So that North Americas energy can come from China during the night?

The sun is always shining somewhere but this does doesn't sound feasible simply due to geo-political and infrastructure reasons.

Have any serious plans been put forward for this idea?

Running a power cable across the Pacific is going to be rife with expensive engineering problems, but sure, you could send electrons from Three Gorges to Google at some cost. I wouldn't call it cheaper, though.

AFAIK even getting solar electricity from Sahara to European part of the Mediterranean basin would be extremely expensive, and this is peanuts compared to the cost of sending electricity over the Pacific.

Unless there are massive improvements in superconductive materials, of course.

Couldn't they invest into hydrogen electrolysis? Hydrogen will grow in importance as an industrial energy input.

If saharan electricity is the cheapest then nobody else can compete in hydrogen production.

In the spirit of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." I wonder if shipping big piles of fully charged batteries around has any chance of being a practical power distribution method?

Not even remotely. Batteries have some of the worst energy density both by unit of volume and mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene....

Not to mention global annual battery production amounts to less than 1 hour of the USA's national electricity usage.

Your first point is valid, but I think the second is using the wrong measure — as batteries are rechargeable, surely the measure should be total existent batteries not annual production of batteries?

(I would be surprised if this was viable even with my suggested measure, no argument there!)

Liquid natural gas freightliners are also refillable. I'm not sure what you mean by this. A cargo ship filled to the brim with batteries still has orders of magnitude less energy as a ship filled with the same mass of natural gas.

Global annual battery production has to be first integrated with respect to time and then multiplied by the turn-around time to calculate global annual capacity to ship electricity by way of charged batteries.

I absolutely accept that this is a poor solution, and that I am quibbling over a factor of perhaps 500 at most when it’s short by a factor of ~250,000.

The value of the electricity can be measured by comparing it to the value of a petroleum product. transportable energy can be made using from CO2 in the air using Fischer-Tropsch.

It's energy intensive, and uneconomic - which is why people are stringing HVDC links across bodies of water - Denmark/Sweden, Australia/Tasmania, NZ North/South Islands instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

LNG tankers are today’s energy equivalent of station wagon full of tapes. In the future we might do the same by liquefying hydrogen (or ammonia) to distribute energy from renewable-rich countries to renewable-poor ones.

I highly doubt this. According to wikipedia[1], three high voltage towers can transmit 7079 MW of power. To beat that with lipo batteries you'd need to move 26,713 metric tons worth of batteries per hour[2], and that's not even including time to charge. I don't think any sort of freight transportation method can do that cheaper than some transmission towers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7079+MWh+%2F+265Wh%2Fk...

Well, this is technically true, and already being done today with gas and petroleum.

Converting it back-and-forth to electricity isn't easy nor very efficient, though. Hydrogen is a bit easier, although still lossy. I'd say it's doable, and not as bad as it sounds, if you really have excess production.

inb4 compressed air supertankers.

That said, it will in most cases be less expensive to use it as close to the originating point as possible if you can find a need for it.

The most effective (relatively safe, relatively energy-dense, easy to handle) way to store energy is in a hydrogen-carbon bond. If only there was some way to transport that across oceans in large tankers....

OK, shipping batteries between continents is far from feasible now.

But what about electrifying a small collection of households by batteries that are replaced from a truck every N weeks, instead of building many miles of power lines through (perhaps flammable) wilderness?

Remember, lithium ion batteries are demonstrably effective bombs. Shipping big piles of bombs around is a well-established power distribution method, although not usually electrical power.

Batteries are heavy - unless you are sending these station wagons downhill, its probably not such a great idea.

A 747 as a giant lithium battery with wings

Sneakernet 4.0

You really want to be dependent on other countries for your vital infrastructure? Imagine if we go to war with china/russia, and they shut down energy exports to the US causing rolling blackouts everywhere.

The obvious solution would be not to go to war with china/russia unless they shut down energy exports. And of course they wouldn't, as they depend on selling and also importing electricity at times. We even have practical experiences with that. Germany for many decades got their natural gas from the sovjet union and russia. Despite of the cold war, and it indeed was just short of a war state, gas supplies never were cut. Because cutting gas supply to Germany would have been a simple way to apply pressure, but not a cheap one. It would either have triggered a war or at minimum that after recovering from the cut, Germany would have been permanentely lost as a trading partner. So there was never a supply cut in many decades.

Then get your electricity nationaly, or from france, or from germany, or from saudi arabia, or from australia, or from argentina.

The point of a global energy grid would be that there's always sun and wind somewhere on the planet and you would smooth out time-of-day differences in usage. The point is NOT to outsource your country's entire electricity production.

> Then get your electricity nationaly, or from france, or from germany, or from saudi arabia, or from australia, or from argentina.

Ah yes, because the other countries will magically have the spare capacity (both in terms of generation and transmission)?

We already see this play out in Europe: nobody there wants to do anything about russia because they control the natural gas supply.

>The point is NOT to outsource your country's entire electricity production.

Maybe, but the effects are the same. If you can't produce enough electricity to make it through the night, that puts you in very vulurable position. Even if it doesn't completely shut down the country, it might cause enough unrest to topple the current administration (eg. if they're only leading in the polls by a few percentage points and there's an election in a few months).

> Ah yes, because the other countries will magically have the spare capacity (both in terms of generation and transmission)?

I believe simongr3dal’s argument is the invisible hand of the free market, not magic.

Optimistically, solar resources are more evenly distributed than oil and gas, so no country can act like Russia; pessimistically, Russia isn’t the first country to exert influence by threatening to cease supply of its resources, and it won’t be the last; the optimistic response to which is that there are many ways to solve seasonal issues, for example the UK (personal familiarity, no other reason for this example) could plan 18-hours local storage and enough local production for winter rather than summer.

Magnetic field of power cables is easily detectable and you can't realistically defend thousands miles of them.