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That only work on large continuos mass of land that expand east-west. Small countries or Chile have problems
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National borders don’t limit power transmission.

Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.

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> National borders don’t limit power transmission

Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?

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Russia, China, and most of the rest of the world has interconnected their grid with other countries.

This is a map of where the grid is frequency matched across internal borders allowing easy exchange. DC connections don’t need this synchronization, but it reduces losses with AC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...

In war this might be a minor issue, but in war electrical infrastructure ends up a target so it doesn’t matter that much.

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Instead of looking at the pretty map, look at the table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid#Dep...

Note how there are only 7-8 regional connections spanning multiple countries (counting Europe and North America as one block each). One is there for historical reasons (IPS/UPS, Russia), others for economic integration (post-Soviet) or political affinity. With the exception of one, none are integrated with aggressive countries, and in most cases the distance isn’t far enough for it to become reasonable to do what you think can be done. The US ended up with separate interconnections because a single one proved unstable anyway. Hell, Japan has two networks!

DC links do exist outside those blocks, but they’re bilateral and small. The problem isn’t that it’s technically impossible, it’s that states won’t make their grid reliability depend on a neighbor. Just to point a single case, in 2018 a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia was enough to throw off the frequency of the entire continental European grid. Something being technically possible doesn’t make it practical

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