Chapter 960 - The February Spent on Plane (1/2)

After staying in Kuala Lumpur for three days, Jiang Chen returned to Coro Island on his Gulfstream G650 and began preparing for his next trip.

Shortly after he returned, Celestial Trade sent a construction ship to the sea between Ange Island and New Malaysia Special District to begin construction work under the sea. It was much more troublesome to lay such a submarine transmission line than to build an overhead transmission line on land. However, for Celestial Trade that often engages in submarine engineering, it was not a big deal.

The person in charge of the project assured Jiang Chen that the transmission line would be completed by the end of March at the latest.

On the other side of the Moon Colony, the colonial director Tang Weijie also assured Jiang Chen through video calls to complete the laying of long-distance power transmission equipment by the end of February. From Celestial City, the device used to receive the laser was also under construction.

Kelvin guaranteed Jiang Chen that by the middle of March at the latest, the whole country would be able to use the electricity generated by the lunar nuclear fusion power station. Coro Nuclear Power Plant could finally be decommissioned form the historical stage after years of criticism .

…

Jiang Chen spent almost the entirety of February on his plane.

Following Malaysia’s agreement to connect its domestic grid with the Xin, negotiations between Celestial Trade and Australia, India, Nippon, and South Korea were also in progress.

As Jiang Chen expected, the electricity price of 1.2 cents USD per kilowatt-hour was impossible to refuse. Some people speculated that Celestial Trade used solar energy, while others also speculated that there were a large number of isotope of uranium and thorium on the Bennu asteroid, but no one thought of nuclear fusion.

Because it was too difficult to achieve nuclear fusion, no material could withstand the tens of millions of degrees of reaction temperature required. The fabled cold fusion has even more demanding conditions to the point that was sounded more fictional.

In fact, even in the 22nd century, there was no material that could withstand tens of millions of degrees of high temperature.

If such a material did exist, flying into the Sun would not be a problem. After all, the internal temperature of the sun was only around 20 million degrees Celsius.

But in the not-too-distant future, a magical technology that confined particles into a certain space, while maintaining its own high temperature, while not making contact with other materials, was invented. Instead of a material container in the traditional sense, it was held by an invisible hand.

It was the magnetic confinement technology.

But even applying magnetic confinement technology, nuclear fusion power generation was still an almost impossible problem for most people. The device for constraining charged particles by magnetic confinement was born as early as the end of the 20th century. However, the use of magnetic confinement technology to constrain the uncharged helium-3 and deuterium involved particle science that couldn’t be explained by present day physics.

All in all, the negotiations with Australia were quite successful. The Australian-side promised to build the submarine transmission line, but insisted that the construction and maintenance of this line must be handed over to Australian companies. Jiang Chen readily accepted this proposal. If it was really handed to the offshore construction team of Celestial Trade, they wouldn’t be able to manage all the projects. They could only postpone the construction period after the completion of the transmission line between Ange Island and New Malaysia Special District.

Australia’s annual power generation was almost twice that of Malaysia, close to 400 billion kWh. Moreover, due to institutional reasons, the Australian-side did not interfere in the negotiation with its own domestic companies like Malaysia did on the import amount.

Australia’s electricity was basically monopolized by two major companies. AGL committed to the development of new energy source offered a lucrative deal. The company signed a contract of 100 billion kWh and obtained priority in the Australian market after Jiang Chen proposed the offer.

This southern hemisphere market would generate more than one billion Australian dollars in revenue per year for Celestial Trade.

As for India, the negotiations went even smoother.

As an emerging economy with the world’s fifth-largest power generation, India’s annual electricity subsidy remained an astronomical figure. Just when negotiating with India, Jiang Chen learned the definition of honing. Both parties already agreed on the price, but they strangely couldn’t finalize the deal.

In the end, Jiang Chen simply gave the follow-up work to Future Bank’s branch in India and then flew to Japan.

There were still many things he must do, and there was no time to waste in one place.