- Again, as a few years ago, world politics is concentrated on the web of pipelines.
- The battle is very intense and its outcome is difficult to predict. We have no less chances to win than our rivals.
- Our President is forced to take the initiative in the most difficult times and act as heavy artillery to "break through" enemy's positions.
Pipelines and geopolitics - the real reason behind Putin's visit to Italy
Nikolay Starikov
Translated by Kristina Rus
1 comment:
Pipelines are 20th century geo political strategy. Over the next few decades their relevance will become less and less significant and are already being treated with less importance, I think. As Saudi Arabia announced they intend to be a dominant producer of (solar) electricity by midcentury and then winding down what remains of their oil business by end of century it should help focus the minds on what happens in the world during the next century. If Mid East, Africa, Europe, US, China all have lots of solar but only one half of the earth is facing the sun at any given moment, we can either store the power during the day for use at night. But batteries are expensive, dirty, dangerous and don't last very long (a few years at most) which drives the cost of solar up higher than fuels -- and even the best chemical combinations on the periodic table -- lithium air -- is still too expensive even assuming very rosy assumptions. Worse, as they age, batteries get more dangerous too while much of the costs of manufacture can never be eliminated because the batteries require taking enormous amounts of materials collected around the globe and then putting them in ultrafine molecular order (energy and labor intensive), they can get some of the expense out, but not most of the expense through productivity, technology and efficiency gains. Converting electricity into other fuels is even worse. Pumping water up a hill or air into a cave or other ideas are plain awful.
So people should be thinking about networks to solve the distribution problem instead. Long lines lose power and aren't efficient when burning fuel to produce electricity, but may make sense when solving the problems with solar and wind and overly volatile market prices that make it hard for renewable generators to make money during the day light and provide disincentives for base load operators to invest. The amount of peak demand and high prices far away at night would keep electricity prices from dipping too far during the daylight and then at night would keep prices from skyrocketing. The amount of transmission losses getting electricity to the "dark" side of earth would pretty much set constraints on market prices. I don't know how to tie it all into the hegemony narrative or peace loving authoritarian east vs evil liberal west theme but still interesting to consider the basic math and prices for the renewable markets that will soon come to dominate.
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