There Aren't Enough Cables To Meet Growing Electricity Demand (bloomberg.com)
- Reference: 0178041673
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/13/207259/there-arent-enough-cables-to-meet-growing-electricity-demand
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-12/there-aren-t-enough-cables-to-meet-growing-electricity-demand
The International Energy Agency estimates that 80 million kilometers of grid infrastructure must be built between now and 2040 to meet clean energy targets -- equivalent to rebuilding the entire existing global grid that took a century to construct, but compressed into just 15 years. Each high-voltage cable requires custom engineering and months-long production in specialized 200-meter towers, with manufacturers reporting that 80-90% of major projects now use high-voltage direct current technology versus traditional alternating current systems.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-12/there-aren-t-enough-cables-to-meet-growing-electricity-demand
I'm going to have to tell you (Score:2)
> There Aren't Enough Cables To Meet Growing Electricity Demand [...] The International Energy Agency estimates that 80 million kilometers of grid infrastructure must be built between now and 2040 to meet clean energy targets
I'm failing to see the relevance of the text to the headline. As if we were going to meet clean energy targets? As if we were trying?
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Well, not everywhere is as backwards as the US is. China is trying pretty hard, and parts of the US are, but other more privative conservatives are of course trying to undo the effort.
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> China is trying pretty hard,
China's start to the construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-powered capacity and resuming construction on 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, all fueled by investment from the coal-mining sector, would suggest otherwise. Analysts may expect that China's expansion of its clean-energy capacity will slowly squeeze out coal's share of its electricity generation, but their rapid coal-power expansion is posing a "challenge" (it's amazing how "challenge" sounds so much better than "major stumbling block") to
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So delete "clean energy targets" and add "to support data center growth."
If you don't grow it and harvest it, (Score:3)
... you mine it and process it.
So all the price inflation in the world isn't going to do much until more copper mines and smelters are in operation - which is a decade-scale investment.
and that is why fucking around with the global commodities markets on a faster-than-monthly basis is a good way to fuck things up for decades.
Well done, Dear Leader, for acting like a Tangerine Shitgibbon. So glad to know you'll still be in power (or your appointees, as the Alzheimers bites) to try to sort out your own self-inflicted problems.
It's not just copper - a lot of high power grid lines are made of aluminium conductors with a steel core - you can get more conductivity for cheaper pylons carrying less weight. But it still needs mining and smelting.
The game changer would be if someone succeeded in inventing a sufficiently conductive carbon-based polymer. With some genetic engineering, we should be able to harvest the raw materials instead of mining them. I've been hearing about incremental advances in "plastic conductors" since I was literally in school. Sounds like it's poised for a revolution some century soon, because nobody has put any real effort into the problem. Assuming, of course, that such a thing is actually possible , of which there is no guarantee.
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I don't think it is copper/al that is the bottleneck. I own some mining stocks and watch commodity prices, Cu and Al are not at peaks. The summary sort of infers it, and the article is paywalled. This site [1]https://www.eescable.com/high-... [eescable.com] gives a bit more info. At the HV level I guess it is not what I see at distribution lines which is usually a steel core for strength with Al wrapped around it for conduction. At HV it looks like manufacturing is quite complicated and that is the bottleneck. Even wire has
[1] https://www.eescable.com/high-voltage-power-cables-an-in-depth-introduction
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"a lot of high power grid lines are made of aluminium conductors with a steel core - you can get more conductivity for cheaper pylons carrying less weight. But it still needs mining and smelting."
Not just high power grid lines. The overhead lines into your house are too. The line connection into your breaker panel is aluminum.
As you observe, it still requires mined materials. Aluminum refining uses a lot of electricity.
While you are ranting about inept politicians remember "Joe Biden" did all he could to sh
CLEAN-ENERGY cables??? (Score:1)
Clearly someone wants a government handout to build more.
You don't need "new" cables or "bigger cables." Cables are limited by their ampacity, or "amp capacity" or current carrying. So you an up the votage, delivery more Watts (kilo, mega, giga, etc) without changing the cables.
In other words the original artile is a grift attempt and not written by anyone ... oh wait... Bloomberg... yeah, a grift for more money.
Pros: You can run more power through the same lines. You don't need new cables, new towers, o
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> So you [c]an up the vot[l]age
For overhead lines, you can. Up to a point. You'll have to re-insulate the lines. And perhaps replace the towers with taller ones to maintain safe clearances. But pretty soon, you'll run into [1]corona discharge losses [iconenergia.com] and other problems. At this point, the single conductors must be replaced with [2]conductor bundles [instrumentationtools.com] to create conductors with larger "effective diameters", reducing the electric field strength near each conductors surface.
For underground cables, nope. Exceed the insulation voltage rating and it wi
[1] https://iconenergia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/news2_efectoCorona.jpg
[2] https://instrumentationtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Corona-Discharge.jpg
CEO whining about China, then this at the end... (Score:2)
> Back in 2014, the European Union fined all the big cabling companies for collusion. And I read through those documents. And they would go around the world and stay at hotels and talk together, and they basically say, ‘Okay, you Europeans, you stay in your market, and we Asians will go in our market.’ And if they got a request for proposals, then they would let each other know and make sure that the right bidder won the contract.
> They've been fined, and today, they would say that's all in the past and I think if you look, there's no evidence that it's still going on. But if you look at it, there's kind of no reason to continue colluding; there is so much demand and constricted supply. One of the CEOs I spoke to for the story, I asked him, ‘what do you think of the competition?’ And he said to me, ‘everyone is behaving.’ So if everyone is behaving, everyone is trying to keep prices at a good level for everyone else, there's not so much expansion of supply, then there really wouldn't be a need to collude, even if they wanted to take that risk again.
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In case it's not clear, the "asian companies" are Japanese and Korean, not Chinese. The post-collusion strategy is to co-opt the regulators and hype the strategic sovereignty argument. Different strategy but with the same objective: monopolisation allowing the incumbents to charge more and supply less without fear of new entrants competing with them.
Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
High-voltage transmission lines are aluminum conductors wrapped around stee cab;el for strength.Both of these elements are literally dirt cheap and available domestically. Trump won't need to invade Chile.
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> Where is it? Oh yeah, it's all tied up in stocks and bonds and "commodities"..
I'm really wondering what you think cables are made of, if not from commodities.
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When someone buys a stock, where exactly do you think the money goes? When you put money in a bank, do you think the bank keeps it in a vault?
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Yeah. I don't see YOU producing anything.