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Canada Considers a Subsea Power Cable to Europe (maritime-executive.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/canadapolitics@lemmy.ca
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[–] 1 point 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (4 children)

Yeah... ugh... no? Unless you invent a higher voltage transmission method, transferring electricity that far would be wildly inefficient. Its obviously possible, but why? It would be the most expensive electricity in the world.

Hudson Bay electricity goes as far as New York, ~1750km with 10% losses. Getting that same electricity to say France would be 5000km and the article says 30% losses.

Even Churchill Falls to Scotland is 3500km+.

If you could up the voltage though, yeah its not a bad idea but we are dealing with 2x to 3x the distances we see in Quebec.

Then what... a Russian sub can just turn the lights out in Western Europe?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago

    high voltage direct current

    Then what... a Russian sub can just turn the lights out in Western Europe?

    Europe would still have their own power generation... It would just improve generation/consumption mismatches. By island hopping you could shorten the buried lengths, to make replacing damaged sections easier.

    Happy valley goose bay to the tip of Greenland, up the coast to kulusuk, across to Iceland, then to faroe islands then maybe Shetland, Bergen, Stavanger etc.

    Seems like the sort of thing that isn't unreasonable to study.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago*

    Apparently they power it from both ends. So the distance to maximum loss will be the halfway point. So very roughly about 16% loss from either end based on the HBE numbers you provided.

    Upping the voltage has limits because you're actually powering repeaters along the cable.

    edit: Oop my bad. I thought this was about the proposed data cable. Not power.

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