The World Needs Supergrids, But There's a Problem

I'm a landowner in Finland and when a grid company needs to work on my land, they just inform me and start working. The law says that they must cause only minimal damage to my land and clear up any mess, but I cannot stop them. I like this system, power grids are more important than my "not in my backyard" feelings.

I am somewhat skeptic because of what I see happening in my area. A simple interconnection beween Canada and USA has been stopped by a referendum promoted by an american energy producer to stop a competitor. In this case clean hydroelectric energy will not be able to replace coal and gas to fight climate change.

Well super grids are not really just a "proposal" in Asia. Indian national grid is already connected to Nepal Bhutan and Bangladesh and another HVDC line to Srilanka is under implementation (Madurai - Anuradhapura HVDC). So I think regional super grids are already becoming reality and might transform into intercontinental grids in the future

The Russia-Europe energy debacle shows that we cannot do an international energy grid, you can’t rely on adversaries for energy. Europe could connect within the EU, the US could potentially connect with Canada and maybe Mexico but a massive connected system that connects most of the world would be impossible from a national security standpoint

India also has a plan called OSOWOG - One Sun-One World-One Grid.

Nice, surprised Suncable wasn't mentioned as that project plans to power 15% of Singapore through the world's largest solar farm in Australia and already has billions in funding through a 4200km underwater HVDC connection to provide a stedy 3.2GW of energy from its 17GWh solar farm.

Not the future of "energy", but the future of "energy transfer". Those are related, but different concepts.

Tesla didn't invent AC, he invented 3-phase AC, huge difference.

Two things will make renewable energy possible. 1.) global super grid, 2.) power storage facitilies. My money is on power storage facilities.

There's a series of videos called "The Light Tamers" by a physics professor here on YouTube that has the history of electricity in more details. Though Tesla was a main character in the story, the three phase/three wire system was developed by a Russian in Germany and Steinmetz developed a series of mathematical tools - mainly the Phasor - that were fundamental to the development of the field. The first DC power transmission was installed in Brazil to get the 50Hz from the 8 turbines that generate energy to Paraguay into a town near where I live in São Paulo. However, that was only needed because on the agreement to build the Itaipu power plant a rather small country, Paraguay, got half of the generators and they were all built for 50Hz while Brazil uses 60Hz. Brazil has a historic debt with Paraguay because of the late 19th century war so I find the agreement fair.

its really dangerous to centralize sources of energy... Recent situation in Russia is obious example what might happened if you become dependent.

Go Mongolia! I had no idea it had THAT much green energy potential. I knew it had a lot but that much? WOW!!!

In India we have one nation one grid unlike us where there are multiple grids. There are also synchronous interconnections to Bhutan, and asynchronous links with Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal. An undersea interconnection to Sri Lanka (India–Sri Lanka HVDC Interconnection) has also been proposed. A proposed interconnection between Myanmar and Thailand would facilitate the creation of a power pool and enable trading among all BIMSTEC nations

The important thing is cooperation of every individual involve and set aside politics. No country should have a control on energy. Unless we overcome this, We'll have hard time achieving this.

Man this makes renewable energy way more practical, love this!!

The problem with super grids is dependency on foreign countries. We need to figure out how to live in an area based off the area, not based of the fact you can import resources to live in an unsustainable area. Without the pressure to supply for local demand with local power sources, we lose innovation and we abuse the power sources we already have. Just like oil/coal/gas. There will be problems with renewables and a sustainable approach is a diversified one where the needs are met by tailor made solutions for the area, not just brute force imported.

Very nice, but I have 3 questions: 1- How much does a single project cost: installation, equipment, maintenance,...? 2- Will all consumers connected to the cable pay the same unit price? 3- Doesn't the interconnection of countries pose a challenge to their sovereignty and security?

I believe in order to reach this ambitious goal of creating a super grid there has to be a global collaboration of all countries to establish an international renewable energy organization separated from any political issues ,its sole purpose is to provide clean energy for everyone in the planet by utilizing each country's energy producing potential and it should be adopted by UN as one of its subsidiaries .

10:33 The Champlain Hudson Power Express is different from the other exemples in that it starts outside of the US in Canada. Québec currently has power surpluses and has been trying for more than a decade to build new lines to export that electricity. Québec is still building more capacity despite having surpluses. Québec wants to become the battery and power supplier of the entire North East. Québec's power grid is also very interesting in that it has some of the highest voltage AC power lines in North America, with the primary and secondary transmission lines operating at 735Kv and 315Kv AC. Theses high voltage lines were built in order to get power from large dams up north down to the population centers in the south over a distance of almost a thousand kilometers. The modern high voltage AC power lines was in fact invented for the needs of that project.

Or maybe instead we just build more smaller nuclear reactors and we dont have to worry about transmission lines as much.