It looks like the road was constructed to serve the four hydro facilities that generate power for Montreal. https://openinframap.org/#7.12/53.8/-74.103/A,B,E,I,L,O,P,T show's the hydro facilities and power lines weaving their way down to Montreal.
Relatively long distances of road and power transmission lines to reach the two most remote locations. Especially considering they seem to be limited in capacity (only 319 and 469MW).
Curious to know if something bigger was in the plans, or perhaps the road also have/had other uses?
The piece of the puzzle that you're missing is the dams at the far end of the road divert the Caniapiscau River into the La Grande River, which provides close to half the water that eventually feeds all of the generating stations downstream.
Additionally, the reservoirs formed are important for making the system provide reliable power to match demand - demand for power in Quebec peaks in the coldest parts of winter, and the natural peak of runoff/river flow....is not then.
So, the generation out there is useful but is not the primary reason why the road was built all the way out to there.
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No special insight on the difficulty/expense of constructing the transmission, but ~788MW of extremely cheap power forever for constructing/maintaining ~130mi of extra transmission doesn't seem completely improbable to work out financially, especially at the time.
I'll also note:
- Vegetation maintenance costs are probably low given how slow things grow out there.
- This was constructed long before the modern era of cheap(er) renewables.
- Even today, Quebec's location, weather, and time of year of peak demand make the calculation for solar's cost-effectiveness a lot harder.
The alt text does say "Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5." so I guess even at the time without inflation it wasn't really possible
It could be a second-hand wrench. Or maybe smuggled in without tariffs: a 1-foot, 3-pound wrench is $3.45 on Taobao (including shipping, a pair of gloves and a roll of PTFE tape). It might not be Snap-On but it'll probably survive being hit with a few crypto speculator skulls.
Or tools from the current victim. Someone broke into my house using the utensils from my grill on the patio to try to pry open a rear window before just using them to break the glass.
Zimbabwe has entered the room. Also had a central bank before the last round of hyperinflation/reset. One could argue that the lack of a central bank is a feature. What other differences would would you imagine distinguish bitcoin from central bank currencies?
“One state is doing terribly” (or even a handful of them, before someone mentions the Weimar republic) really is not equivalent to “it is impossible for a state to do it well”.
It's just a talking point. Only about 2x as many people are using it as 3 years ago, and due to being boat-anchored to the molasses slow L1, it would take 75 years, $500,000,000,000 worth of electricity and all the remaining block reward to open a lightning channel for everyone on earth. Even then its quadratic routing complexity would likely render it completely ineffective long before that many people tried to onboard. It's like a Soviet phone line, if you apply now, you might get a channel before you shuffle off this mortal coil.
So you're against the lightning network because it can't be scaled infinitely?
The overall system is just software, and it can be improved.
L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second.
L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently.
L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).
I’m against it because it’s physically impossible to sign up people in any quantity and doesn’t offer the same guarantees as the L1. We can talk about an L3 when there is one.
I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.
I went down the rabbit hole of trying to work out what this is. In involves new coins and ICOs. I'll stick with Matrix and Signal.
"Session is enabled by services provided through the Loki blockchain network. The Loki cryptocurrency is a fundamental part of these services, providing an anonymous way to transfer value between people. A lightweight wallet integrated into the Session app, using keys derived from the users existing keypair, could allow users to quickly and privately transfer value inside Session."
