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Oh yes, thousands of km of high power copper cables.

Crossing west-to-east Europe with electricity is already loosing 30% of it. Let's transport electricity from Australia to India !

And for wind, it's the same issue, when there is wind in Finland, there is wind in Spain. So you can't "balance thing" between countries.



> Crossing west-to-east Europe with electricity is already loosing 30% of it. Let's transport electricity from Australia to India !

From the DESERTEC website:

> For long transmission distances direct current transmission is superior to alternating current. Alternating current has high losses due to capacitive and inductive resistance, which do not occur in direct current transmission. With that technology, a 3000 km line (for example Cairo to Munich) has losses lower than 10%.


That would be high reactive losses due to unbalanced inductive and capacitive reactance in an ac load.


If the energy is practically free from the sun then 30% loss can be manageable if that's the cost of renewable reliable energy. Heck coal is only about 44% efficient to begin with and we currently accept that loss.


Over large distances, high-voltage direct current transmissions would be used which has losses in the low single-digit percentage per 1000km. See following link for details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...


Power lines don't use copper. They're aluminum with a steel core.




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