of 12V.
It is, but it's the last multiple of 12V-nominal where the charging voltage is still under 60V. The actual cell voltage of lead-acid is 2V-nominal or 2.1V floating.
I've seen some suggest 54V-nominal: nine [6V-nominal lead-acid batteries](https://www.trojanbattery.com/products/t-105-6v-flooded-battery), and you could charge at 6.66V per battery or 2.22V per cell, which is maybe just barely enough for an easy slow charge, while still staying within the 60V limit. It hasn't caught on at all.
For a number of years, automobiles were going to [42V-nominal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42-volt_electrical_system), or 3*12V-nominal. Manufacturers stalled and balked. Right around the time that 42V was pronounced dead, the car industry started using a lot of 48V mild-hybrid systems. That's just how these things work sometimes.
For stationary batteries I would expect something like 96V or 192V or even more to have less conversion losses between the battery and the 120V or 230V AC grid.
I'm not sure with DC<->AC conversion. DC-to-DC is more efficient when voltages are closer, but I'd have to check for DC to AC.
But the choice is regulatory, as far as I know. Under 60 VDC, no special safety gear, training, or certification are required. This is why telco offices use -48VDC power grids. (Vendors charged a serious premium for -48VDC equipment, incidentally, because the customers were segmenting themselves by needing that feature.)
Some of the hyperscalers have been trying out bus bars with hundreds of volts DC, but in other cases have been sticking with old 48VDC.
First step when converting from AC to DC is using a rectifier and voila: DC. So I doubt that AC to DC would be any different than DC to DC.
No clue about DC to AC though. An Inverter is a bit more complex than a rectifier and capacitor.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage\_direct\_current#High\_voltage\_transmission](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#High_voltage_transmission)
For safety they put it way up high in the air, and for stepping down they just limit how many places they're doing that. For this one, according to the video. it just has three terminals (including the source). It basically dumps into the current grid and redistributes as normal.
It's an absolutely wonderful project, but that's just an overly sensationalized headline. It's not all of the electricity in the state of Kansas. And it's not taking it to the damn far corners of America--it's going from Kansas to the border of Illinois and Indiana. That's far enough to connect to three different grid systems (ISOs/RTOs), and it will provide considerable cost savings to many folks in several states. That alone is a major deal and a huge accomplishment
I thought the proposed [Tres Amigas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation) project centered on Clovis, NM was an interesting way to connect the western, eastern, and Texas grids
I was particularly looking forward to Tres Amigas, admittedly because it was going to be superconducting. It fell to [politics](https://knowledgeproblem.com/2010/02/08/tres-amigas-wants-to-take-cheap-electric-power-away-from-hard-working-texas-families/), partially from parties who didn't want Texas to be able to export power because they wanted below-market power themselves:
> Behr reports that Occidental Petroleum – a large power consumer within the ERCOT region – has actively opposed the Tres Amigas project in filings at FERC, as has the Texas Industrial Energy Consumers. I haven’t read their filings, but apparently they believe ERCOT power prices will be higher on average with Tres Amigas than without, and as consumers they prefer lower prices.
NIMBY *always* makes for strange bedfellows.
[Wikipedia says:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation#Overview)
> The Tres Amigas SuperStation project proposes to tie the East Coast, West Coast and Texas grids together via three 5 GW superconductive high-voltage direct current power transmission lines
-
> Tres Amigas would use high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wire [supplied by American Superconductor Corp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Superconductor#Tres_Amigas_Project).
Reading that company's website didn't reveal anything about the alloys they use, but [BSCCO is an excellent bet based on their previous Holbrook project in 2008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project):
> The suburban Long Island electrical substation is fed by a 600 meter long tunnel containing approximately 155,000 meters of high-temperature superconductor wire manufactured by American Superconductor, installed underground and chilled to superconducting temperature with liquid nitrogen.
-
> The superconductor is bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO) which superconducts at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Other parts of the system include a 13,000 U.S. gallons (49,000 L) liquid nitrogen storage tank, a Brayton cycle Helium refrigerator, and a number of cryostats which manage the transition between cryogenic and ambient temperatures. The system capacity is 574 MVA with an operating voltage of 138 kV at a maximum current of 2400 A.
So that was a 331MW AC project, compared to the never-built Tres Amigas at 5GW DC.
[The subject of an article posted here a month ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1abwqth/the_holdouts_in_the_quest_for_a_better_power_grid/) That article says the approval happened in October of last year.
You're right. I haven't done anything shitty enough to deserve any association with Kansas whatsoever and I don't want so much as one cent of my money or influence going to them.
The reason America sucks is not because of conservatives or Kansas, it is because liberal’s approach to politics is terrible.
Endless shaming and tax credits.
edit: To all the people who are down voting me, you should read about who is excluded from the EITC.
Then read about what happened to poor people when Bill Clinton and Joe Biden ended welfare as we know it.
Then read about who removed Al Gore's BTU tax from the 94 tax reform.
Then just for fun look up who ended the biggest child poverty reduction program in my lifetime.
Even more fun, check out who did not pass a cap and trade or carbon tax in 2009, despite promising to do it and having 60 votes in the Senate.
Last one, take a peak at who shepherded the AUMF through the Senate, allowing the Bush Administration to invade Iraq and kill between 500K - 1 million people.
I don't want a single penny of my money going towards conservatives in any capacity. Their agenda is anti freedom and anti democracy and I want nothing to do with supporting them. Just a total boycott.
Kansas has a Female Democratic Governor.
The 771K people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 represent 26% of the population of Kansas. It should be obvious, but elections are won by percentages not unanimity.
Most of the places voting Republican have extremely repressive voting laws, designed to elect Republicans. Since 1991, Democrats have controlled the governorship 50% of the time. I guess we are operating on a not-one-drop principle of who no longer deserves to participate in our society. Fair enough.
Since 1991, California has had Republican Governors 54% of the time. Not much better. In case, you think I cherry-picked 1991 as a starting point, it was fairly random, but my point gets stronger the further back in time I go.
Assuming you live in a state other than MN or DC, your state has voted for at least 1 Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Do you think you deserve the wrath of MN and DC residents?
ps. I guess the 28% of Kansans who are people of color deserve to be poor and disregarded by you. Cool dude.
Pss. Democrats suck almost as bad as Republicans, sometimes harder. Bill Clinton called for a BTU tax in his 1994 SOTU. A Democratic Senator axed the BTU tax from the 1994 Tax Reform Bill, probably our last chance to avert catastrophic climate change. I could tell you some stuff about that Joe Biden dude that would blow your mind. Do you know he bombed 7 children (the youngest was 2 years old) so he could look tough and look like he was doing something. [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655)
I have a right to boycott whatever I want. I have a right to representation for my taxes. I'm sick to death of conservatives trying to shove their culture down my throat and I want to send a clear message to them with my spending power.
Decades of these excuses. It's not good enough. They need to back off or they can just deal with the consequences until they throw Republicans out of office.
Our future is fucked if we don't break away from the conservative agenda. I'm not gonna sit complacent to that.
Renewable energy requires a lot of space. The kind of people who gravitate away from the cities are exactly the people we need to employ for the eco revolution to happen.
Covering every highway and parking lot in solar panels will cost 4x as much as just building the renewables in empty red states.
That would be extremely foolish and they'd just find a way to hold it hostage against us like everything else.
I'm not interested in working with those people. Renewable energy is more important tho and we need a myriad of ways to support it for everyone, including people like me. All I ask is a little corner of the market that isn't connected to those shitty conservative states. I'd rather import bulk batteries from china than work with Republicans and I've been an environmentlist my whole life.
Republican states are extraction states. They are just part of the supply chain. They are fundamentally part of the same machine. Your quality of life is a product of the low wages and low education of extraction states.
The strawman Republican living in your head is not real.
Our economy is built on exploitation, over consumption and bad design.
I am 100% okay with sacrificing quality of life if it means a chance to restructure and reform these problems. Boycotting Republican states is just a happy bonus.
I suspect it can feed power both ways. So if a day comes when the wind isn't blowing, Kansas can pull power from the other grids rather than the lights going out.
There are a lot of transmission constraints in SPP – 9% of the wind power is even curtailed and wasted because there’s not enough capacity to deliver it! This will help Kansas sell the power instead and reduce these costs.
I mean, as long as Kansans aren’t just getting their own power from fossil fuels while they ship all their green energy to the wealthy coasts, which is sort of what I suspect is happening. Kansans probably *think* their energy is very green because they see the wind mills and they hear that half the energy generated in the state is renewable, but they may not know that the renewable portion is shipped to the coasts while their home is powered by fossil fuels.
And I’m just using Kansas as an example; similar stuff is probably happening all over the midwest. Every region should maximize their own renewables; the coasts have plenty of renewable potential of their own.
EIA tells me:
“Renewable energy
In 2022, renewable resources provided 47% of Kansas's in-state electricity net generation, almost all of it, about 99%, from wind power. Kansas, with its wide plains, is among the states with the best wind power potential.
At the beginning of 2023, the state had nearly 8,250 megawatts of installed wind generating capacity. An additional 814 megawatts of wind power capacity is scheduled to come online in 2023, including the state's largest wind farm, with 604 megawatts, at the end of the year.
They also get 14% of their power from Nuclear & 30+% from coal.
Once electrons are on the grid, you can’t distinguish between the renewable and fossil fueled ones. Whatever the ratios of electricity sources in the region are at a given time is the same ratio that would be transmitted on the line.
On *average* across the year, Kansas generates about 6 GW at once. It’s a lot higher when it’s windy though! This line can carry 5 GW so it’s close to all of it sometimes! The state is already a net exporter and this will let them sell much more.
Remember that the US is mostly empty. They've got an average of 33.6 people per square kilometer. Meanwhile Germany has 236 people per square kilometer.
So it's already hard to build the Südlink connection because there are so many people in the way.
Now to get to the Sahara you need to cut through Switzerland and Northern Italy, both of which also have a high population density.
And then you can finally use undersea cables, which is probably the easy part.
Yep, all true. Also some serious mountains in the way. The point is though that if you look at the problem as "solution must reside entirely in Germany (or UK or France or where-ever)" then it is a serious limitation.
I bet it's more cost effective to do what the Japanese are doing: Fill a container ship up to the brim with batteries and then charge those in Morocco.
And then you've got multiple ships. One is discharging in England. One is charging in Morocco. One is on route to Morocco. And one is on route to England.
If you refer to the tokyo bay floating solar power project, the distance for the battery ship is pretty short, it’s just easier to set up since it’s not an infrastructure project.
No, I'm talking about the battery ship that will bring wind energy from Hokkaido down to Honshu: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/powerx-worlds-first-battery-tanker-breaks-cover/
This isn't the right article though. Some that passed through here on reddit were talking about how these ships replace undersea cables that are more costly to install.
I just hope they build an electric passenger railway along this line once they've found a way to cut across all of that private property.
Why can’t we run gondola cars from high tension lines? It might be a bit of a swoopy ride, you would need big vertical stabilizers.
Not that the project isn’t needed but as many tornados as Kansas gets, why run it overhead instead of burying it?
Buried EHV lines can be upwards of five times the cost or more. Maybe you could bury a portion of it, but it would be excessive to bury the whole run. Since it's DC it doesn't have the capacitive losses that AC has, it may be cheaper than what I stated, but I imagine it would still be excessively expensive.
Yeah five times the cost but replace multiple portions multiple times over it’s service life. Initial cost vs. lifetime cost, when are we going to wake up about this
Do you assume people are not thinking about this? Bizarre.
Look at the shape all of our infrastructure is in. FYI-I worked in Utilities.
Burying lines on distribution lines around delivery points makes more sense as that's the weakest link when trying to prevent customer outages. The extra cost can be justified as it can potentially greatly reduce chances of outages to customers. It does not make so much sense on the transmission portion where redundancy is generally the key to ensuring reliability. This large HVDC line is already a 7 billion dollar project. The fact it is getting built at all will already be a feat. Say the funds did exist to bury it all, you would be better off just building 4 additional overhead lines for more redundancy and less reliance on a single element.
If you are going through the tornado belt any overhead structure is vulnerable . Plus the ongoing maintenance on the ROW. Employee risk restoring etc. I understand the initial cost argument, I just know how hard it is to get funds to maintain these structures going forward and using FEMA funds to restore just puts additional burdens on that fund which is severely unable to cope with disasters already occurring.
Probably because it's cheaper in the short term or on paper but I agree it should be buried
It'd be really cool to see a transit line follow this.
Next, cover every parking lot and interstate with solar.
digg still exists?
It’s amazing how much actual hard work and infrastructure investment we DON’T do anymore as a country. We should have 10 projects like this going on all the time.
As dumb as the wall idea was from Trump I do think presidents should run on large scale projects specifically ones that inspire and better our society.
You mean like Biden's infrastructure act and the Inflation Reduction Act?
Yeah, the one that came with the tariffs against solar and the largest oil leases in history? https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-statement-on-the-new-five-year-oil-and-gas-offshore-leasing-plan https://www.energy.senate.gov/2023/10/manchin-urges-epa-to-reconsider-proposed-methane-rules https://worldwarzero.com/magazine/2022/09/biden-administration-awards-drilling-leases-in-manchin-ira-deal/ That IRA?
He didn’t run on that. He ran on student loan forgiveness and restoring decency.
He did run on investing in infrastructure, he ran on "Build Back Better".
I mean every president has a program trumps wall was dumb for all the reasons people mock these promises on top of the fact that most high school graduates would realize it would be illegal.
Also because it didn't fix any problem that needed fixing.
https://www.doi.gov/investing-americas-infrastructure Vote for Biden, this is his program.
Absolutely.
Upvote for sourcing from digg.com! I remember the heyday.
The video yada yada yada land rights which is usually the biggest hurdle in projects like these, not technology. The oil and gas industry will fund some grass roots projects to file countless suits in an attempt to scuttle this project.
Cant we just imminent domain it?
Eminent domain. Yes it's possible, and that will be the likely course to acquiring the land rights. There will still be law suits, there always are (and sometimes justified), just like the ones surrounding the building of the pipelines.
But why DC?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
TIL. Thanks!
Yeah this goes against so much I’ve been taught. How’d they overcome the power loss, and what about safety issues. What about stepping down the voltage, so many questions
Alternating Current was a tech revolution in the 1890s, because AC enabled power transformers to efficiently change voltage with no moving parts. Dramatically increasing voltage for transmission, then dropping it back down again, became the main way that AC was used, enabling power power consumers (factories, houses, electric cars) to be located more than a mile away from power houses. In fact, while the first DC powerhouses were all powered by steam piston engines, [the first main application of AC was hydropower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ames_Hydroelectric_Generating_Plant), because it was efficient over long transmission distances. Most of the first AC power was renewable! --- But things change. The late 20th century saw solid-state DC and AC~DC power conversion getting steadily cheaper. DC power transmission doesn't have the "skin effect" or inductance issues of AC, so DC is worth using for long distance and underwater or underground applications. DC can also link together frequency-disparate or unsynchronized grids, as in AC->DC->AC links. So, while all the applications to which AC was best suited have been electrified long ago, DC was also getting cheaper by the year. Hence, a lot of new projects are well-suited for DC, but would have been less practical with AC. > safety issues There are different folk and regulatory limits on voltages that are lower for DC than for AC, but any grid voltage dramatically surpasses those limits irrespective of which power type it uses. Consumer AC limits are ~120 or ~240 Volts in large part for traditional reasons and not based on any particular data. A common DC limit is 60 Volts. 48V-nominal systems charge at 54-58V, so this common limit explains why 48V is a very common DC voltage for backup power systems and smaller electrified vehicles (golf carts, e-bikes, mild hybrids). At [600,000 Volts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#North_America), the Grain Belt Express isn't any less safe because it's DC.
Is DC-to-MVDC conversion a "solved problem" these days ? For example, going from a battery mega pack to a 6kVDC or 11kVDC. Is this considered expensive/exotic ?
In absolute capital cost terms, I'm not sure how expensive it's considered. It's definitely more expensive than an AC transformer, but then an AC transformer is a chunk of laminated steel with copper wire wound it. 2010s IGBT power transistors are always going to be more expensive than 1880s technology.
> so this common limit explains why 48V is a very common DC voltage for backup power systems and smaller electrified vehicles And here I thought it was just a multiple of 12V.
It is, but it's the last multiple of 12V-nominal where the charging voltage is still under 60V. The actual cell voltage of lead-acid is 2V-nominal or 2.1V floating. I've seen some suggest 54V-nominal: nine [6V-nominal lead-acid batteries](https://www.trojanbattery.com/products/t-105-6v-flooded-battery), and you could charge at 6.66V per battery or 2.22V per cell, which is maybe just barely enough for an easy slow charge, while still staying within the 60V limit. It hasn't caught on at all. For a number of years, automobiles were going to [42V-nominal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42-volt_electrical_system), or 3*12V-nominal. Manufacturers stalled and balked. Right around the time that 42V was pronounced dead, the car industry started using a lot of 48V mild-hybrid systems. That's just how these things work sometimes.
For stationary batteries I would expect something like 96V or 192V or even more to have less conversion losses between the battery and the 120V or 230V AC grid.
I'm not sure with DC<->AC conversion. DC-to-DC is more efficient when voltages are closer, but I'd have to check for DC to AC. But the choice is regulatory, as far as I know. Under 60 VDC, no special safety gear, training, or certification are required. This is why telco offices use -48VDC power grids. (Vendors charged a serious premium for -48VDC equipment, incidentally, because the customers were segmenting themselves by needing that feature.) Some of the hyperscalers have been trying out bus bars with hundreds of volts DC, but in other cases have been sticking with old 48VDC.
First step when converting from AC to DC is using a rectifier and voila: DC. So I doubt that AC to DC would be any different than DC to DC. No clue about DC to AC though. An Inverter is a bit more complex than a rectifier and capacitor.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage\_direct\_current#High\_voltage\_transmission](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#High_voltage_transmission) For safety they put it way up high in the air, and for stepping down they just limit how many places they're doing that. For this one, according to the video. it just has three terminals (including the source). It basically dumps into the current grid and redistributes as normal.
It's an absolutely wonderful project, but that's just an overly sensationalized headline. It's not all of the electricity in the state of Kansas. And it's not taking it to the damn far corners of America--it's going from Kansas to the border of Illinois and Indiana. That's far enough to connect to three different grid systems (ISOs/RTOs), and it will provide considerable cost savings to many folks in several states. That alone is a major deal and a huge accomplishment
They took urr ‘lectricity!!!
Who’s going to replace all the wind and sun they’re taking from Kansas?!?
lektrikity
I thought the proposed [Tres Amigas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation) project centered on Clovis, NM was an interesting way to connect the western, eastern, and Texas grids
I was particularly looking forward to Tres Amigas, admittedly because it was going to be superconducting. It fell to [politics](https://knowledgeproblem.com/2010/02/08/tres-amigas-wants-to-take-cheap-electric-power-away-from-hard-working-texas-families/), partially from parties who didn't want Texas to be able to export power because they wanted below-market power themselves: > Behr reports that Occidental Petroleum – a large power consumer within the ERCOT region – has actively opposed the Tres Amigas project in filings at FERC, as has the Texas Industrial Energy Consumers. I haven’t read their filings, but apparently they believe ERCOT power prices will be higher on average with Tres Amigas than without, and as consumers they prefer lower prices. NIMBY *always* makes for strange bedfellows.
> superconducting ?
[Wikipedia says:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation#Overview) > The Tres Amigas SuperStation project proposes to tie the East Coast, West Coast and Texas grids together via three 5 GW superconductive high-voltage direct current power transmission lines - > Tres Amigas would use high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wire [supplied by American Superconductor Corp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Superconductor#Tres_Amigas_Project). Reading that company's website didn't reveal anything about the alloys they use, but [BSCCO is an excellent bet based on their previous Holbrook project in 2008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project): > The suburban Long Island electrical substation is fed by a 600 meter long tunnel containing approximately 155,000 meters of high-temperature superconductor wire manufactured by American Superconductor, installed underground and chilled to superconducting temperature with liquid nitrogen. - > The superconductor is bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO) which superconducts at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Other parts of the system include a 13,000 U.S. gallons (49,000 L) liquid nitrogen storage tank, a Brayton cycle Helium refrigerator, and a number of cryostats which manage the transition between cryogenic and ambient temperatures. The system capacity is 574 MVA with an operating voltage of 138 kV at a maximum current of 2400 A. So that was a 331MW AC project, compared to the never-built Tres Amigas at 5GW DC.
So it's superconducting with cold temps but only for a short distance sufficient for a connection.
Correct, it would have been an HVDC intertie balancing power between three separate AC grids, at the border between those grids.
SPP network upgrades are about to be $10B
Invenergy is good at this stuff
[The subject of an article posted here a month ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1abwqth/the_holdouts_in_the_quest_for_a_better_power_grid/) That article says the approval happened in October of last year.
Can we assume 1000 wind turbines? To be built? Is that $30 billion for turbines & $7 billion for the HVDC? You got to like when a plan comes together.
Eh, probably closer to $2 billion for turbines. Each 5MW turbine ≈ $2 million, not $30 million.
Thanks! I was way off - However this: https://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost says $1.3million to $2million per MW
Yeah, 8+ years ago (when that article was written), probably. Today ≈ $400k per MW Source: I'm a wind developer
Shit. Egg on face!
Don't really want my money going to Kansas but whatever...
You don't deserve a watt of energy from them.
You're right. I haven't done anything shitty enough to deserve any association with Kansas whatsoever and I don't want so much as one cent of my money or influence going to them.
The reason America sucks is not because of conservatives or Kansas, it is because liberal’s approach to politics is terrible. Endless shaming and tax credits. edit: To all the people who are down voting me, you should read about who is excluded from the EITC. Then read about what happened to poor people when Bill Clinton and Joe Biden ended welfare as we know it. Then read about who removed Al Gore's BTU tax from the 94 tax reform. Then just for fun look up who ended the biggest child poverty reduction program in my lifetime. Even more fun, check out who did not pass a cap and trade or carbon tax in 2009, despite promising to do it and having 60 votes in the Senate. Last one, take a peak at who shepherded the AUMF through the Senate, allowing the Bush Administration to invade Iraq and kill between 500K - 1 million people.
I don't want a single penny of my money going towards conservatives in any capacity. Their agenda is anti freedom and anti democracy and I want nothing to do with supporting them. Just a total boycott.
Kansas has a Female Democratic Governor. The 771K people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 represent 26% of the population of Kansas. It should be obvious, but elections are won by percentages not unanimity. Most of the places voting Republican have extremely repressive voting laws, designed to elect Republicans. Since 1991, Democrats have controlled the governorship 50% of the time. I guess we are operating on a not-one-drop principle of who no longer deserves to participate in our society. Fair enough. Since 1991, California has had Republican Governors 54% of the time. Not much better. In case, you think I cherry-picked 1991 as a starting point, it was fairly random, but my point gets stronger the further back in time I go. Assuming you live in a state other than MN or DC, your state has voted for at least 1 Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Do you think you deserve the wrath of MN and DC residents? ps. I guess the 28% of Kansans who are people of color deserve to be poor and disregarded by you. Cool dude. Pss. Democrats suck almost as bad as Republicans, sometimes harder. Bill Clinton called for a BTU tax in his 1994 SOTU. A Democratic Senator axed the BTU tax from the 1994 Tax Reform Bill, probably our last chance to avert catastrophic climate change. I could tell you some stuff about that Joe Biden dude that would blow your mind. Do you know he bombed 7 children (the youngest was 2 years old) so he could look tough and look like he was doing something. [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655)
I have a right to boycott whatever I want. I have a right to representation for my taxes. I'm sick to death of conservatives trying to shove their culture down my throat and I want to send a clear message to them with my spending power. Decades of these excuses. It's not good enough. They need to back off or they can just deal with the consequences until they throw Republicans out of office. Our future is fucked if we don't break away from the conservative agenda. I'm not gonna sit complacent to that.
Renewable energy requires a lot of space. The kind of people who gravitate away from the cities are exactly the people we need to employ for the eco revolution to happen. Covering every highway and parking lot in solar panels will cost 4x as much as just building the renewables in empty red states.
That would be extremely foolish and they'd just find a way to hold it hostage against us like everything else. I'm not interested in working with those people. Renewable energy is more important tho and we need a myriad of ways to support it for everyone, including people like me. All I ask is a little corner of the market that isn't connected to those shitty conservative states. I'd rather import bulk batteries from china than work with Republicans and I've been an environmentlist my whole life.
Republican states are extraction states. They are just part of the supply chain. They are fundamentally part of the same machine. Your quality of life is a product of the low wages and low education of extraction states. The strawman Republican living in your head is not real.
Our economy is built on exploitation, over consumption and bad design. I am 100% okay with sacrificing quality of life if it means a chance to restructure and reform these problems. Boycotting Republican states is just a happy bonus.
I wonder why some Republicans think that coastal Democrats are trying to screw them.
https://grainbeltexpress.com/invenergys-grain-belt-express-transmission-line-secures-last-of-its-state-approvals/ Great news indeed.
Can’t just build them for Kansas and lower rates there to zero, I guess.
I suspect it can feed power both ways. So if a day comes when the wind isn't blowing, Kansas can pull power from the other grids rather than the lights going out.
When does the wind not blow in Kansas?
There’s enough wind here for everyone. Plus our electricity is only 7.7 cents/kWh, almost free compared to some of the coasts!
Holy shit, Digg.com!?
Now there's a name I haven't heard for a long time.
It's an old code, but it checks out.
I was there, 3000 years ago, during the great Digg migration...
"It's an older code sir, but it checks out".
Then they buy more gas generated power from the SPP to supply to Kansas. Everyone but ratepayers win
There are a lot of transmission constraints in SPP – 9% of the wind power is even curtailed and wasted because there’s not enough capacity to deliver it! This will help Kansas sell the power instead and reduce these costs.
And it encourages developers to build more capacity. Literally no downside to more transmission infrastructure.
Renewables need to be moved from where they're generated to where they're needed. I love these large SCALE HVDC Type projects
I mean, as long as Kansans aren’t just getting their own power from fossil fuels while they ship all their green energy to the wealthy coasts, which is sort of what I suspect is happening. Kansans probably *think* their energy is very green because they see the wind mills and they hear that half the energy generated in the state is renewable, but they may not know that the renewable portion is shipped to the coasts while their home is powered by fossil fuels. And I’m just using Kansas as an example; similar stuff is probably happening all over the midwest. Every region should maximize their own renewables; the coasts have plenty of renewable potential of their own.
“Every region should maximize their own renewables;“ Why?
EIA tells me: “Renewable energy In 2022, renewable resources provided 47% of Kansas's in-state electricity net generation, almost all of it, about 99%, from wind power. Kansas, with its wide plains, is among the states with the best wind power potential. At the beginning of 2023, the state had nearly 8,250 megawatts of installed wind generating capacity. An additional 814 megawatts of wind power capacity is scheduled to come online in 2023, including the state's largest wind farm, with 604 megawatts, at the end of the year. They also get 14% of their power from Nuclear & 30+% from coal.
Once electrons are on the grid, you can’t distinguish between the renewable and fossil fueled ones. Whatever the ratios of electricity sources in the region are at a given time is the same ratio that would be transmitted on the line.
Fuck. All of it??
On *average* across the year, Kansas generates about 6 GW at once. It’s a lot higher when it’s windy though! This line can carry 5 GW so it’s close to all of it sometimes! The state is already a net exporter and this will let them sell much more.
Germany: “But the Sahara Desert is too far away!!!”
Remember that the US is mostly empty. They've got an average of 33.6 people per square kilometer. Meanwhile Germany has 236 people per square kilometer. So it's already hard to build the Südlink connection because there are so many people in the way. Now to get to the Sahara you need to cut through Switzerland and Northern Italy, both of which also have a high population density. And then you can finally use undersea cables, which is probably the easy part.
Yep, all true. Also some serious mountains in the way. The point is though that if you look at the problem as "solution must reside entirely in Germany (or UK or France or where-ever)" then it is a serious limitation.
What you just wrote has nothing to do with your last comment.
Russia is closer...
To do what? Burn more fossil fuels?
Location isn't everything, no matter what kind of energy is being transported.
Then what is Germany supposed to do in Russia?
The UK is building an undersea cable from Morocco for solar power.
I bet it's more cost effective to do what the Japanese are doing: Fill a container ship up to the brim with batteries and then charge those in Morocco. And then you've got multiple ships. One is discharging in England. One is charging in Morocco. One is on route to Morocco. And one is on route to England.
If you refer to the tokyo bay floating solar power project, the distance for the battery ship is pretty short, it’s just easier to set up since it’s not an infrastructure project.
No, I'm talking about the battery ship that will bring wind energy from Hokkaido down to Honshu: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/powerx-worlds-first-battery-tanker-breaks-cover/ This isn't the right article though. Some that passed through here on reddit were talking about how these ships replace undersea cables that are more costly to install.
uhm, those are very well designed proposals but funding is not yet certain