The transport losses are by far the smallest part of that. HVDC is available at 3.5% loss at 1000km as a standard product, but if building it at the required scale was trivial we’d be doing it rather than talking about it.
Biggest issue lately seems
to be right of way/approvals - most of the paths between hydro and wind sources are overland.
Most of the existing HVDC interconnects are undersea.
You don’t need to deal with 10k different landowners each wanting their own special deal if you’re connecting Tunisia and Spain, vs North and South Germany.
Of course, and probably 50% or more of those landowners are going to fight you tooth and nail in court in that proceeding. Some so you’ll pay them more to settle/go away, some because they just hate you on an ideological level or refuse to budge [https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...]
If you’re covering significant distances that people live in, you can expect to spend a decade or sometimes more in court before being able to build - if ever.
Because of course there are the environmental reviews, the impact assessments, etc. and each of those will be hundreds to thousands of pages long, and you’ll likely have to fight over each page, also in court, with folks who don’t like that you’re going to dig up that random patch of flowers to install your power line or whatever.
And that is assuming you’re lucky enough to not have any endangered species in the way, in which case you might literally not be able to build at all if it is in an area you have no choice to go through.
So far no one is staking out patches of ocean floor, and generally even if they did, the topography is usually more forgiving there. So all you need is landing approval, which means one government and one compliant landowner on each side somewhere along each coast that is close enough to an existing grid that you can interconnect to it. Much more solvable. Still not easy or straightforward.
In California it took me 4 years and $18k worth of professional help to get approval to do completely standard fuel reduction work on a completely uninteresting plot of land that was super overgrown with brush and dead trees - with no one objecting to it - in the middle of a historic wildfire crisis in California that actually expedited the process.
I had to notify 10 something local native tribes (in case they maybe were somehow attached to the land, which they weren’t), had to do a detailed archeological survey, had to have a licensed biologist do a detailed walkthrough to look for endangered species (there were none).
Meanwhile the 3 largest fires in the states recorded history burned nearby, and they wouldn’t let me clear brush and remove dead trees from a clear fire hazard area and it’s a miracle the place didn’t burn to the ground.
this is an important story ! you might need to bolster the facts with some non-anonymous details (not here) but if this is as you say - your County officials are certainly not going to be pleased at the portrayal.. so you need to skip them somehow and get to the public.
This is CalFire - it’s a state responsibility area. These rules also apply state wide, however. It’s a well known problem in the state. My 4 yr timeline was, as I mentioned, expedited due to the fires. 6 yrs is more typical.
your experience is directly at odds with the policy story that some govt elements are trying to present, along with numerous, repeated stakeholder processess that claim to be trying to do exactly what you were trying to do .. You are saying that the current, expedited and "combined " permit process as recently amended by the Governor's Office, reduced your "years of applying for permission" from SIX to FOUR at a time of catastrophic fire hazard.
The details will have to speak for themselves and this is not the forum, however I strongly encourage you to seek some kind of outsider, and avoid those for whom the reputational damage occurs..
Lol, are you saying the PR
doesn’t match the reality with CA gov’t is news?
I got my thing approved and done with (finally), zero interest in getting involved any more. Everyone else involved knows this is how it goes too.
If you think me going to some news agency is going to do anything but get me stomped on in some future year (and it ending up being a decade instead), you might want to take a look around first.
edit: all these records and more are also public records and should be trivially available via FOIA requests - which said PRcoughnews outlets would be pulling if they wanted to know what was really going on.
There are only 100k private timberland owners in CA (and mostly nutballs like myself that seem to like pain and suffering in the form of paperwork), so it’s an easy group to stomp on, relatively speaking.
Most places you can do that without any permits at all. Or maybe a burn permit from the fire warden, but that is $10 and issued in 10 minutes unless there is fire danger that day.
You can remove small amounts of nuisance stuff in small areas, and burn in small piles during days you are approved to burn (which are limited). Maximum pile height of 3 ft, and 3x3 ft diameter if I remember from the last burn permit I pulled?
You can clear up to 1/3 of an acre, or emergency thin I think up to 3 acres if you comply with those rules, but the 3 acres they reserve the right to come in and fine you if you do something they don’t like, and you have to file a permit to do that too. Any trees about a certain diameter or of certain species, regardless of
level of disease or danger they might require you to keep. A dead tree that might have an owl or protected animal in it? Ho boy.
It would take several lifetimes to even attempt that on 60+ acres of overgrown timber. I spent a week and barely did 1/4 of an acre working full time, and it still wasn’t adequately thinned.
In the end, it took a crew of 4 with purpose built heavy equipment (a masticator), working full time over 4 months to do it to state standard -once the paperwork finally cleared this summer.
Ah sorry about that. Yes, most places it is pretty mellow and focused on stopping nuisances. Here it seems to be an excuse to build a Giant bureaucracy and associated fiefdoms that need to be protected.
Each one of which has some plausible reason for it to exist that nominally make sense, but starts of choke out a ton of reasonable behaviors pretty quickly.
There's only so much a landowner can. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. It's a fairly common occurrence.
Oil pipelines are bit different because there are tons of people and organizations outside of those directly impacted who are willing to join the fight.
It happens very regularly. Roads and utility corridors are built and expanded every day. Eminent domain doesn't generally directly impact enough people to make a serious election issue, unless we are talking about either very local elections, or when the thing being built is something people feel strongly about like an oil pipeline.
By very regularly, you mean ‘regularly tarpitted for a long time anytime there are a decent number of people near
the work’? Bridge widening work on 101 has been delayed for decades by this in the Bay Area, CalTrain electrification was delayed by over a decade, etc. etc.
Most utility corridors are in the middle of nowhere and already established (and people stay away because of this), so reusing an existing corridor is relatively easy - unless it widens into someone’s yard. Then it’s a matter of how much money that person has.
For connecting previously not connected areas with a new line, especially if it goes through somewhere folks are living? Be prepared for the actual work making whatever you are doing to be a tiny tiny percentage of the time
and costs involved.
In most of the rest of the country we manage to build new roads and new transmission lines without the extreme issues you're describing. Over the last few years, I can think of hundreds of homes and businesses near me that were moved to widen existing roads or build new ones. A few people/businesses tried to fight it, they all lost quickly.
You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.
Unlike your examples, HVDC lines have no real negative impact on anyone but the immediately impacted property owners. If you're building HVDC transmission lines between countries, you can also very likely reuse existing utility corridors for much of it, and build through lower density areas for most of the rest. The actual number of property owners directly impacted won't be high enough to make an impact on elections.
One thing to consider here too, as I think we might be talking about two different types of situations.
Even in the US (which is very low density compared to most places), most people live in cities or denser suburban areas (80.7%). 97% of all land Area in the US however is Rural.
So you are right in that this is not a problem in most of the US (by land area), and this isn’t a problem in elections in those areas either - it won’t negatively impact enough individuals, and problem cases can often be routed around, because the pop density is low.
However, this IS also a problem for most of the US (by populations), as this directly impacts costs and infrastructure upgrades for the majority of the population in the US.
Europe is even denser, and some locations have just as bad if not worse regulatory environments, so it’s the same factors at play. Some countries in Europe excepted of course.
You can't take the experience of a private citizen trying to clear some brush, bridge widening delays in one of the most regulation heavy states in the country, and oil pipeline opposition, and apply it to building HVDC between countries in Europe.
Or some random place in Ohio for that matter.
The regulatory hell that cities and states wealthy enough to afford it impose on themselves is not representative of the entire country.
I don’t think that map is either evidence in favour or against your position: HVDC has minimal impact, yes, but partly because you can bury the cables more easily, and buried cables are still more expensive.
HVDC is (I think) the only thing that can be used for underwater connections, so it’s used where the price makes sense. If the question is regulation we should also see all proposed and recent AC lines in Europe.
It is dramatically more expensive running HVDC under water than above ground, as the cables need to be incredibly tough even compared to buried land cables. I ran across a price quote that seemed like 10x the cost per km installed. If you can do suspended overhead cables, even cheaper. HVDC has pros/cons around the inversion/rectification on either end.
Yet essentially all planned or existing HVDC lines (at least ones notable enough for the map), are undersea cables.
They seem non-notable enough I had a hard time finding a good combined list anywhere.
I ran across plenty of references to HVAC being used for offshore wind turbines and the like too.
And they were the default standard (and still are for shorter runs and where the grid frequency matches). There are AC solutions for lack of grid frequency matching and the like.
I can’t find a list or easy map for major new on land grid connections - if you can find one, that would be great. Might be national security concerns or something?
Maybe because they can be implemented with only one pole/conductor for the underwater part. AFAIUI two poles go to the shore, where one pole ends in a metal-mesh underwater, using the salty sea as conductor until the remaining single cable reaches the other shore, where another underwater metal-mesh exists, and from that emerges the remaining piece of dual pole HVDC overland.
I know of at least one such solution between Germany and Sweden trough the Baltic Sea.
It’s even easier to do that on land by the way. You’d use large Earth grounds, which also don’t corrode as badly as grounds in saltwater. And running it on land (minus permitting, right of way, etc) is dramatically cheaper as the cable itself also doesn’t need to be as sturdy.
AC has a capacitance/inductance issue in any sort of run where it is surrounded by metal or metallic elements. Usually the runs are short enough and inconsistent enough it doesn’t matter. Metal shielding (required for undersea and most underground) and certain types of soils are pretty much terrible. That said, for ‘short’ runs of less than a couple hundred km, the cost of the HVDC inverter/rectifier drowns out the losses most of the time, so AC still wins most of the time. Sometimes there are still niceties around HVDC (like easier load management) that can still tip the scales.
If it’s a 1000km single run, the math is definitely different, but there aren’t a lot of those. If there are transformers, taps, generators, or other live equipment in the middle, those also change the equation, and in a grid environment, there are a ton of those.
