It looks like a tradeoff. The only place in the world doing a significant amount of long distance transmission is China. Their wind and coal resources are in the west, and demand is in the east, and transporting coal by rail just further increases air quality problems in the east. Based on what they are implementing, HVDC make sense at 800km+, and AC for shorter runs. I think it comes down to HVDC requires less conductor due to the AC skin effect, weighed against cost/loss for DC->AC.
Yes, for that run. The reality is that a far cheaper option would be to just install natural gas peaker turbines in Houston. Chienre Energy is exporting LNG from there so plenty of gas, and I’d estimate the cost per GW at $200M vs $1B, and the time to complete at 1 year vs 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...