High voltage inter connects are also more expensive than nuclear power to build.
Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines.
The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country.
The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand.
>Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?
We don't have 40 years to wait for that technology to mature. We need to be cutting emissions now. Green energy has resulted in increasing use of fossil fuels. The only reason why total CO2 production has dropped is because we've been building gas power plants instead of coal.
> High voltage inter connects are also more expensive
Aren't these paid for by the excess electricity that you've sold?
> Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines. The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country. The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand.
Isn't this simply describing what the current situation is?
>The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country.
That is because America technically is not or should not be and what definitely not founded as "a single country". The USA was supposed to be and by law, i.e., the constitution should far more be governed like a ~2005 EU. The Federal government is in many ways extremely illegitimate in how it acts in illegal ways in direct violation and contradiction with the Constitution, i.e., the supreme law of the land, i.e., the highest law above which even Federal legislators cannot act without violating the law.
It is one of those fundamental things that the vast majority of people even in the USA simply do not comprehend on an even basic level, not even to mention anyone outside of the US. It's one of those obvious and blatant lies that humans somehow have the capacity to simply live with as if it is not a lie.
It is an odd phenomenon when one is able to recognize the mass delusion for what it is. Imagine being somewhere in a group and all the sudden everyone in that group but you insists that grass is in fact not green at all, but rather purple. You would be astonished and confused at first and incredulous as to what is going on, before you went through some phases to rest on a kind of bargained acceptance of "ok, well I guess we are doing that now", regardless of how insane and stupid it is.
The us is too large to have a single grid. AC can't be synchronized across that large an area, sine waves need to be in different parts of the cycle at different times and so a generator on either coast end up fighting each other.
We can and should do more high voltage DC interconnects, but that isn't the same as making the grid larger.
Outside of Russia there are no transcontinental high voltage lines.
The US doesn't even have a single energy grid despite being a single country.
The European market is probably the most tightly coupled in the world and the inter-border power lines can carry less than 20% of most countries power demand.
>Or convert the excess capacity to green hydrogen which is used as an energy source for things like steel manufacturing?
We don't have 40 years to wait for that technology to mature. We need to be cutting emissions now. Green energy has resulted in increasing use of fossil fuels. The only reason why total CO2 production has dropped is because we've been building gas power plants instead of coal.