you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 60 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Some reasons to be discouraged making a solar farm in a desert:

  1. Middle of nowhere, you need to transport all the hardware to the place
  2. Maintanace, you need people on-site to support it
  3. Desert sand is sandbladting your panels
  4. (and this is the biggest one I think). You need to transport the power from where its generated to where is requested. Which is an imperfect proces, and every time you double the distance you also double the resistance
  • source
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    400kv DC lines to the rescue!

    Expensive though...

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Why DC? I've always been taught AC was better for long distances. What am I missing?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Solar produces DC, presumably the even higher voltage is preferable to the conversion losses.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    From what I remember you get pretty close to AC mid-conversion anyway, but I looked it up and there are some other reasons to use DC:

    From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current]:

    HVDC lines are commonly used for long-distance power transmission, since they require fewer conductors and incur less power loss than equivalent AC lines. HVDC also allows power transmission between AC transmission systems that are not synchronized. Since the power flow through an HVDC link can be controlled independently of the phase angle between source and load, it can stabilize a network against disturbances due to rapid changes in power. HVDC also allows the transfer of power between grid systems running at different frequencies, such as 50 and 60 Hz. This improves the stability and economy of each grid, by allowing the exchange of power between previously incompatible networks.

  • source
  • parent