Interesting Links for 17-11-2021

[andrewducker]

Racism Is Institutional In British Cricket

(tags:UK cricket racism OhForFucksSake )

Supersaurus: Scientists realise dinosaur might have been the longest ever after fixing fossil mix-up

(tags:dinosaurs )

Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable (losses would be just under 50%)

(tags:solarpower chile Asia )

Joanna Cherry's popularity is not going up

(tags:LGBT SNP transgender politics Scotland )

England’s austerity-hit courts losing days of work to collapsing ceilings, broken lift and arctic conditions

(tags:justice UK OhForFucksSake )

There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

(tags:Canada transport roads weather )

Remarkably accurate neurosurgery residency interview

(tags:medicine USA surgery doctors funny satire video interview )

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told an employee he would have her killed. He kept an exec from being fired after a sexual harassment claim. He didn't tell his board of alleged rapes and other misconduct.

(tags:games rape abuse misogyny OhForFucksSake )

John Carmack on Steve Jobs

(tags:Doom games Apple stevejobs johncarmack history computers graphics opengl )

Amazon to stop accepting Visa credit cards issued in UK

(tags:UK Amazon visa credit wtf )

The students losing thousands in an Edinburgh rental scam

(tags:edinburgh property fraud )

‘Clear risk’ UK joining Pacific trade deal will raise drug prices for NHS

(tags:uk nhs trade )

The FTC is moving to end “click to subscribe, call to cancel”

(tags:business usa )

Netflix has started publishing its top 10 watched movies and TV shows

(tags:netflix )

Dogs! Being! Kissed!

(tags:dogs behaviour )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

My bet (with myself) is that cables will probably win in the contest between cables and batteries.

If your line losses on a 15,000 km subsea cable are only 50% then power that costs $20 / MWH to produce in Chile comes off the cable costing $40 / MWH plus the cost of the cable - that means the cable can cost $60 / MWH and still be in the right ball park of cost for power.

I reckon we are a lot lot closer to $60 / MWH cables than we are to huge batteries. Not necessarily 15,000 km long subsea cables but long distance cables.

Not saying that batteries won't eventually become cheaper than cables but once the cables are built it will be a long time before they are replaced.

[andrewducker]

That seems very reasonable.

[danieldwilliam]

Mind you a 15,000 km cable does sound very courageous, on a Sir Humphrey scale of bravery.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. I think I'd want to see a couple of one's half the length be proved feasible before handing them all the cash.

Unless, of course, the difficulty of laying cables doesn't scale with length, and it's merely a case of repeatedly laying segments until you get there. I'd want to talk to several experts about that though.

[danieldwilliam]

I think the difficulty scales with depth and with the condition of the seabed. Both of which are influenced by the length. A longer cable is likely to go through deeper water and the longer the cable the more likely you are to hit difficult seabed conditions.

I think you could probably build a 3,000 km cable in shallow water and easy conditions for roughly 3 times the cost of a similar 1,000 km cable but find that a 2,000 km cable in very very deep water costs much more than twice the cost.

There may also be a limit to how deep you can put these things.Some pattern like; 100 meters, easy, 1,000 meters tricky, 6,000 meters very difficult indeed, 7,000 meters - might as well be on the moon.

[andrewducker]

I just found this, which has a bit of a map:
https://www.ft.com/content/674557bc-13c7-4010-a7f8-7b8c06b3a32e

Unfortunately, the maps of the sea floor that I've found aren't nearly detailed enough to give an idea of what the ridges are like on the way over:

[danieldwilliam]

The more detailed maps will be private in one way or another.