The Problem: Electricity cannot travel long distances on power grids without massive losses.
The Solution: Create battery boats that ship power around the world, much like oil and natural gas are shipped today.
Deserts are the ideal locations for solar power due to their regular and predictable sunshine and because building solar farms has minimal environmental impact in deserts. However, they tend to be a long way from where power is needed.
Since current transmission lines cause large electricity losses taking power over long distances, deserts have so far not been able to solve the world’s clean electricity problem.
I therefore propose moving away from power lines and adopting existing fuel transfer processes for oil and natural gas; ships.
In particular, battery ships; massive container ships which carry batteries. These ships would anchor off the coast of desert countries and have the batteries charged up from power lines coming from land out to the sea, then sail to destination countries to unload electricity there.
Most likely, each shipping container would be a battery, for two key reasons: 1) it means the batteries could be unloaded in their destinations and stored for gradual release of power while the ships continued sailing, loaded up with empty batteries; 2) it makes the upfront investment worth the risk, as even if the battery boats become obsolete the batteries themselves can still be used in a host of different ways and locations.
The boats themselves would run on electricity, making the shipping far cleaner than it is now, and would be designed so that all the container batteries could be charged up while on the boat, saving the time and hassle of unloading batteries into a port and connecting them up to be charged.
In countries such as Australia, with large deserts on the same land mass as areas with high electricity demands, battery trains could be used instead – using the same shipping containers, but loaded onto rail instead of ships.
The idea seeks to mimic the existing systems we use for moving fuel around the world, and apply them to electricity, offering a different approach to conventional, inefficient power lines. It also provides a quick solution to massively expand solar power provision while further research can be conducted into more efficient ways to move electricity long distance, but the world gets the reductions in emissions now, not some unknown time in the future when (or indeed, if) that research bears fruit.
With a large fleet of battery boats, deserts around the world would become viable for massive solar power plants, meaning even countries with little or unreliable sunshine where solar power is impractical could still receive solar power from these deserts. It also solves the problem of there being no sunshine at night, as the battery boats could provide their power day and night, organising their arrival times to meet the needs of their destination.
We already have Natural Gas and Oil ships, so Battery Boats seem a logical progression.
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