It is usually a mistake to overbuild batteries. The money is better spent on PV panels, wind turbines, and grid tie-ins and, eventually, other storage media.

Longer distance runs of AC can have a lot of losses though due to inductance, especially when they’re close to large conductive masses (like seawater or earth).

DC requires expensive conversion equipment to get back to AC for the grid.

AC is cheap for short runs. Usually AC vs DC high voltage starts to be equally cost effective around the several hundred miles of buried lines, and a clear winner around the 1000 mile range (efficiency and capex wise).

HVDC can also allow grid balancing when disparate grids are connected (different frequencies and voltages for instance).

We are where we are. Politics is a thing.

If it pushes along the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, I don't care if it's "inefficient". Show me a major company that hasn't wasted money or done something in a way that is technically less than optimal.

Using the 3.5% per 1000 km factor. Plus, of course, conversion and voltage stepping losses at both ends.

I'm just commenting upon the likely motivations are primarily domestic politics and geopolitics given its pretty obvious that you could achieve similar results by doing this with onshore wind and solar installations in southern Spain with lower technical and cost requirements.

Its definitely true that outside of the EU we are going to be treated differently than if we were EU members. EU members will always come first, and geopolitical spats with say Spain over Gibraltar or France over fishing that would otherwise get mediated via the EU could now be higher risk in future.

Morocco is even within reasonable distance for the UK to run sorties from UK air bases, let alone including aircraft carriers, cruise missile attacks from submarines, etc.

If it's an idea obvious enough to occur to a teenager 20 years ago it hardly requires politics to explain why it comes up now, does it? At the time I gave up on the idea because either I didn't find out about HVDC or it wasn't as effective as it is now. Transmission losses seemed to kill the idea. Now apparently that's more or less solved and other issues dominate like manufacturing costs and mineral availability.

As for renewables being abundant near by - where? UK already built tons of windmills. You can't get baseload-level renewable power from adding more of those because there are days when the wind stops blowing. As for solar in Europe, land is at a premium there and they're already wanting to use available resources for their own needs, rightly so. Also worth considering - for unclear reasons global wind speeds have been slowing down over time. Long term wind projects need to factor that in to their economic calculations. Solar doesn't have that issue.

There was a fire recently, but it's a strategic connection.

https://ifa1interconnector.com/

Also the UK is connected to Norway

https://northsealink.com/

And Ireland also

https://www.eirgridgroup.com/customer-and-industry/interconn...

Politically, maybe. Technically and financially, not at all.

There’s 3GW of interconnection between france and the UK with a 4th under construction, and france is a broker / hub between germany, italy, spain, and the UK (as well as its own production).

Furthermore, cost of storage is falling even faster than wind or solar ever did. Wait until next year, and you get lots more storage for your money.

Finally, batteries are good for very short-term storage -- their round-trip efficiency and fast response are unbeatable -- but they cost more than alternatives. For storage that you don't need to draw down every night, something you can fill cheap tanks with is better even if round-trip efficiency is low. Something you can also sell when your local tanks are full, and buy if they seem likely to go dry, is better yet.

So, expect to see a lot of anhydrous ammonia long-term storage. Also, hydrogen, and liquid nitrogen. And, lots of tropical sites synthesizing for export to higher latitudes in winter, and lots of higher-latitude cities importing it, via ship, in place of LNG and oil.

It is kind of surprising to see the batteries set up in Morocco, not in UK. That might be politics. Typically, storage is best sited near point-of-use. Maybe part of the deal is Morocco gets to use a share of the energy.

Honestly, the EU27 have their own home-grown grid problems to deal with[0], helping third countries transit power through the EU territories must be right at the bottom of the list!

Austria and Germany had a single electricity price zone ... until October 2018, one of the reasons blamed for the split was "slow grid expansion"[1].

[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-ele...

[1] https://www.apg.at/api/sitecore/projectmedia/download?id=24f...

These things are all matters of fact. From the EU's perspective these things are not "negative" exactly, but merely the way they play the game. Everything is connected to everything else and any inter-dependency may become leverage in any unrelated area of cooperation at any time.

Last time I checked the UK was still the sole country in the world refusing an official ambassador status to the representative of the EU and the sole country to have threaten to unilaterally withdraw from an international treaty with the EU in clear breach of international law. I think your definition of genuine and mine differ substantially.

As we should be. "We" spent years going "we've got the EU over a barrel, we'll make them bend to our whim, they need us more than we need them". Brexiteers now finding out that "leaving the EU" means we're no longer on their side and negotiating against 27 united countries sucks, well it would be funny if it wasn't hurting so many people.

In fact it tends not to think of the UK at all, these days.

As to being "fair game": that's true, in the sense that the EU will place the interests of member states over those of the UK. That dynamic must be among the least surprising developments of history, considering it is both obvious and formed the core of every serious prediction in the run-up to Brexit.

There was plenty of swagger back in those days with fantasies of renewed UK superpower domineering the EU and extracting every concession it can think of. "Fantasy" because that's just not how it works if the other party makes up 60 % of your foreign trade, but you make up less than 10 % of theirs.

So here we are now, with the UK coming up with these harebrained schemes that feel like some party organized with the specific purpose of not inviting your ex.

I've just paid a €5 handling fee (just the handling fee, there was zero customs fee or any VAT levied) to receive an item sent by post from the UK to the EU, it was sent by post with a declared value of £3, and labelled as a gift.

Yes, I know all about declaring artificially low customs values - been there, done that - but in this case it was a single item of used childrens clothing, the best part of 40 years old(!) and of absolutely zero value other than to the recipient, it was being gifted from one generation to the next.

Somehow cheap electronics orders from China seem have always sailed through EU customs just fine :/

OTOH I can fly to Stansted for less than €10 all-in. Maybe next time it would be cheaper to fly to the UK and collect in person. Given the challenges of climate change, this option in particular appears to demonstrate how not-joined-up international policymaking currently is :(

I think there are a lot of use cases for those fuels that don't even require a lot of long term storage, my current favorite being hydrogen fuel cell powered semi trucks that already burn a lot of diesel crossing places that have a lot of renewable electricity potential but not enough transmission (i.e. wind in the Great Plains and sun in the desert Southwest). This would get around the issues with batteries eating into truck weight limits.

Also, the idea of freight trucks "sailing" across the country on wind power is just an appealing narrative.

Just want to add that it was a bit different than that. More exactly, an English newspaper asked a French official if cutting electricity off was a possibility and that official answered nothing more than "the treaty that was agreed upon does include this as a possibility".

It was never an actual threat or in any plan at the time.

A veiled threat is not breaking any clauses. You should look up the number of times the Swiss (and others) have threatened to withdraw from so-and-so agreement with the EU. It isn't new. The EU has dozens of active arguments/negotiations with dozens of countries at any given time. And we already established that this is a bilateral treaty and without any guarantors (unlike the Good Friday Agreement) and hence could be ripped up at a moments notice by either party if they so chose. Just look at the number of times France has made threats in relation to the Trade and [non-]Cooperation Agreement (TCA). The exit clauses are merely there to offer a graceful means of pre-agreed exit strategies.

The EU however *literally drafted emergency powers legal text* to trigger the Article 16 (exit clause) of the N.I. Protocol during a dispute - a petty, tawdry and without any basis in reality dispute at that - regarding Covid-19 vaccines.

It is remarkable how the tone of your posts reveals how "on edge" you are about this. Even laden with typos such is the haste with which you type. It (Brexit - an event which concluded over two years ago) is clearly still a very raw nerve for you.

What you call conspiracy is normally named classic strategy by all who study and use it. So any normally prudent State do it's best to avoid creating potential threats potentially used against itself. Some do not just because those threats are corruption-fueled economy. And again we see countless examples in just the very recent history.

Renewables are still very far from built out, so not seeing something done in your vicinity tells you very little about its practicality.

A pretty good rundown on shared use for solar PV and vegetable crops is at https://greencoast.org/agrivoltaics/ with reports of better yields, up to 3x in certain crops, from reduced heat stress and water loss, and also higher efficiency in the panels from cooler operation.

There are many different configurations being experimented with. Just elevating and spacing out the panels in otherwise conventional installations is common. But some are putting in exactly-vertical, double-sided panels, starting near ground level, that they drive tractors between. Panels have been used on the roofs of greenhouses for a long time. Using the framework supporting panels for other apparatus, such as irrigation piping, is common. In some fields, panels are placed directly above plants to protect them against harsh weather.

There are experiments with partially transparent panels, that harvest the green light plants don't use, and pass the rest through.

An example of people in UK complaining (at length) about solar PV displacing agriculture is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFgM5hO2e1Y

Plenty of experimental GW scale nuclear reactors have been built, just look at the history of CANDU design for an example. That’s just the scale this stuff operates at, you need real world data to demonstrate it’s actually cost effective at scale and actually building stuff still requires actual R&D. Further, you don’t want to just build one you want multiple examples to see what costs look like when people building the thing have relevant experience.

Storage closer to consumers has a huge number of issues being more expensive to manage, harder to scale, less efficient, etc etc. It sounds vastly more useful than it is because you end up increasing failure modes and make failing safe much harder.

The whole idea of the EU is that all nations in it are subservient to the commission. We like it that way because that makes the collaboration more rational and it makes the rising tide lift all the boats. Wether you agree with it or not, the idea of the Brexit is that the UK can be strong without the EU, possibly even stronger. Wether that will happen remains to be seen.

But how can you say they can't be independent of the EU in power while commenting on an article that's literally about them establishing power bypassing the EU?

I'd love for the UK to come back to us in the EU. But their "intentional obtuse"-ness is exactly what they should be doing to make good on their promises to the citizens of the UK.

The fish debacle ( the UK refusing to license EU-based ships).

There are lots of licensed EU fishing vessels. Note that Jersey isn't actually a part of the UK, technically it's a Crown Dependency. Anyway. The full story of the dispute is much more complicated than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Jersey_dispute

Summary:

- After Brexit an amnesty period was agreed before the new fishing permissions were enforced on UK/Jersey territorial waters.

- French fishermen reacted by adopting unsustainable fishing techniques like aggressive trawling. Basically trying to extract as much marine wealth as possible before they were restricted. "Young accused French trawlers of "breaking the spirit of the amnesty" and that due to recent dredging by French trawlers that Jersey's marine ecology "won’t take this for much longer and, if it goes on, we will have to close the area off for years". This hadn't been anticipated in the agreement and appears to have poisoned relations from the get-go.

- The agreement involved granting licenses to fishermen who had been fishing there previously and could evidence that. The French authorities weren't submitting valid evidence to the Jersey authorities (blaming bureaucratic screwups like lost documents).

- Because the evidence wasn't meeting the requirements, licenses weren't always being issued quickly.

So far, ordinary bureaucracy. It should have never really reached public attention at all, as it could have been sorted out between the local authorities. Unfortunately what followed was this:

1. Blockades of Jersey harbor by the French fishermen, with the French government doing nothing.

2. French boats were repeatedly caught illegally fishing, claiming they'd been told by the French government they could fish wherever they wanted. See the trawling problems above.

3. Shortly after, the French government banned Jersey fishermen from landing fish in France. No justification was given. This was in violation of the agreement and Jersey thus said it'd appeal to the EU Commission. That was not only ignored but the French simply escalated the ban to include all freight movements, again, in plain violation of the agreements.

4. The French government then escalated again and threatened multiple times to cut off Jersey's electricity supply in retaliation.

From the UK's perspective this was all well out of proportion to the scale of the problem. Also it involved unilateral violations of the agreement by France, no workable suggestions for how to do things better and after that an MEP argued that it should be escalated to full blown trade sanctions. Without passing judgement on which side was "right" in this dispute it's obvious why the UK would want to diversity energy supplies away from the EU.

> need for control and action on a local level

Ah you mean that local control and democracy when the party with 13% of the votes gets 0.2% seats in the parliament", right? [1]

[1] Great CGP Grey video on the 2015 General Election in the UK: https://youtu.be/r9rGX91rq5I

You're not really sorry. And you won't be re-doing anything, all you will do is write longish comments about your worldview.

it is most definitely not

it handed it over in the peace treaty that ended the war

> The Catholic King does hereby, for himself, his heirs and successors, yield to the Crown of Great Britain the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications, and forts thereunto belonging; and he gives up the said propriety to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right for ever, without any exception or impediment whatsoever.

full text here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Peace_and_Friendship_Treaty_o...

> Oversee territories are a shame on every countries that still hold them be it the UK or France.

meanwhile Spain has two enclaves of the exact same type of in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla

Every border is a result of "taken from them at gunpoint." (It's not hard to find folks who had large pieces of Spain taken from them at gunpoint.)

Dependency isn't a claim. It is, however, a tool for taking.

In fact, as this particular transmission line will be feeding into the UK national grid, its normal role will be backup for offshore wind.

That somebody else at the end of a different transmission line might want access to the battery would be a good reason to site it where those lines meet. Another might be that you need to minimize fluctuations on power going through your transmission line. But whatever the reasons, they certainly will not be trivial, and might be revelatory. Trivially dismissing the question adds no light.

P.s. a broken and undemocratic or unrepresentative bureaucracy is not going to be solved or fixed by adding higher levels of beuraucracy.

That's why when you read about EU law changes you so often read about negotiations between the Parliament and Commission. In the UK the executive branch implements the will of the legislative branch. In the EU the Parliament is often found implementing the will of the executive. Technically it's not a Parliament at all, due to this lack of the "right of initiation".

Ex: “you need to minimize fluctuations on power going through your transmission line.” That sounds reasonable, yes you need to maintain grid frequency etc, but it’s got almost nothing to do with transmission lines. Further there is equipment to deal with various transitory issues that is much cheaper than a giant battery + required equipment to connect those batteries to the electric grid.

As to the topic, if you want to bring up unrelated and experimental storage technology then don’t pretend to be “shocked” that the topic expands.