There's a break-even point. But, that assumes you WANT to transfer electricity over the distance. Given that the desert is more than 600km from most habitation I agree that per-unit-travel it's not more expensive, but the thing is there are viable sites for generation closer to the location of use, which means both transmission cost and losses, and cost-of-construction are below the break even point: If you want to use deserted regions, you have to be prepared to front load the construction cost with higher total costs.
The Sun Cable system being planned for the N.T. will be using HVDC to transmit power into Indonesia and Singapore, if it gets off the ground. The Trans-tasman electricity feeder cable is HVDC (for instance) but people continue to argue it is not economically viable, despite Tasmania have huge hydro power resources and arguably being able to do what the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro is meant to do.
W.A. is 2000km from the eastern Seaboard. an HVDC would work fine. There is no strong economic drive to make the eastern seaboard transmission network which spans South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, N.S.W. and Queensland a national grid.
Thanks for explaining! That makes sense, it’s mostly that it’s mainly used for relatively long distances. I’m not very familiar with Aussie projects, but it’s cool to hear that the govt there seems to be aggressively planning for this type of cross-regional energy transfer.
There's a break-even point. But, that assumes you WANT to transfer electricity over the distance. Given that the desert is more than 600km from most habitation I agree that per-unit-travel it's not more expensive, but the thing is there are viable sites for generation closer to the location of use, which means both transmission cost and losses, and cost-of-construction are below the break even point: If you want to use deserted regions, you have to be prepared to front load the construction cost with higher total costs.
The Sun Cable system being planned for the N.T. will be using HVDC to transmit power into Indonesia and Singapore, if it gets off the ground. The Trans-tasman electricity feeder cable is HVDC (for instance) but people continue to argue it is not economically viable, despite Tasmania have huge hydro power resources and arguably being able to do what the Snowy 2.0 Pumped Hydro is meant to do.
W.A. is 2000km from the eastern Seaboard. an HVDC would work fine. There is no strong economic drive to make the eastern seaboard transmission network which spans South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, N.S.W. and Queensland a national grid.