If the problem with Solar power is that energy can’t be easily stored why don’t we build big power cables under the sea from areas where there is a lot of sun, ie around the equator, especially the Sahara. My thinking is that we have big communication cables connecting the U.K. and US, why could this not work for power?
My initial thoughts are bandwidth/ capacity issues and politics/geopolitics
In: Engineering
It’s financially and functionally unfeasible. The cables running under the ocean are mostly, if not entirely, fiber optic cables. They’re basically flexible glass that can bounce around a beam of light you shine into it. You can pulse that light in specific patterns to send data, and they’re really useful over long distances since they don’t have many losses. They can not transmit power though, only data.
Running a conventional cable over that distance would be a waste. Regular cable that’s made of something like copper creates losses the longer the cable is. When you’re talking a distance of the Atlantic Ocean, and then the distance to somewhere like the Sahara, between your power source and the receiving end, you’d barely get any power, if you did get any at all. There are relatively long cables, but nothing that long. It’d be likely billions of dollars in construction just for the cable, and then billions more for the solar farms and wouldn’t produce as much power as just regular stations or more local solar farms.
It’s much more practical to build your power source closer to where it’s needed. And if you want to go full renewable, it’d be more effective to just diversify your portfolio with a mix of things like wind, hydro, geothermal, and solar. Even more practically you could generate a very steady and very environmentally clean base load using nuclear and invest in smaller scale storage and renewables for the fluctuations in your load.
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