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Comment by scotradamus | Hacker News Reader

You're forgetting the two most important; energy storage and transport.

Yeah, imagine if we could more or less losslessly transfer electricity over vast distances. Massive renewable energy farms could be built wherever there was sun/wind/rivers whether the energy consumers are close or not. Energy could be sent to pump water into reservoirs as huge centralized batteries. The problem with 'what happens when the sun isn't shining/the wind isn't blowing' could be sidestepped because it's always sunny/windy somewhere, so we just get the power from as far away as needed.

People seem to underestimate how efficient regular power lines are. The continent-spanning european power grid has a total transmission loss of about 6% using 19th century technology (transformers and copper wires). Modern high voltage DC lines can perform even better. The main limitation seems to be that people don't want to have power lines in their back yard. Not something that superconductors are going to sove.

Also the cost of a equivalent superconductor network would be an order of magnitude more expensive that what is essentially room temperature metal cables with very basic technology - transformers, insulation, and switchgear.

A superconducting power network could be built today - it would consist of a pair of ceramic superconductors suspended in a liquid helium pipe, wrapped with 3 feet of insulation.

Every few kilometers, one would need liquid helium pumping and chilling plants.

Total helium losses to leakage wouldn't be too big. Electricity transmission efficiency would be reduced by all the chilling gear running, but still better than regular conductors.

The only real barrier is cost. Not even the cost of the superconducting material. You can't hang a 6 feet diameter pipe on pylons across the nation - you're going to have to bury it, and that's going to get exxxxxpensive fast!

> The only real barrier is cost.

I feel like this could almost be a slogan for the human race at this point. Our grasp of science and engineering has reached a level where's there's very few things we might want to build where we couldn't conceivably do it. We could build the most outlandish megastructures, infrastructure and space bases if we really had to, but it all just costs too much.

"It's expensive and we couldn't find investors" really means "It's a lot of work, and nobody thinks it'll be worth it".

We might be able to anything, but the capitalist system stops us doing things that don't look profitable.

Profitability at time X is a pretty decent heuristic for whether something is worth doing at time X.

How do you know that? Unknown unknowns.

Unknown unknowns are more likely to cause problems and delay completion, not accelerate development.

> ...suspended in a liquid helium pipe...

Where would we get enough helium to cover more than a small city's worth of power transmission lines?

Is the amount of energy you spend building and maintaining that network more than what you're already losing to inefficiency?

Interesting video on Chinese 'supergrid' from coal plants in the west, to the population centers in the east, a total length of 3,324 km (2,065 miles):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfG0USvDTew&t=686s

To increase efficiency, they are increasing the voltage to 1.1 MV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfG0USvDTew&t=780s

Since the population and the generation is intermingled, the average joule of energy actually doesn't travel far. Perhaps only a few hundred km.

Increasing power transfer effectiveness by even 1% seems like it would be a huge improvement when you consider the energy demands of a continent. That's potentially a lot of CO2 saved.

I find it hard to tell if you're serious or not. To a rough approximation this is exactly how it works today.

Reminds me that I need to check performances of graphene supercaps featured electric engines.

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