Singapore is not known to do nutty things, but this one sounds nuts:

https://youtu.be/wAv6GGDGeJM

Powering Singapore using solar energy converted in Australia transported over high voltage undersea cables.

Big Al, as I recall you may be the only power systems engineer here … would be interesting to read your take if you care to share.

Why nuts? Sounds perfectly sensible to me. The technology is largely there. There are huge sunk costs to pay, but I imagine it's not hard to figure out the scenarios in which the returns easily cover the true costs of creating the link. And the future potential seems ... sunny. The risks seem more political than economic.

Um, electricity idiot here. What's to prevent the sunken power lines from suffering some sort of enclosure failure and shorting out the Pacific Ocean? I'm only half joking. I said I was an electricity idiot.

Like I know we have gfi's on our outlets near water in a house, but presumably there is a surge that occurs initially to cause it to trip? Would these buried lines just have a series of mother-of-all-gfi's installed along their route? Because I'm assuming that once those lines are sunk, esp in the Pacific, no one's going back down to repair them.

Maybe they plan to use the redneck fishing technique which requires auto batteries and jumper cables.
They drop the hot cable clamps into the water and pickup the dead fish that float to the top.
Yes, it is illegal.

I'd be curious to see more technical details concerning this project, particularly regarding the underseas cable and possible energy storage to make the power derived from solar available all 24 hours of the day.

The relatively shallow depth of most of the cable route should make repairs possible, although not easy. The very long run of cable will pose some significant issues with the charging current as solid dielectric cables act like capacitors. I'm not sure what measures will be taken to compensate for this. It's much, much less an issue for aerial conductors.

The AC/DC and DC/AC converter technology is well-developed now and implemented on some very long circuits, the one in China cited in the video being a prime example. Such converters are in service in some underwater links, but this one is much more ambitious.

The energy storage requirements may actually be the most challenging to implement. Locating the solar power source in the Australian outback should reduce day-to-day variations due to weather, but day/night and seasonal variations still have to be catered to. I wonder if a mix of solar, wind, and maybe nuclear or hydropower might better balance supply and demand and require less storage capacity. At least there is plenty of area in the outback to build energy storage facilities
.
All in all, a very ambitious project. I hope to hear more details sometime.

Big Al

That was a fascinating article. I knew there were many underseas fiber optic cables, but hadn't realized how truly extensive the network had become.

One thing that I have never understood, going back to the early days of the internet, is the economic structure that allows payments for such infrastructure to flow to the owners, private or government, from all the myriad users of that infrastructure. Maybe an economist among our group can explain how that is accomplished or point to documents that explain it. With packet switching, there is no definite route that any bit of traffic may take from point A to point B. Thus, traffic can't be charged on a per-connection/time basis like we once were billed for long-distance telephony.

Big Al

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Like I know we have gfi's on our outlets near water in a house, but presumably there is a surge that occurs initially to cause it to trip? Would these buried lines just have a series of mother-of-all-gfi's installed along their route? Because I'm assuming that once those lines are sunk, esp in the Pacific, no one's going back down to repair them.

Essentially all electrical lines with significant voltage and/or current are protected by some sort of overcurrent devices such as fuses or circuit breakers. The proposed cable would certainly have such protection.

The GFI receptacles in your home work on a current balance principle, continuously monitoring the current in the hot (black) wire versus the neutral (white) wire. In a GFI recptacle, if those currents differ by more than 5 milliamperes, the device detects that difference in current, representing current flowing via different path (a ground fault) and trips open to stop the current flow. They've been required by the National Electrical Code for many years in locations such as near sinks or outdoors where a short to ground involving a person is particularly dangerous. As they are relatively inexpensive, their use has been required in more and more instances where the is some possibility of personal injury or death.

Big Al

quote:

Maybe an economist among our group can explain how that is accomplished

Don't look at me! I haven't a clue. It's not even remotely close to what I study. Sort of like asking a bird ecologist to discourse on molecular genetics. It's all biology!

If I looked into it, I suppose I could figure out the incentive structure, but I'm far too lazy/busy ...