Because of our increasing need for copper for electric vehicles, which contain about 4 times as much copper as a regular vehicle, the search is on for untapped copper reserves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IZz26dR9ik&t=3s
When an electric car dies I assure you it is being stripped of copper from any parts that cannot be sold.
Copper is expensive and even scrap dealers deal with copper separately.
In India, even street pickers know the value of copper.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=kil...
However, there is development in carbon nanotubes, in the lab they already make wires on par with aluminium, so hopefully that will work out.
Aluminum-wound motors are apparently also a thing, though (like with aluminum power cables) they tend to be physically larger than copper-wound motors for the equivalent amount of power.
How do they keep galvanic action from eating the whole assembly? I've never been clear on that bit.
I could be mis-remembering but I also feel like it's more prone to whiskers/pest when soldered to boards, especially lead-free mixes. Either way, ends have to be crimped, so that's more steps.
Just generally more annoying and expensive to work with than copper.
Aluminum for wiring works just fine if properly engineered and can be cheaper once that engineering is amortized.
I would never buy a house with aluminum wiring for anything other than service cable or wiring to 220V appliances. I've seen too many homes with aluminum wiring where plugs, light switches or fixtures were swapped out for fixtures that were not rated for use with aluminum wiring. I picked up a FLIR camera that attached to my iPhone - was at a friends house that had aluminum wiring. Was screwing around with the camera and noticed some hot spots on some walls - looked closer and they were outlets. Felt the outlet and it was warm to the touch. Killed power to the circuit, popped the outlet out of the wall and the terminals were crispy critters! Freaked my friend out a little - swept the rest of the house and ended up replacing a dozen outlets, a handful of switches and checking every ceiling and wall mounted fixture. What a nightmare - many of the hot products showed obvious signs of overheating.
If handled properly aluminum wiring can be effective. The problem is it's often not handled correctly :(
My understanding is that Al wiring can be cheaper, but specifically in the housing domain, because virtually every fixture is copper based, it ends up being a huge PITA.
Extremely long-term, sufficiently high quality graphene or carbon nanotubes can theoretically have higher mass-specific resistivity than copper or even aluminum. But in practice, CNTs and graphene have much worse electrical conductivity due to defects and the need to conduct between tubes/crystal regions/bundles.
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