Continent-scale grids and markets already exist in a lot of places, they just have to be made more robust.
While heavy industry will be a lot more energy efficient as it electrifies, especially with heat pumps which are currently capable of replacing 45% of industrial heat requirements, it still needs a lot more energy than the average household. Bringing electricity from further away to power manufacturing plants, steel mills, aluminum plants and cement kilns 24/7/365 is necessary. Ditto all ground transportation as it electrifies in the coming decades.
Of course, it’s not enough to have transmission running long distances, enabling the free flow of electricity from areas of surplus to areas of demand requires markets where buyers and sellers can establish contracts. Those agreements will be for the next 15 minutes, the next hour, the next day and longer, just like current regional electricity markets.
Georgia in the Caucasus on the east side of the Black Sea underwater to Romania, bringing the amazing renewables resource of far eastern Europe to the more populated part. Another is crossing the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Europe. And there’s an on again, off again HVDC connector that will bring even more hydroelectricity from Quebec to New York that’s on again.
You can see why HVDC is the new pipeline. While the legacy molecules for energy crowd continue to think that the future will include ever more tubes and tankers carrying gases and liquids for us to burn, that’s not the case. Just as generating electricity with wind, solar and water is incredibly efficient and cheap, and using it directly for transportation and heating is incredibly efficient and cheap, transmitting electricity as electrons is also by far the optimal choice.
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