The answer to small-island power supplies may be arriving, in the form of High Voltage Direct Current. HVDC is not a new idea, indeed English Electric presented a 100kv machine called a 'Tranverter' in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. What's new is solid-state devices (triacs) enabling economic conversion and reconversion at the ends of the transmission lines. (The 'Transverter' was mechanical, although General Electric in the US were working on Thermionic Valve systems at that time). The point is, 400kv HVDC can be transmitted vast distances economically, our granfathers were no fools, (no reactance, no inductance), and it can be run as one cable, undersea if required. This opens the possibility of utilising the vast hydro-electric resources of Norway and Canada, currently making aluminium, to serve consumers in Europe and the US. In another forum we saw that electric locos of 1MW were using Triacs, so this is feasible.
The 'public' seem to think that you can transmit electical-power for free! No thought of the capital costs or transmission loss costs enter what few brain-cells they have. I remember once spending 45 minutes carefully explaining to a BBC TV reporter how we avoided killing the employees in our plant, with a series of logic devices, cctv, recorders, sensors, computers, etc, only to have the whole multi-million pound investment broadcast nationwide as a "black box" !!! In reality, it's actually cheaper and more efficient to transport coal or oil in a railway wagon or semi than it is to send it in a conductor, and that's a fact.
