Scenario: Aliens gift humanity some mega power plant that runs off a black hole or some shit. Maybe it’s a quantum time battery or perpetual motion machine, whatever.
If we plopped it somewhere on Earth, could humanity build infrastructure across the globe to provide everyone with near unlimited clean electricity?
The two biggest problems would be getting that much power out of a single spot and getting power to really remote places. Running power cables to Hawaii would be a huge pain in the ass, for example. Zoift’s suggestion of manufacturing hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 is a perfectly legitimate way of “transferring” power.
The current total electricity consumption of earth is something like 24 petawatt-hours per year, making for an average rate of something close to 3 terawatts. To transmit that kind of power in one place you’d need a bus bar with a cross sectional area of something like 4,000 square meters, a bit more than 60 meters on the short sides. This is such a big bus bar that it doesn’t really make sense, we’re talking about a block of solid copper bigger than most buildings. I expect we’d have to do some wacky superconductor shenanigans or something to actually do the initial distribution to branch lines.
Nah we’d boil water to spin turbines on a long steam pipe lol. It’s a proven technology and way less difficult than manufacting superconductors with no defects in bulk and keeping them cold.
That would be an alarmingly large steam pipe but I don’t know enough about steam pipes to say exactly how alarmingly large
Only to spread out the energy for use. Hydraulic and steam power has been routed through cities in the past which is a more complex problem.
I suspect you’d be quite surprised at how much energy you can push through a pipe carrying steam. It’s the fundamental technology behind most powerplants. Steam in a pipe can easily handle Gigawatts in nuclear powerplants.
Getting energy out of anything concentrated is hard, but steam is cheap and holds a lot of energy.
At what voltage? China has 1.2MV lines already, and if power were free that number could surely go higher even with efficiency losses.
I was assuming 765kV lines
If my very loose math on your loose math is accurate, current superconductor wackiness levels (best available critical current density) would take that down to 40 square meters, so 6 meters a side, which would still be quite a lot. Eyeballing the current standard for big plants, looks like they’re using like forearm-length-wide tubular busbars, so this is quite a lot more massive. But there’s also the possibility of transformer magic happening to reduce that amperage.
40 square meters of YBCO sounds even more daunting than 4000 square meters of copper in some ways. Might have to ask them kindly generator aliens for some better superconductors while they’re at it.