Australia seems especially well suited for long-distance transmission because development is so heavily weighted to the coasts; there's not a lot of existing built-up interior areas to route around. At 800 kilovolts HVDC line losses are only 5% per 2000 km:
Yeah, people really underestimate how efficient HVDC has become. Even that doc is outdated - it was published in 2015 so likely based on 2013/2014 figures. Modern projects, e.g. ultra HVDC (1100KV) in China are seeing more like 1.5%/1,000KM losses: http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html
Curious to know the relative costs of HVAC vs battery per megawatt/hour offset from peak solar production.
4000 KMs east to west is about 2.4 hours offset geographically. Would it be cheaper to have 2.4 hours of storage closer to the east coast of Australia, with solar farms close to the consumption? Or would building a 4000km HVAC transmission line from the west coast of Australia to the east coast be cheaper? I'd imagine there would be a tipping point where one option is more economical than the other.
Personally, I'd like to see WA's electricity network connected through to SA, and connect SA's through to NSW, but I also like the idea of many independent microgrids for the resilancy they'd offer.
The controversial conclusion I came to many years ago was all of the above ... I remember when the solar lobby was fighting the wind lobby fighting the hydro lobby to be the one true green energy source. It was and still is entirely pointless.
Distributed independent microgrids with interconnects fed by a range of power generation methods and size the generation at >1.5x power needs. Refurbish and maintain fossil fuel to fill when needed, and ideally make them as modular as possible with turbine halls being convertable between different fuel types.
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...
(See page 11)