I am a PhD Electrical Engineer. I studied the application of superconducting materials for use in electric motors and generators. Superconducting materials are superconducting with three basic constraints. The first is what everyone talks about and that is temperature. The material must be below the critical temperature. The second is that the current density of the current in the conductor must be below a critical density (so you can't crank up the current arbitrarily). The third is exposure to magnetic fields. The magnetic field must be below a critical flux density This is a tough constraint for electric motors wherein a strong magnetic field produces the motor torque. When any of these three are violated, the material stops being superconducting. Then there's the trouble with Maxwell's equations. In a perfect conductor the current flows entirely on the surface of the conductor. This makes the current density on the surface infinite, which inherently exceeds the critical current density to maintain superconducting. So in a real superconductor the current flows in a thin shell having nonzero thickness and the current density in the shell sits right at the critical current density. Whenever the current changes with time, the thickness of the thin shell grows or shrinks so that the resulting shell sits at the critical current density. And the dynamic process of establishing the changing thin shell creates loss, i.e., heat, that must be removed. This is particularly troublesome if the current is AC or if changing currents are needed to drive a motor. Superconducting wire is only superconducting under static conditions when all three critical conditions are met. The above is brief as that is what comments allow. I could be much more precise and explain things in greater depth and breadth. But I doubt folks would want to read many pages of text and besides I have other things going on in my life.
Yerbut... Thats me trying to sound intelligent... ITER uses supercondicting electromagnets.. How does this tie in with the magnetic field strength limits? Does ITER not use particularly strong magnetic fields? Or Is the limit rather high in the first place?
@@borisfilipovic5253B? Wtf is B? You cannot mean sound level... Surely... Edit add: this has been answered many times, thanks the helpful ones, not so thanks the condescending garbage ones.
AC issues might not be a problem for use in long distance high voltage DC interviews, that presently are used for instance to connect power from the Columbia River generation plants to the California power grid. That one carries 700KV. (Or used to - I knew one of the engineers who helped design it, back in the 1970s. IDK if it's still the same )
I hope s superconducting HDMI cable will help my soundbar sound better. I am looking for maximum fidelity when watching TikTok cat videos on the big TV.
That will make absolutely no difference. HDMI is digital and a bit is a 1 or a 0 pretty much regardless of the cable. People who sell oxygen free speaker cables and gubbins are taking their customers for a ride.
As an electrical engineer i still stand by the conculsion that these will never catch on. I dont even see a purpose for them as high power transmission losses are almost negligable. For a 380KV system only loses arround 1% over 100km at just above 1GW of transmission power. There have been studies how feasible a reduction on these losses is and they unanimously agree that there is no way of reducing these with a cost effective method (aside from companies like these that seek more investment). We use overhead power lines to reduce capacitive losses to the ground. to even use long distance overhead power lines we use bare wires to keep their weight down. there have been proposals to increase the diameter of these lines to reduce ohmic losses but the costs of having more and sturdier towers to cope with the weight would oughtweigh any potential gains. now adding thick insulation and nitrogen lines into the mix would make this even worse in addtions to the power needed for the cooling systems. superconductiong power lines also dont adress a far more significant power loss factor and that is transformation into high voltage and back down again. as facincating as the suibject is, nothing will come of it and its just another start up seeking fast investing from goverments that dont understand what they are investing into.
I was under the impression that the capacity would also drastically increase, but seems there are some limits to how much current can flow while still maintaining superconductivity.
I was looking for exactly this comment. As a fellow electrical engineer I second your statement that the transmission of power over HV overhead power lines is already so efficient that very little gains are to be made.
Agreed. However, losses aren't the only consideration. Being able to increase the amount of real power along a transmission line is another possible benefit. Cooling could theoretically increase the amount of power flow since heat limits the current carrying capacity. This could theoretically increase the delivery of power in an existing transmission Right of Way. But from reading other comments, there are other limitations as well that need to be considered ("skin effect"). But then, why not go with a larger aluminum conductor over this? However, those cables must weigh a lot more. The current transmission system is almost entirely aluminum, which has higher conductivity per weight than copper. A nitrogen cooled copper cable sounds like a nightmare from a structural design perspective, and likely cost prohibitive in addition to the cost of operating the cooling. Aluminum system would increase the cable diameter. There is technology that already improves power flow on long transmission lines (HVDC on very long lines, series capacitor banks, etc.). I think the design in the video could have applications, but not for the bulk transmission system any time soon.
At the extreme operating points, as the power goes up, cable losses go up with the square, and those losses need more power, causing more system losses. Supercondictors would help in that case, you have a known, rather than dynamic limit. But the grid doesn't spend much time at that operating point.
@@u1zha yeah, except for very nich cases i can't see how this could be profitable. Without insulation the cold is gonna escape to the environment - so you don't lose electricity thru resistance, but you're burning massive amounts of energy in keeping the damned thing cold. With insulation you don't lose cold so your energy expenditure in keeping it at -190°C gets minimized, but as you correctly point out, these will be really heavy. Probably by burying them instead of having them hanging in the air, but that introduces another set of difficulties. Frankly, the only case use i can think of is delivering electricity to medium islands (or isolated mining communities in places like Siberia), thru High Voltage DC - underwater cables already require massive insulation and are already very expensive to lay down, so by increasing the net flow this system courd be more profitable than the traditional one
High voltage engineer here. The current pilot applications for superconducting cables are places where we don't have the room to put in a comventional cable. I don't have the numbers in my head, but one of them is the expansion of transmission capability inside a German city where conventionally you would have had to have three 110kV systems (= 9 cables) over a with of 2-3 meters, ripping a giant trench into the city to place the cables. Instead they were able to lay one single three phase medium voltage (10-30kV, don't remember exactly) superconducting cable into a pre-existing empty tube underground, thus massively decreasing the size and duration of the construction site. As for icicles or freezing birds... cables are laid underground and superconducring ones are well insulated at that to reduce losses, so you wouldn't need to worry about that. Overhead superconductors would only really be a thing if they were room temperature. What you DO need to worry about though is the problem every AC cable faces: Capacitive losses. I very much doubt they can make cables more than a few 10s of km long, not because it's not technically feasible, but because you would end up with a majority of the current just feeding the capacitance of the cable instead of actually transmitting power, which would massively increase losses. Unless they plan on using HVDC transmission, there we don't have this problem.
The freezing bird nonsense makes me heavily question just how much she knows about basic stuff to begin. Should it not be SUPER obvious to a physicist that it has to be absurdly well insulated to make it work over any large distance?
saving space is great, this video is talking about saving energy. u know, the amount of power that would normally be lost in a conventional cable, would that be enough to run the cooling system?
@@echelonrank3927 That entirely depends on how good the insulation of the cable and the quality of the superconductor is. The transmission losses will definitely be orders of magnitude lower, but they already are pretty low in a conventional cable, so the savings will not be huge. Definitely there though!
At least they'll be able to sample the burrito to see if it's any good and worth opening more branches. I wouldn't order the string theory nothing burger any time this millennium...
Oh, that explains why the little superconducting wires in the ITER magnets are attached to GIANT copper windings; to absorb the plasma recoil. (Sorry, I couldn't resist Star Trek Enterprise tech speak.)
Yes, the idea of power transmission by High Tc superconductors has been in the works for decades. The practical introduction of the idea is still not imminent. I recall hearing that the cables would be routed underground instead of overhead, which I suppose would be safer for the birds. The idea that the superconductors would could run in parallel with copper to take on the current load in case of superconductivity failure sounds heavy and expensive.
Liquid nitrogen is a byproduct of making liquid oxygen for industry and hospitals. Some of the liquid nitrogen can be used to precool the air coming into the liquefaction plant, but due to the fact that most of the energy is in the latent heat of vaporization rather than the temperature change, a lot of it is left over. If you wanted to produce your own liquid nitrogen for superconducting lines, you would install a standard air liquefaction plant, sell the liquid oxygen it produced at a very slight discount, and use the leftover liquid nitrogen for not much more than free.
@@Alkoluegenial - True! Most of the energy is consumed by the compressor motors. Often times two cooling loops are employed. The air has to be first dried down trace levels of H2O. Also all other contaminants, such as CO2 must be removed. Then the compression/expansion processes can take place to generate liquid air. That then must be fed into a cryogenic fractionating tower to separate out the N2 component. Most of that process was not shown in the simplified diagrams in the above video.
This isnt typically used for above-ground power lines but for underground ones if there is no space for traditional power cables. There is/was one planned in Munich - 12km in length capable of 500 Megawatt at 110kV
I think our entire power cable network should be underground. No company wants to do it; because it costs too much money. I think they used some other lame excuse; but money is usually the reason.
@rremnar underground cables have to be much beefier and you need to take some measures to prevent the ground from burning when the cable fails. In above ground cables gravity will seperate the wire when it starts to wear out and cut's the connection. Which is easy to detect and shuts down the entire line. But yes it's doable and looks much better, but it is quite a lot more expensive.
Another issue with superconducting power delivery systems is how to cope with a "quench"- when for whatever reason some portion of the conductor loses its superconducting qualities and becomes resistive. Current flow then causes heating there, which then warms up adjacent portions of the conductor, which then also quench, and you have an avalanche of localized heating which can destroy the conductor.
Came here to say this, if they are transmitting thousands of amps along a zero resistance cable and suddenly there was a very high resistance, well lets just say I would love to watch the explosion (from a safe distance) because it would be spectacular!
I think your confusing a thing that's a problem in an MRI machine that's a giant inductor with something that your average fuse/breaker would handle pretty well. If they get a hot spot either of 2 things happen, the monitoring system notices that resistance is now not zero and turns it off. It shorts to something making a current spike and the breaker trips like any other power line. Or it shorts and arcs until it can't support the arc any more just like any other power line. Why do people always assume any new thing must be totally perfect without any possibility of failure? High power density power lines have lots of spicy failure modes and fail regularly.
I woke up this morning depressed about the state of the world. Now you give me this wonderful news: I finally have a power cable for my death ray. I bought it from Acme so it's guaranteed to work well.
And Sabine is worried only about the birds perched on frozen electrical lines. She should have kept you in mind and given some thought to the Road Runner. @Falconlibrary, you really can be a Wiley one!
Some commentators below are absolutely correct. My son is a PhD Materials Engineer working in this area, and he makes these same comments about the "RELIABILITY" of these materials. They FAIL regularly, for almost random reasons, like thermal shock, ground movement, seasonal thermal stresses, rainfall pressure, etc, etc. Most of these materials are "glassine" and cannot take any tensile stress at all. Also, as Elon Musk paraphrased, the idea of using liquid Hydrogen as any kind of storage medium (ie: over long distances or volumes), is the "stupidest idea ever". Simple Kelvin Thermodynamics will destroy this stupid concept, as soon as it is tried in real scale.
A similar idea was presented around 20 years ago. In that one they used mini boring machines to put the cables underground and used liquid hydrogen as the coolant (also useful as a way to distribute the hydrogen for use in cars-it was 20 years ago). They were talking about being able to send 50,000 amps dc in one cable with a second cable as the return. The main problem, and I don't know if they've figured out how to deal with it, is what if something happens to the cable, say a break caused by earthquake or overly rambunctious contractor digging in the area, then the sudden drop in the current leads to a massive back emf, which can be quite destructive.
I imagine the pipes holding the coolant/cables would need to be pressure rated so that what seems like an inevitable disruption forces pressure relief in specific locations along the line. Locations I wouldn't want to live near.
@@jcbeck84 I bet, such cables will be only at the highest load lines. There will it make most sense. So protecting those is already done in some way or form.
You can't win. If the out and back are separate they have inductance which means any failure of cooling causes an energy dump into what is now a resistance. If the cables are coaxial they have capacitance which means the same result. And as the generator cannot turn off instantly, you now have that large spike in EMF, destructive to generator and cables. I don't like any kind of electrical infrastructure which isn't stable when current is flowing through it at room temperature.
My suggestion for a new kind of power line is a long pipe filled with nothing that you shoot antimatter through. At the far end, the antimatter annihilates, causing a transfer of energy. It's a dream I have. You might even call it a pipe dream.
Sure, shield the pipe with magnetic field to keep the animattter from touching it... but sounds more like a weapon than power transmission. So make one and sell it to the army not the electric company
41007. Seriously, full first law energy conservation that includs heat implies that refrigeration of well insulated superconducting powerlines releases incidental amounts of nonthermal energy. Nanoscale diode arrays may be a practical way of releasing incidental amounts of electrical energy. Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise power is dificult to deny. Diode voltage / current characterstics can be displayed on an XY tracing oscilloscope. Please drink the antidote to second law of thermodynamics doom stupor. The science is free. Liberate the technology. Aloha
41007. Seriously, full first law energy conservation that includs heat implies that refrigeration of well insulated superconducting powerlines releases incidental amounts of nonthermal energy. Nanoscale diode arrays may be a practical way of releasing incidental amounts of electrical energy. Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise power is dificult to deny. Diode voltage / current characterstics can be displayed on an xy tracing oscilloscope. Please drink the antidote to second law of thermodynamics doom stupor. The science is free. Liberate the technology. Aloha
@@liam3284 Matter, of course. How would the tech otherwise matter? To be serious, I know it's a bad idea and was just making a joke. Even ignoring the danger of the antimatter coming into contact with any of the matter, the costs would be astronomical. Just look at how much antimatter costs to produce. Googling quickly reveals it's in excess of $60 trillion per gram.
One of my college buddies was engineer in charge of the first commercial superconducting power line ever built. His major was actually physics, which makes sense. He was a savant. His mind went places others did not know.
During the late-80's early-90's, I worked for Superconductor Technologies Inc. whose product lines concentrated on high-Q resonators and microwave filters made from high-temperature superconductors, mostly Thallium-Barium-Calcium-Copper Oxide (TBCCO) and Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBCO). It was cool stuff!
Back in 2000s when I studied chemistry, one of our faculty's departments had a Bruker NMR spectrometer that used both liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for cooling its superconducting magnet. It was a beast that had stairs and a catwalk to access the specimen insertion area. I wonder how the future developments in superconductors will affect scientific gear like this.
@@osmosisjones4912It’s not that quantum effects happen more at low temperatures, they’re just way more noticeable at low temperatures. Heat is just a measure of how fast particles in a certain area are moving. If an area is too hot, the particles are moving too quickly for quantum effects to have much noticeable impact.
@@Benson_aka_devils_advocate_88 oh yeah, miniaturization of equipment is definitely the way - given how massive the electronics alone used to be in the '60s or even '80s, compared to modern instruments. Computers used to fill entire rooms and eat hefty hundreds of kilowatts of power. Now you get more processing power from a handheld device. Even a modern digital sampling oscilloscope is teeny tiny compared to the old analog scopes from decades ago that had long cathode ray tubes, let alone the even older ones built entirely with vacuum tubes. Modern electronics packs tons of functionality in cubic centimeters of space. Other parts of scientific gear will have to follow - and they often do, with micro-fluidics and the like, that allow for testing extremely small samples.
@@KeritechElectronicsThe computer analogy is very very faulty and equally destructive. It worked only because, Lithography is rather a homogenous problem, one technique solves a large no. of problems. All it needed was increasingly accurate netroligy and process contril, the science and fundamental Engineering of wich has already established. But take MEMS. The problem is no longer homogenous and it's not scalable even, now that the technology is there. Other problems are way more heterogeneous and in many cases, like for superconductivity, even a lot of the science is yet to be worked out. Yet investors hope to get the same scale up and return like the lithography, as a result, waste money and resources, or ignore/pull out promising tech that is slow to bear fruit. I too hope that Bruker's awesome NMR machines get smaller and more affordable, but i won't hope much.
Many new high temperature superconducting cable manufactures have popped up , typically due to small niche contracts from things such as nuclear fusion energy experimental projects and other specialized physics endeavors. Now that they have so much invested in their manufacturing infrastructure they are seeking to simulate other markets for their products. They have to try to create markets even if their products haven’t been demonstrated to be cost-effective with the existing electrical cabling technologies and manufactures. This creates a climate where deceptive marketing practices can flourish.
When I held a senior position in a superconducting company over a decade ago, I saw significant challenges in commercializing superconducting AC power cables due to two key issues: 1) the often overlooked but substantial inherent AC losses, and 2) the limitations of liquid cooling systems, which restricted the ability to handle elevation changes. Perhaps advancements have been made since then, but before getting too excited, I'd recommend carefully considering these two fundamental challenges.
If you want make use of the higher currents possible you have to turn to DC anyway. The losses of AC/DC DC/AC converters usually get lost in translation.
@@armandaneshjoo Oh, give the guy a break. It might have been a poorly written joke, but even you should have been able to determine that. I've seen you respond to so many comments for this video, and everything you say is just filled with hate and condemnation. Who hurt you, my friend? I'm here to listen, if you need someone to talk to.
If it were so poorly insulated that a pigeon's foot would freeze to it before the bird gets the idea to stop sitting on the cable, it's hard to imagine they'd reach their 100 km goal.
Wow, that could be progress! But, first of all, I think I don´t cancel my order for fiber optic cables, that are promised to come up in the next five years here in good old Western Germany.
@@SlightyLessEvolvedInternet is mostly provided using cables... It is still information that is carried from one point to another in the form of an electrical current. The cables that are the subject of this video would very much apply to sending and receiving Internet signals. Your Internet connection is still routed from the source to you through copper wires even through fiber optic cable. At some point, your modem/router uses a wired cable to complete the reception of service, which is still the case when using satellite ISPs.
Definitely yes. Graphen at least if you will make vacuum tube, then potential differences at edges... Inside nothing to stop electrons, tube by itself too stable to have vibration of atoms so strong that they will stop electron. Maybe some combination with another material to make it more effective. Or glass of some certain molecular structure. Glass don't need clear structure it can be any form. So yes, they're possible... Physically, but engineering of it... It'll be hard.
Despite the common use of the phrase ‘high temperature superconductors’ no practical superconductor has ever been found to operate at anywhere close to room temperature despite over a half-century of research in such fields. The highest temperature practical superconductors typically still need to be cooled down to around liquid nitrogen temperature. You are correct that when a superconducting magnet, that is operating at near full current, suddenly reverts to a normal state, also known as ‘quenching’ an enormous amount of energy must be quickly dissipated, typically that is done in a cooled resistor bank. That aspect, of superconducting circuits, was not mentioned in this presented scheme.
@@vernonbrechin4207 there are superconductors that operate at room temperature, but just take pressures about 30 times that which diamonds form in the Earth lolz
Our current power system makes a hell of a bang when it gets unhappy as well, lol. But yes with superconducts it is more like a certainty rather than a possibility. The added expense of active monitoring and damage mitigation systems makes the cost effectiveness a challenge. I suspect if any commercial viability is reached it will only be in very unique cases.
Thank you Sabine. Great video. Easy to understand, even for the ignoramuses like me. You have a keen sense of humor. Signed up for the Brilliant premium.
It might have been just a joke, but the outside of the cable is unlikely to be cold, because the entire point of insulation is to keep the cold inside.
@@as0482 Yes, but only as a bonus because you can't prevent the evaporation. It's still way better to have as little heat cross the outer insulation barrier as possible. If they were really getting "icicles" forming on the cables, that would be pretty awful insulation. I mean, maybe they really can't insulate it very well and it really is that bad, but that would argue further against this idea, which is already pretty suspect. Superconductor cables are only 10-15% more efficient than normal high-voltage lines, so the idea is already kind of fundamentally dumb. There isn't much there that's worth the incredible complexity.
I can't imagine that cables that expensive would be above ground where windstorms could destroy them. They'd be buried, right? So, maybe we could have cryogenic moles?
I assumed the same thing. But then I noticed someone else here comment: "I'm not a fan of putting high voltage cables under the ground. Far too dangerous, you can have a 50 m radius around them that can /will electrify everyone (evaporation at those voltages) them when something goes wrong. " So might not be a good idea after all. Also might be more expensive to set-up and do maintenance.
@@AlexBarbu Bizarre comment. First, electricity doesn't evaporate. Second, a power line will create a magnetic field but it doesn't "electrify" surrounding substances, solid, liquid or gaseous. The cable insulation prevents any problematic leakage of current.
@@AlexBarbu It's not dangerous to put high voltage cables into the ground, in every bigger city you have such underground cables. It's just cheaper to have overhead lines. There isn't any "leakage" of electicity from this lines, but they induce magnetic fields. That isn't a big problem in the air, as air is a very bad conductor, but it becomes a problem in wet earth. But it's no danger to stand next to such an isolated cable, but the magnetic field causes problems when you put several cables next to each other. Anyway, superconductor cables are way to heavy to hang them midair. They will most likely replace high voltage lines inside cities. They are often already cooled with mineral oil under pressure, it won't make to much difference to change from oil to liquid nitrogen.
Thankyou for doing the thinking for us Sabine. I don't know how long I'd have thought about superconducting cables before _cryogenic_ _pigeons_ came to mind. 😆🤣😆
As a german i'm a little bit sad that she didn't mention our german efforts in this area. In Munich is a test project with HTS cables called SuperLink.
3:16 - Never trust an engineering company that uses a lowercase "m" to mean "millions". Edit: apparently the error was introduced by the website reporting on the press release, not the actual company (the original press release says "$24.9 million", not "$24.9m").
The screenshot appears to be from FinSMEs, some type of news site, not the company itself. The M is capital in the headline but lowercase in the text. I'm guessing it was written by someone who recently majored in journalism, graphic design, English, etc, or by an intern; possibly based on a press release from VEIA or one of the other parties listed.
@@Allen2 - Well spotted. The press release on VEIR's actual website says "$24.9 million", so it seems it was FinSMEs that decided to shorten it to "$24.9m".
And the insta freezing kills most of the parasites and a good chunk of bacteria, so eating raw pidgeons' meat becomes feasible (as the Russians do in Siberia, eating frozen fish straight out of the lakes)
Those saying this should be buried miss the fact that high voltage feeders are typically overhead for ease of installation and maintenance and typically very well hardened from the environment. We've been doing it this way for a century.
If you produce the superconductor by vacuum depositing alternate layers of iron and copper with a final layer of unobtanium you could significantly reduce the amount of money available for research
i like this channel better then thunderfoot (different subjects i know).... just feels a bit more humble and that makes it easier to listen to. the dude is just so full of himself XD (no need to like this as it is not really a positive message i know :$ ) Love the videos :) and i can feel the real frustration without the anger.... idk im just spewing here.
My biggest problem with it is that the loses are not so bad to justify something so complex and expensive. It's just something like 0.3% for every 100km in DC power lines, and around 5% from transformers. At absolute worst we only lose 10% of the energy. Do you want to know how you reduce those loses ? Make energy generation closer to consumption. Like, let's say, mounting solar panels on the roofs of homes.
That is not the main advantage. As said in the Video way more current could be transported with the cable. Because the current is only limited by the dissipation of heat due to ohmic-losses (DC-Transmission). This increases the possible power transfer to huge amounts (only limited by the hardware on each end)
@@oliversmith7130 yes, because if you transmit more energy the cables get hotter and become less efficient. so ? just get more cables. unless you are trying to transport energy through the Atlantic, more cables will always be cheaper and easier. and you know what reduces the need for more throughput from power cables ? local energy generation... like solar panels in roofs. it's a problem looking for a solution. it may have some very niche applications. specially for extremely high energy demanding situations, but overall it's so complicated and expensive that it doesn't justify replacing the powergrid with it.
The best way to reduce losses is constrain peak demand. Dynamic losses are the square of the power delivered. Static losses are proportional to the size of the equipment (larger equipment needed to support larger peak). Modern battery systems, placed at the zone substation, may save more energy by flattening peaks than they lose charging and discharging.
Just to play devil's advocate, it has been suggested that only 2,000 square miles (20 x40 miles) of solar panels in the desert could supply the entire US grid. The reason this has not been considered feasible is exactly because of transmission loss. If this powerline is actually feasible, then we may have just found a good use for a whole bunch of usless desert.
@@armandaneshjoo i absolutely agree with you. I just answered to the question if wires can be made from ceramics and since glass is more or less a ceramic material i mentioned glass fibers. Of course manufacturing superconducting fibers is much more challenging (but obviously not impossible). Can you tell me why the grain structure is so important? I know that the stochiometric composition plays an important role but didnt know that the microstructure is also that important.
@@avsystem3142 silica glass and ceramic share a lot of properties due to similar bonding types (ionic, covalent) therefore its also an brittle insulator with similar mechanical properties. And i sayed more or less
Well, if they can make it work with the sun beating down on it in the summer, they can make it work buried. I suspect they just want to be able to get at it for measurements or to swap it out for different trials, or something.
@@jamesvandamme7786 My main concern with suspended cables is you are asking for a whole load of extra problems when you're trying to demonstrate viability. Using suspended cables with wind loading, wind oscillation, ice loading and their attendant flexor issues are rather much, speaking as someone who worked as a test engineer on the space shuttle fuel cell fueling system. Those were all rigid piping except for a few of the couplings for thermal expansion. I'm saying they are begging to fail.
I recently visited a dermatologist. They use liquid nitrogen to freeze skin abnormalities. The doctor made some comment about exploding nitrogen. I informed her that nitrogen is inert and cannot explode. She then asked me where I got my degree. I informed her that I have none. She then went on to relate the occurrence that made her believe that nitrogen had exploded. She was apparently working with the substance and wanted to transport it. She poured some into an ordinary thermos bottle and capped it and placed it in the trunk of a car. Subsequently, there was an explosion. It wasn't the nitrogen that exploded, it was the thermos, from the overpressure when the nitrogen warmed and became gaseous and greatly increased the pressure in a vessel with no pressure relief valve. Apparently, MD's don't study physics.
If the nitrogen is lost, it won't be conducting much. As I understand it, most high temperature superconductors make really good insulators once they get warm; it's one reason they can explode if they're carrying large amounts of current when superconductivity is lost.
@avsystem3142 What difference does it make? In practical terms, it was the liquid nitrogen that caused an explosion. The main point being, just because it's inert, doesn't mean if not handled properly, it can't cause great damage or harm.
There is another problem that stems from the essence of superconducting: not enough loss to maintain stability. Every moment generation must equal loss plus load, and that loss is an underrated asset. Imagine all generated sources having to somehow agree about voltage and phase. It is a concern we all accept but never think about. We have pneumatic rubber tires on our road vehicles for a couple of reasons. Traction, of course, has no correlate in bulk electric power. Ride smoothness has a critical counterpart in electric power transmission; we don't want much loss but we sure don't want to overstress anything. Still, if we are ready to take the leap I hope we would finally make the switch to DC.
Ohh good point. So over time you would get a lot of high frequency noise bouncing around between end points of the superconductive segments of the power grid. Maybe the lines could be periodically surrounded by dissipator circuits that inductively couple only to higher frequency components.
The electric correlate to traction is phase matching. When your phase crests grip your motor and spin it, you have traction. When they don't grip it strongly enough and the crest goes by without pushing the motor, you're skidding.
There has been reports of using LNG pipeline for cooling. Not sure how big of a scale or how practical it is, but essentially a few years ago Chinese planted superconducting wires into LNG pipelines, which transports cold LNG anyway.
For the icicles, here techniques used in Canada : Hitting high tension lines with telephone poles attached to a helicopter (really), temporarily pushing more power to heat the cables (most superconductors are not conductors when warm, so I guess this one might now work), or putting some kind of device on the cables capable of making them move remotely (they mostly use explosives, but maybe a bunch of N64 rumble packs could do the trick ;)
A lot of networks in the UK are undergrounded. They are more resilient than overhead lines, however there are disadvantages if there is a fault you have to locate it and dig up the cable and replace.
@@Fluxdeluxe1 Realistically, you could just put an underground tunnel next to the cables, making maintenance substantially easier. At the price of initial costs increasing.
Just a quick mention didnt see this point anywhere. Superconductors could in some cases make the grid more unstable, as if enough superconductors is introduced it would also mean the resistance is smaller. Smaller resistance means smaller losses, but also larger oscillations.
Her razor sharp wit is commensurate with her knowledge of science and physics. I definitely would not want to go to battle against her on any intellectual matter.
I work on MRI scanners, the above liquid nitrogen temperature superconductor would dramatically lower cost EXCEPT the wires are too brittle, as in a high magnetic field would create forces that break the windings. There are problems to solve.
You are the most important source of awesomeness and for making things make sense for a fake polar bear in Norway. One tha tis not so clever but willing to learn from those that know how. Thank you so much for all your videos.
2:15 - Or with high-tension lines, you have a steel cable (for strength) and an aluminium shell (for weight and conduction) because the skin depth at 60Hz is such that the steel cable doesn't get involved in conducting electricity...
For each mile of cable there is a non-zero risk of a leak that causes a loss of superconductivity per day. So, it's a chain that will fail entirely if just one link is broken. That means that the risk of failure anywhere on the line goes up exponentially with the distance, so the viability of the system depends heavily on how reliable you can make it. All the pumps and tubes must be able to chuck along for years on end without failure.
@@afterthesmash Eliminating trees also elminates oxygen. Putting cables below ground is a better idea. Oh, I didn't know we had frequent earth quakes? Oh wait, we don't!
Failure risk goes up linearly with distance (actually slightly less, since the *number* of failures goes up linearly, but with sufficiently many segments, some of the probability weight corresponds to multiple simultaneous failures, which practically still is a single disruption).
@@RWZiggy So if they went to the vast expense of replacing the national grid with superconducting cables, do you think your electricity bill would fall by 5%?
@@juimymary9951 Do you have any idea how many nuclear power plants could be built for the same price as replacing the national grid with superconducting cables?
If it were me and I had these lovely superconducting cables, I would not be stringing them on poles... I'd bury them. You'd have to adjust the outer jacketing to deal with any alkalinity or acidity in the soil, but I'd imagine you could have these last a good 30-50 years. The issue with current direct bury (DB) cables is that you have to dissipate the heat into the ground, and since the ground is a much better thermal insulator than open air, you can't pass as much current through them as you could an open wire... but if you're supercooling the cables anyways, then you'd WANT more insulation. I mean, hell, you could even install them inside of an outer duct for even more protection and insulation which also makes it a lot easier to replace in the future, provided the duct is still good enough. What is that, three birds one stone? I think these would be most beneficial to use as main power transfer from power stations to substations. Then you could just use normal distribution architecture (poles, wires, buried cables, etc) to get the power to where it is needed. As for my expertise: I'm a Electric Utilities designer... I'm the guy who makes the plans that tells the crews where to install poles and transformers and other pieces of equipment... so I'd say I have a fair amount of knowledge in this area.
The problem of losses occurs in all transmission lines of the grid. But back in the 70,s Broun Bovarie SPA. Italy designed a system for underground 1megavolt line DC. Power the coaxial cable is charged like a capacitor and at the other end a static converter turns it back to 3 phase 415 mains power again. The resistance of the cable was the most significant loss but that line capacitance stabilized the system against surges that a normal transmission line cannot. The high voltage converter was most interesting to me as they stacked the switching SCR,s vertically like a big insulator stack and they used optical signals to control them.
Love Sabine, her sense of humour and her way of simplifying complicated science topics of that moment. Also love the high level of comments debate and tech talk back and forth among electrical engineers here, debating what factors limit the application of super conducting in the real world, and regret my mere science degree in chemistry and math, cannot compete. Meanwhile, May the research- ... ... ... continue.
The Proceedings of the IEEE carried an article about it 55 or more years ago when I was a student. It went into quite a lot of detail about a proposed design and talked about current and magnetic field densities and the required refrigeration system. If memory serves, for some reason it had to carry only direct current, which complicated matters.
Here in the states both V and E have been used interchangeably to denote Voltage in equations. When I attended US Navy tech schools, E was used to denote voltage and then when I attended university, V was used to denote voltage--- and then you go to your Physics class...
Very intelligent lady >> Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976) is a German theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, author, science communicator, and UA-camr. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology, and Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
also thinks -196°C is *above* room temperature 😂 also thinks they would put the cables in the air 😂 and they wouldn't insulate the cables so that birds could freeze there 😂
There are a 3 issues I see with this. 1. While evaporative cooling will be better for maintaining temperature, the total cooling per meter is not changed. The only difference is, that instead of cooling the whole lot by a small amount, they'd be cooling a small volume by large amount (from outside temperature air all the way to liquid nitrogen). 2. There needs to be a fail-state reboot option that does not require the grid to be operational. Basically, if the power fails for several days and the cooling stations go offline, there needs to be a way to start them back up and cool the whole powergrid to operational temperature, before it goes back online. 3. It needs to be fail-safe. What happens if a cooling station goes out and there is nothing to cool the cable? There must either be safety vents, that will vent the expanding nitrogen into the atmosphere, or the cables must be able to withstand nitrogen's vapor pressure at 100°C at least (I am putting a safety margin here, in case something else goes wrong too, and I am assuming the cables are painted white.)
The following two thoughts popped to my electrical engineer mind: (1) Why do we hang the cable? As it looks like from the drawing the cable is isolated? (I am a bit confused how the phases can be so close..). By burying it in the ground we will not only miss the opportunity for cryogenic birds but also slay the biggest problem with building new high-capacity transmission lines: nobody appreciates their backyard being decorated by electrical engineers. (2) The key property you want a transmission line to have is reliability. Aluminum/Steel cables as used in overhead lines have that -- unless physically damaged or subject to off the charts weather conditions they work. If your cooling station looses power (unless they come with a transformer..) or has some other failure, suddenly you cannot use a major link in the transmission network.
We used niobium titanium in liquid helium at BNL RHIC and Fermilab accelerator magnets . Very very intense cryogenic refrigeration machines. Expensive. DC no skin effect for powerlines now being constructed. HVDC . Interesting idea 👍
Also if the cooling system fails or is degraded, the cables go almost instantly into thermal overload. CERN manages this in the LHC with trip sensors along the cables. Something similar would be needed in the transmission system.
spending energy on liquid nitrogen is much better than conventional conductors, because amount of energy needed doesn't depend on electric current. i.e. this line can transmit any power with same constant energy use. that means above some power it's cheaper than conventional conductors
Losses in transmission are not normally very large. A 275kV transmission line with a power capacity of 500MW with a cable of resistance 3 Ohms only loses about 2% of the energy.
In 1997 I was in my physics lab and I and a few other students were talking with the professor about hi fidelity audio systems and their limitations. I asked the professor if superconducting cables were possible, since they could be used to eliminate resistance both in the audio cables, and the electrical components within the speakers. He simply asked "why would you want to do that?". He didn't say it in a curious way, but rather in a skeptical way. I simply replied that it may yield almost perfect audio and be the ultimate audiophile system. He didn't really seem to follow. I don't think he was interested in such things. I never dug deep enough into the idea to figure out whether applying superconductor technology to audio systems and related wiring would be feasible, but for him to ask me that in the way he did always bugged me.
Above -196 degrees would be easy, you meant bellow. I love your videos keep doing them you are very interesting to watch and I love your non biased opinions
The problem is the nitrogen evaporation. Either the pump stations have to have a constant supply to replenish the lines or compress and condense nitrogen on site. Either way it is cost inefficient to do. Simply cooling it by letting the nitrogen evaporate is a solution to a problem that ignores a greater fundamental problem.
Liquid nitrogen transportation is quite expensive, and direct extraction of the air is usually the best option, but probably there are some applications that, hypothetically speaking, can be used. One of them is extracting energy from the thermal gradient. Cool evaporated nitrogen can be used to power pumps (just use it for refrigeration applications or wait) inflate tires, or industrial applications.
Bury the cables. The ground temperature is more constant and less susceptible to fluctuations in temperature so you can have a more consistent system for cooling/insulating
hm, from memory, the resasons it had not been done already. - it takes energy to keep them cold. - superconductors don't like high di/dt - quench ( loss of superconductivity, e.g. from damage to the cooling loop) creates a hotspot which propagates, potentially damaging large part of the cable. - overcurrent fault may lead to quenching. - cuprates and other high temperature superconductors are ceramic, not great for making cables. - many forms of insulating material at the required temperature are brittle. These are only material and engineering problems though, traditionally it was considered not worth the effort.
High pressure might be far more practical, you would only need a thin layer of material and something squeezing in on it, then surround that layer within a fluid that resist changes in density due to pressure or temp. They do something similar for deep sea drones, you can fill portions of it with a fluid (I think mineral oil is some times used, I could be miss remembering that though), that pushes back against the water pressure outside protecting the electronics. You could do some similar, so the inside pressure isn't trying to push out, letting it remain at a pressure. The question is, just how much pressure does it take? Is my idea stupid and impractical because it takes an absurd amount of pressure? I don't know.
I am a PhD Electrical Engineer. I studied the application of superconducting materials for use in electric motors and generators. Superconducting materials are superconducting with three basic constraints. The first is what everyone talks about and that is temperature. The material must be below the critical temperature. The second is that the current density of the current in the conductor must be below a critical density (so you can't crank up the current arbitrarily). The third is exposure to magnetic fields. The magnetic field must be below a critical flux density This is a tough constraint for electric motors wherein a strong magnetic field produces the motor torque. When any of these three are violated, the material stops being superconducting.
Then there's the trouble with Maxwell's equations. In a perfect conductor the current flows entirely on the surface of the conductor. This makes the current density on the surface infinite, which inherently exceeds the critical current density to maintain superconducting. So in a real superconductor the current flows in a thin shell having nonzero thickness and the current density in the shell sits right at the critical current density. Whenever the current changes with time, the thickness of the thin shell grows or shrinks so that the resulting shell sits at the critical current density. And the dynamic process of establishing the changing thin shell creates loss, i.e., heat, that must be removed. This is particularly troublesome if the current is AC or if changing currents are needed to drive a motor. Superconducting wire is only superconducting under static conditions when all three critical conditions are met.
The above is brief as that is what comments allow. I could be much more precise and explain things in greater depth and breadth. But I doubt folks would want to read many pages of text and besides I have other things going on in my life.
Also dB/dt must be under certain values
Yerbut...
Thats me trying to sound intelligent...
ITER uses supercondicting electromagnets..
How does this tie in with the magnetic field strength limits?
Does ITER not use particularly strong magnetic fields?
Or
Is the limit rather high in the first place?
@@borisfilipovic5253B? Wtf is B?
You cannot mean sound level... Surely...
Edit add: this has been answered many times, thanks the helpful ones, not so thanks the condescending garbage ones.
AC issues might not be a problem for use in long distance high voltage DC interviews, that presently are used for instance to connect power from the Columbia River generation plants to the California power grid. That one carries 700KV. (Or used to - I knew one of the engineers who helped design it, back in the 1970s. IDK if it's still the same )
@@dougaltolan3017 B...magnetic field. dB / dt stands for the time derivative of the magnetic field.
I hope s superconducting HDMI cable will help my soundbar sound better. I am looking for maximum fidelity when watching TikTok cat videos on the big TV.
😂
@msromike123 But they absolutely need to be helium cooled! I won't budge my credit card, below that feature😼
That will make absolutely no difference. HDMI is digital and a bit is a 1 or a 0 pretty much regardless of the cable. People who sell oxygen free speaker cables and gubbins are taking their customers for a ride.
I've them soon in stock and also available with gold plated connectors.
@@rogerphelps9939 whoosh
As an electrical engineer i still stand by the conculsion that these will never catch on. I dont even see a purpose for them as high power transmission losses are almost negligable. For a 380KV system only loses arround 1% over 100km at just above 1GW of transmission power. There have been studies how feasible a reduction on these losses is and they unanimously agree that there is no way of reducing these with a cost effective method (aside from companies like these that seek more investment).
We use overhead power lines to reduce capacitive losses to the ground. to even use long distance overhead power lines we use bare wires to keep their weight down. there have been proposals to increase the diameter of these lines to reduce ohmic losses but the costs of having more and sturdier towers to cope with the weight would oughtweigh any potential gains. now adding thick insulation and nitrogen lines into the mix would make this even worse in addtions to the power needed for the cooling systems.
superconductiong power lines also dont adress a far more significant power loss factor and that is transformation into high voltage and back down again. as facincating as the suibject is, nothing will come of it and its just another start up seeking fast investing from goverments that dont understand what they are investing into.
I was under the impression that the capacity would also drastically increase, but seems there are some limits to how much current can flow while still maintaining superconductivity.
I was looking for exactly this comment. As a fellow electrical engineer I second your statement that the transmission of power over HV overhead power lines is already so efficient that very little gains are to be made.
Agreed. However, losses aren't the only consideration. Being able to increase the amount of real power along a transmission line is another possible benefit. Cooling could theoretically increase the amount of power flow since heat limits the current carrying capacity. This could theoretically increase the delivery of power in an existing transmission Right of Way.
But from reading other comments, there are other limitations as well that need to be considered ("skin effect"). But then, why not go with a larger aluminum conductor over this?
However, those cables must weigh a lot more. The current transmission system is almost entirely aluminum, which has higher conductivity per weight than copper. A nitrogen cooled copper cable sounds like a nightmare from a structural design perspective, and likely cost prohibitive in addition to the cost of operating the cooling. Aluminum system would increase the cable diameter. There is technology that already improves power flow on long transmission lines (HVDC on very long lines, series capacitor banks, etc.). I think the design in the video could have applications, but not for the bulk transmission system any time soon.
At the extreme operating points, as the power goes up, cable losses go up with the square, and those losses need more power, causing more system losses. Supercondictors would help in that case, you have a known, rather than dynamic limit. But the grid doesn't spend much time at that operating point.
series capacitors change the reactive impedance, but don't reduce losses.
If the powerline is cold enough to freeze a bird, it's absorbing heat too quickly to be practical.
I'd say its badly insulated!!
@@JosePineda-cy6om Requiring isolation would negate the benefits, by making these cables more massive and costly than they already are.
@@u1zha yeah, except for very nich cases i can't see how this could be profitable. Without insulation the cold is gonna escape to the environment - so you don't lose electricity thru resistance, but you're burning massive amounts of energy in keeping the damned thing cold. With insulation you don't lose cold so your energy expenditure in keeping it at -190°C gets minimized, but as you correctly point out, these will be really heavy. Probably by burying them instead of having them hanging in the air, but that introduces another set of difficulties. Frankly, the only case use i can think of is delivering electricity to medium islands (or isolated mining communities in places like Siberia), thru High Voltage DC - underwater cables already require massive insulation and are already very expensive to lay down, so by increasing the net flow this system courd be more profitable than the traditional one
High voltage engineer here.
The current pilot applications for superconducting cables are places where we don't have the room to put in a comventional cable.
I don't have the numbers in my head, but one of them is the expansion of transmission capability inside a German city where conventionally you would have had to have three 110kV systems (= 9 cables) over a with of 2-3 meters, ripping a giant trench into the city to place the cables. Instead they were able to lay one single three phase medium voltage (10-30kV, don't remember exactly) superconducting cable into a pre-existing empty tube underground, thus massively decreasing the size and duration of the construction site.
As for icicles or freezing birds... cables are laid underground and superconducring ones are well insulated at that to reduce losses, so you wouldn't need to worry about that. Overhead superconductors would only really be a thing if they were room temperature.
What you DO need to worry about though is the problem every AC cable faces: Capacitive losses. I very much doubt they can make cables more than a few 10s of km long, not because it's not technically feasible, but because you would end up with a majority of the current just feeding the capacitance of the cable instead of actually transmitting power, which would massively increase losses.
Unless they plan on using HVDC transmission, there we don't have this problem.
The freezing bird nonsense makes me heavily question just how much she knows about basic stuff to begin. Should it not be SUPER obvious to a physicist that it has to be absurdly well insulated to make it work over any large distance?
saving space is great, this video is talking about saving energy.
u know, the amount of power that would normally be lost in a conventional cable, would that be enough to run the cooling system?
@@leocurious9919 Probably was a joke? 😅
@@echelonrank3927 That entirely depends on how good the insulation of the cable and the quality of the superconductor is. The transmission losses will definitely be orders of magnitude lower, but they already are pretty low in a conventional cable, so the savings will not be huge. Definitely there though!
@@Electroblud ok, but im still wondering how many kW per mile it takes to cool the cables.
"A burrito...filled with the hopes and dreams of electrical engineers". One step up from the nothing burger of String Theory.
What I heard was:
“I eat the hopes and dreams of electrical engineers for breakfast”
Sabine Hossenfelder, 2024
NOO STRING! PLEASE NOT! AAAAARRRGGHHHHHH,,,
Now I want some burritos. 🌯🌯
At least they'll be able to sample the burrito to see if it's any good and worth opening more branches. I wouldn't order the string theory nothing burger any time this millennium...
This is based on real “new” physics not string theory
what would happen to the birds?
well, they'd recharge faster - obviously
The government will have to recall every bird to update the charging connectors... not an easy task to do.
birds aren't real
But if no power is lost in the cable, they might not recharge at all.
👍
@@muleface1066birds are equipped with parasitic induction dohickeys.
Having been in this game years ago, I'm not holding my breath. When superconducters go resistive the bang is quite spectacular.
"the bang is quite spectacular"... UA-cam vid or it didn't happen!
Oh, that explains why the little superconducting wires in the ITER magnets are attached to GIANT copper windings; to absorb the plasma recoil. (Sorry, I couldn't resist Star Trek Enterprise tech speak.)
Yes, the idea of power transmission by High Tc superconductors has been in the works for decades. The practical introduction of the idea is still not imminent. I recall hearing that the cables would be routed underground instead of overhead, which I suppose would be safer for the birds. The idea that the superconductors would could run in parallel with copper to take on the current load in case of superconductivity failure sounds heavy and expensive.
There is extra bang because they are coiled up in magnets, not stretched into wires. A lot of energy stored in one place.
I AM THE SIGMAAA
4:28 Extracting Nitrogen from the air is really energy intensive. I hope that company didn't just mention that as shortly as Sabine did.
Of course they did. This screams power point slide for gullible venture capitalists
Liquid nitrogen is a byproduct of making liquid oxygen for industry and hospitals. Some of the liquid nitrogen can be used to precool the air coming into the liquefaction plant, but due to the fact that most of the energy is in the latent heat of vaporization rather than the temperature change, a lot of it is left over. If you wanted to produce your own liquid nitrogen for superconducting lines, you would install a standard air liquefaction plant, sell the liquid oxygen it produced at a very slight discount, and use the leftover liquid nitrogen for not much more than free.
@@Alkoluegenial - True! Most of the energy is consumed by the compressor motors. Often times two cooling loops are employed. The air has to be first dried down trace levels of H2O. Also all other contaminants, such as CO2 must be removed. Then the compression/expansion processes can take place to generate liquid air. That then must be fed into a cryogenic fractionating tower to separate out the N2 component. Most of that process was not shown in the simplified diagrams in the above video.
This isnt typically used for above-ground power lines but for underground ones if there is no space for traditional power cables. There is/was one planned in Munich - 12km in length capable of 500 Megawatt at 110kV
There seems to be plenty of underground space for pipelines, water mains, and sewers.
I think our entire power cable network should be underground. No company wants to do it; because it costs too much money. I think they used some other lame excuse; but money is usually the reason.
@rremnar underground cables have to be much beefier and you need to take some measures to prevent the ground from burning when the cable fails. In above ground cables gravity will seperate the wire when it starts to wear out and cut's the connection. Which is easy to detect and shuts down the entire line.
But yes it's doable and looks much better, but it is quite a lot more expensive.
Another issue with superconducting power delivery systems is how to cope with a "quench"- when for whatever reason some portion of the conductor loses its superconducting qualities and becomes resistive. Current flow then causes heating there, which then warms up adjacent portions of the conductor, which then also quench, and you have an avalanche of localized heating which can destroy the conductor.
High tec Rube Goldberg silliness.
Came here to say this, if they are transmitting thousands of amps along a zero resistance cable and suddenly there was a very high resistance, well lets just say I would love to watch the explosion (from a safe distance) because it would be spectacular!
I think your confusing a thing that's a problem in an MRI machine that's a giant inductor with something that your average fuse/breaker would handle pretty well.
If they get a hot spot either of 2 things happen, the monitoring system notices that resistance is now not zero and turns it off. It shorts to something making a current spike and the breaker trips like any other power line.
Or it shorts and arcs until it can't support the arc any more just like any other power line.
Why do people always assume any new thing must be totally perfect without any possibility of failure? High power density power lines have lots of spicy failure modes and fail regularly.
@@Auttieb Notice all of the Copper cables in the center. The cables would be buried with a lot of thermal insulation.
Nah, it'll be fine.
I woke up this morning depressed about the state of the world.
Now you give me this wonderful news: I finally have a power cable for my death ray. I bought it from Acme so it's guaranteed to work well.
And Sabine is worried only about the birds perched on frozen electrical lines. She should have kept you in mind and given some thought to the Road Runner.
@Falconlibrary, you really can be a Wiley one!
Make sure you stock up on hand held wooden plank signs for the test.
Lolololol
@@DFPercush It has a label INSPECTED BY R. OADRUNNER so I think it's manufactured and inspected in a Scandinavian country.
@@Falconlibrary A true sign of quality and reliability lol
I was wondering where my hopes and dreams were. Now I know they're in a superconductor burrito.
It's always in the last place you think to look, amirite?
Mine disappeared after my first job, like 30 years ago. I guess they were in that imaginary space we used for S and Z domain transformations.
I was wondering if she is considered attractive in her country 😬
superconducting high voltage cables are nothing new.
The Furukawa Electric is making these since 2012.
your voice is very easy to listen to when referring to complicated subjects. You were born to teach
Some commentators below are absolutely correct. My son is a PhD Materials Engineer working in this area, and he makes these same comments about the "RELIABILITY" of these materials. They FAIL regularly, for almost random reasons, like thermal shock, ground movement, seasonal thermal stresses, rainfall pressure, etc, etc. Most of these materials are "glassine" and cannot take any tensile stress at all. Also, as Elon Musk paraphrased, the idea of using liquid Hydrogen as any kind of storage medium (ie: over long distances or volumes), is the "stupidest idea ever". Simple Kelvin Thermodynamics will destroy this stupid concept, as soon as it is tried in real scale.
It doesn't have to work to be successful, it just has to attract funding. Just ask any big MIC contractor.
A similar idea was presented around 20 years ago. In that one they used mini boring machines to put the cables underground and used liquid hydrogen as the coolant (also useful as a way to distribute the hydrogen for use in cars-it was 20 years ago). They were talking about being able to send 50,000 amps dc in one cable with a second cable as the return. The main problem, and I don't know if they've figured out how to deal with it, is what if something happens to the cable, say a break caused by earthquake or overly rambunctious contractor digging in the area, then the sudden drop in the current leads to a massive back emf, which can be quite destructive.
If anything disrupts the cable at all, and disrupts the coolant flows, that cable better have some effective pressure relief to deal with evaporation
I imagine the pipes holding the coolant/cables would need to be pressure rated so that what seems like an inevitable disruption forces pressure relief in specific locations along the line. Locations I wouldn't want to live near.
@@jcbeck84 I bet, such cables will be only at the highest load lines. There will it make most sense. So protecting those is already done in some way or form.
You can't win. If the out and back are separate they have inductance which means any failure of cooling causes an energy dump into what is now a resistance. If the cables are coaxial they have capacitance which means the same result. And as the generator cannot turn off instantly, you now have that large spike in EMF, destructive to generator and cables.
I don't like any kind of electrical infrastructure which isn't stable when current is flowing through it at room temperature.
Why not... Insulators. You know, So it doesn't get affected by a nice day out. and be safe for birds.
My suggestion for a new kind of power line is a long pipe filled with nothing that you shoot antimatter through. At the far end, the antimatter annihilates, causing a transfer of energy. It's a dream I have. You might even call it a pipe dream.
what's the pipe made of?
Sure, shield the pipe with magnetic field to keep the animattter from touching it... but sounds more like a weapon than power transmission. So make one and sell it to the army not the electric company
41007. Seriously, full first law energy conservation that includs heat implies that refrigeration of well insulated superconducting powerlines releases incidental amounts of nonthermal energy. Nanoscale diode arrays may be a practical way of releasing incidental amounts of electrical energy.
Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise power is dificult to deny. Diode voltage / current characterstics can be displayed on an XY tracing oscilloscope. Please drink the antidote to second law of thermodynamics doom stupor. The science is free. Liberate the technology.
Aloha
41007. Seriously, full first law energy conservation that includs heat implies that refrigeration of well insulated superconducting powerlines releases incidental amounts of nonthermal energy. Nanoscale diode arrays may be a practical way of releasing incidental amounts of electrical energy.
Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise power is dificult to deny. Diode voltage / current characterstics can be displayed on an xy tracing oscilloscope. Please drink the antidote to second law of thermodynamics doom stupor. The science is free. Liberate the technology.
Aloha
@@liam3284 Matter, of course. How would the tech otherwise matter?
To be serious, I know it's a bad idea and was just making a joke. Even ignoring the danger of the antimatter coming into contact with any of the matter, the costs would be astronomical. Just look at how much antimatter costs to produce. Googling quickly reveals it's in excess of $60 trillion per gram.
One of my college buddies was engineer in charge of the first commercial superconducting power line ever built. His major was actually physics, which makes sense. He was a savant. His mind went places others did not know.
During the late-80's early-90's, I worked for Superconductor Technologies Inc. whose product lines concentrated on high-Q resonators and microwave filters made from high-temperature superconductors, mostly Thallium-Barium-Calcium-Copper Oxide (TBCCO) and Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBCO). It was cool stuff!
2:23 That hope and dreams just took me out.
3:31 “It’s like I’m a detective, only instead of following hot leads, I’m following cold wires”
Is this another string theory?
Lol
Shoshimin: how Sabine becomes ordinary
I AM THE SIGMAAAA
Hot leads > cold wires. Excellent
Back in 2000s when I studied chemistry, one of our faculty's departments had a Bruker NMR spectrometer that used both liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for cooling its superconducting magnet. It was a beast that had stairs and a catwalk to access the specimen insertion area. I wonder how the future developments in superconductors will affect scientific gear like this.
Hopefully smaller and easier to access!
If Quantum affects happen when cold. Does is heat that makes use conscious of objective reality
@@osmosisjones4912It’s not that quantum effects happen more at low temperatures, they’re just way more noticeable at low temperatures. Heat is just a measure of how fast particles in a certain area are moving. If an area is too hot, the particles are moving too quickly for quantum effects to have much noticeable impact.
@@Benson_aka_devils_advocate_88 oh yeah, miniaturization of equipment is definitely the way - given how massive the electronics alone used to be in the '60s or even '80s, compared to modern instruments. Computers used to fill entire rooms and eat hefty hundreds of kilowatts of power. Now you get more processing power from a handheld device. Even a modern digital sampling oscilloscope is teeny tiny compared to the old analog scopes from decades ago that had long cathode ray tubes, let alone the even older ones built entirely with vacuum tubes. Modern electronics packs tons of functionality in cubic centimeters of space. Other parts of scientific gear will have to follow - and they often do, with micro-fluidics and the like, that allow for testing extremely small samples.
@@KeritechElectronicsThe computer analogy is very very faulty and equally destructive. It worked only because, Lithography is rather a homogenous problem, one technique solves a large no. of problems. All it needed was increasingly accurate netroligy and process contril, the science and fundamental Engineering of wich has already established. But take MEMS. The problem is no longer homogenous and it's not scalable even, now that the technology is there. Other problems are way more heterogeneous and in many cases, like for superconductivity, even a lot of the science is yet to be worked out. Yet investors hope to get the same scale up and return like the lithography, as a result, waste money and resources, or ignore/pull out promising tech that is slow to bear fruit.
I too hope that Bruker's awesome NMR machines get smaller and more affordable, but i won't hope much.
Many new high temperature superconducting cable manufactures have popped up , typically due to small niche contracts from things such as nuclear fusion energy experimental projects and other specialized physics endeavors. Now that they have so much invested in their manufacturing infrastructure they are seeking to simulate other markets for their products. They have to try to create markets even if their products haven’t been demonstrated to be cost-effective with the existing electrical cabling technologies and manufactures. This creates a climate where deceptive marketing practices can flourish.
Love your brains, Sabine, and your honesty, fearlessness and humor. ❤
Cryogenic Pigeons... That's a good name for a progressive rock band
😂
Yeah, The Eagles is trademarked but that one's wide open
@@Falconlibrary How about “Horny Eagles”?
Frozen bird? Zero Resistance (girl band)?
When I held a senior position in a superconducting company over a decade ago, I saw significant challenges in commercializing superconducting AC power cables due to two key issues: 1) the often overlooked but substantial inherent AC losses, and 2) the limitations of liquid cooling systems, which restricted the ability to handle elevation changes. Perhaps advancements have been made since then, but before getting too excited, I'd recommend carefully considering these two fundamental challenges.
If you want make use of the higher currents possible you have to turn to DC anyway. The losses of AC/DC DC/AC converters usually get lost in translation.
Surely any superconductor is going to be part of a HVDC system though?
@@armandaneshjoo chill neo, put some protection for that edgyness and finish your cereal.
Sincere energy transport is DC. AC would radiate it away.
Do you really need AC to transmit energy in superconducting wires?
You know, it was my own fault for assuming you meant "Room Temperature" Superconductors. Fair play.
@@armandaneshjoo Oh, give the guy a break. It might have been a poorly written joke, but even you should have been able to determine that.
I've seen you respond to so many comments for this video, and everything you say is just filled with hate and condemnation. Who hurt you, my friend? I'm here to listen, if you need someone to talk to.
Excellent Report..
Thanks and Blessings to
Sabine.
0:30 AAAAAA... now I get it!
I love Sabine’s dry sense of humor and deadpan delivery.
its sad she often is wrong nowadays
If it were so poorly insulated that a pigeon's foot would freeze to it before the bird gets the idea to stop sitting on the cable, it's hard to imagine they'd reach their 100 km goal.
It uses evaporative cooling. It inherently can't be well insulated.
indeed
@@Imaboss8ball The evaporative cooling is happening inside the cable, not on the outside.
Wouldn't you want that tho, because then your using the sunlight to speed up the evaporation saving on your own power to do so?
@@armandaneshjoowe’re talking about the insulation of the cable and you timestamped the diagram of a cooling station?
Wow, that could be progress! But, first of all, I think I don´t cancel my order for fiber optic cables, that are promised to come up in the next five years here in good old Western Germany.
Really? 5 years? That is as fast as light. Or something like that.
Link between superconductivity and fiber optics......?........... NONE 😂😂😂
@@boredscientist5756 Perhaps I apply for a patent for that?😉
Isn't this video about the power grid, not internet?
@@SlightyLessEvolvedInternet is mostly provided using cables... It is still information that is carried from one point to another in the form of an electrical current. The cables that are the subject of this video would very much apply to sending and receiving Internet signals. Your Internet connection is still routed from the source to you through copper wires even through fiber optic cable. At some point, your modem/router uses a wired cable to complete the reception of service, which is still the case when using satellite ISPs.
Just got your Planet Wild ad when trying to watch your vid, keep it up. I love these types of ad
5:31 "How reliable such a system would operate on large scales???" This phrase needs a little salt.
Are room temperature superconductors even physically possible, at least without any energy inputs into the conductor?
Not with the current materials that we know of.
@@noradseven that sounds like Yes
If there are any energy inputs it really is not a room temperature superconductor.
Sure there is, never heard of the perpetuum mobile? And vacuum energy? And Zero Point Energy Module? And trilithium crystals?
Definitely yes. Graphen at least if you will make vacuum tube, then potential differences at edges... Inside nothing to stop electrons, tube by itself too stable to have vibration of atoms so strong that they will stop electron. Maybe some combination with another material to make it more effective. Or glass of some certain molecular structure. Glass don't need clear structure it can be any form.
So yes, they're possible... Physically, but engineering of it... It'll be hard.
Room temp superconductors make a hell of a bang when a whole cross section loses it's superconductivity.
Despite the common use of the phrase ‘high temperature superconductors’ no practical superconductor has ever been found to operate at anywhere close to room temperature despite over a half-century of research in such fields. The highest temperature practical superconductors typically still need to be cooled down to around liquid nitrogen temperature.
You are correct that when a superconducting magnet, that is operating at near full current, suddenly reverts to a normal state, also known as ‘quenching’ an enormous amount of energy must be quickly dissipated, typically that is done in a cooled resistor bank.
That aspect, of superconducting circuits, was not mentioned in this presented scheme.
@@vernonbrechin4207 there are superconductors that operate at room temperature, but just take pressures about 30 times that which diamonds form in the Earth lolz
what on earth is that pfp
Our current power system makes a hell of a bang when it gets unhappy as well, lol. But yes with superconducts it is more like a certainty rather than a possibility. The added expense of active monitoring and damage mitigation systems makes the cost effectiveness a challenge. I suspect if any commercial viability is reached it will only be in very unique cases.
@@wj11jam78he like animals
British Electrical Engineers haven't had hopes or dreams for decades. We have been importing our hopes and dreams for some time now.
@@armandaneshjoo Beats me. I was brought up in the 80's by boomers. My dad used to say "Stop dreaming. You know it'll never happen." Good times.
Thank you Sabine. Great video. Easy to understand, even for the ignoramuses like me. You have a keen sense of humor. Signed up for the Brilliant premium.
You are surely not an ignoramus if you watch Sabine's channel, more than most people do with their brains.😊
I really liked the new voice used for the advertisement, I even watched the ad part almost halfway through.
Sabine, thanks for breaking down science bunk and bring everyone back down to reality. It's so sorely needed in our lives.
It might have been just a joke, but the outside of the cable is unlikely to be cold, because the entire point of insulation is to keep the cold inside.
But I thought they were wanting to use evaporation as a cooling mechanism? Isn't that very likely to also result in some of the nitrogen escaping?
@@as0482 Yes, but only as a bonus because you can't prevent the evaporation. It's still way better to have as little heat cross the outer insulation barrier as possible. If they were really getting "icicles" forming on the cables, that would be pretty awful insulation. I mean, maybe they really can't insulate it very well and it really is that bad, but that would argue further against this idea, which is already pretty suspect. Superconductor cables are only 10-15% more efficient than normal high-voltage lines, so the idea is already kind of fundamentally dumb. There isn't much there that's worth the incredible complexity.
@@cuthbertallgood7781 That was my question. Does the power saved pay for the manufacturing (at scale) and the power required to cool the cables?
@@johncasey9544 Probably not for every cable, but on certain ultra-high traffic cables (eg. leading out of a power plant) it might be worth it
Well, technically it is to keep the hot outside, but that's ultimately the same thing.
I can't imagine that cables that expensive would be above ground where windstorms could destroy them. They'd be buried, right?
So, maybe we could have cryogenic moles?
The perfect way to restore the permafrost!
Several moles of nitrogen will constantly crawl through this cables. 🙂
I assumed the same thing. But then I noticed someone else here comment: "I'm not a fan of putting high voltage cables under the ground. Far too dangerous, you can have a 50 m radius around them that can /will electrify everyone (evaporation at those voltages) them when something goes wrong. "
So might not be a good idea after all. Also might be more expensive to set-up and do maintenance.
@@AlexBarbu Bizarre comment. First, electricity doesn't evaporate. Second, a power line will create a magnetic field but it doesn't "electrify" surrounding substances, solid, liquid or gaseous. The cable insulation prevents any problematic leakage of current.
@@AlexBarbu It's not dangerous to put high voltage cables into the ground, in every bigger city you have such underground cables. It's just cheaper to have overhead lines. There isn't any "leakage" of electicity from this lines, but they induce magnetic fields. That isn't a big problem in the air, as air is a very bad conductor, but it becomes a problem in wet earth. But it's no danger to stand next to such an isolated cable, but the magnetic field causes problems when you put several cables next to each other.
Anyway, superconductor cables are way to heavy to hang them midair. They will most likely replace high voltage lines inside cities. They are often already cooled with mineral oil under pressure, it won't make to much difference to change from oil to liquid nitrogen.
Great video, Dr Hossenfelder. Every joke landed. One of your best to date.
Thankyou for doing the thinking for us Sabine.
I don't know how long I'd have thought about superconducting cables before _cryogenic_ _pigeons_ came to mind.
😆🤣😆
As a german i'm a little bit sad that she didn't mention our german efforts in this area. In Munich is a test project with HTS cables called SuperLink.
Seit 5 Jahren in der Planungsphase. Für ein Kabel. Hier werden auch nur Forschungsgelder gefarmt.
3:16 - Never trust an engineering company that uses a lowercase "m" to mean "millions".
Edit: apparently the error was introduced by the website reporting on the press release, not the actual company (the original press release says "$24.9 million", not "$24.9m").
The screenshot appears to be from FinSMEs, some type of news site, not the company itself. The M is capital in the headline but lowercase in the text. I'm guessing it was written by someone who recently majored in journalism, graphic design, English, etc, or by an intern; possibly based on a press release from VEIA or one of the other parties listed.
@@Allen2 - Well spotted. The press release on VEIR's actual website says "$24.9 million", so it seems it was FinSMEs that decided to shorten it to "$24.9m".
Never trust a company that uses decimal points when describing millions.
"You vill eat ze pidgeons" instead of "You vill eat ze bugs" sounds like an improvement already.
I can't squab-ble with that.
And the insta freezing kills most of the parasites and a good chunk of bacteria, so eating raw pidgeons' meat becomes feasible (as the Russians do in Siberia, eating frozen fish straight out of the lakes)
You don't need to cool the cables if you create the correct trajectory using a lattice structure with an offset of 1.1°
Those saying this should be buried miss the fact that high voltage feeders are typically overhead for ease of installation and maintenance and typically very well hardened from the environment. We've been doing it this way for a century.
What a brilliant idea to get rid of the pesky pigeons in my neighbourhood! Bring it on.
You 2? Me 1.st
Aren´t they edible?😅
Stop hating on pigeons, they are a domesticated animal we abandoned to the wild.
Ah! So pigeons are universally hated. In India, in some cultures, they are referred to as the 'Muslims of the bird family'.
@@Skozerny No, they are flying rats.
Very interesting... *starts drawing up a patent application for magnetic avian shoes*...
Sabine, I got a planet wild ad with you in it as the narrator when watching the video!!! 😂
If you produce the superconductor by vacuum depositing alternate layers of iron and copper with a final layer of unobtanium you could significantly reduce the amount of money available for research
i like this channel better then thunderfoot (different subjects i know).... just feels a bit more humble and that makes it easier to listen to. the dude is just so full of himself XD
(no need to like this as it is not really a positive message i know :$ )
Love the videos :) and i can feel the real frustration without the anger.... idk im just spewing here.
different subjects, yeah, but somehow for well over a year or so, it's almost always about musk, musk and more musk.
Yeah i definetly agree with you thunderfoot has a far to big ego
@@johndoe2-ns6tf that made me laugh xD IKR?!
My biggest problem with it is that the loses are not so bad to justify something so complex and expensive. It's just something like 0.3% for every 100km in DC power lines, and around 5% from transformers. At absolute worst we only lose 10% of the energy.
Do you want to know how you reduce those loses ? Make energy generation closer to consumption. Like, let's say, mounting solar panels on the roofs of homes.
That is not the main advantage. As said in the Video way more current could be transported with the cable. Because the current is only limited by the dissipation of heat due to ohmic-losses (DC-Transmission). This increases the possible power transfer to huge amounts (only limited by the hardware on each end)
@@oliversmith7130 yes, because if you transmit more energy the cables get hotter and become less efficient. so ? just get more cables. unless you are trying to transport energy through the Atlantic, more cables will always be cheaper and easier. and you know what reduces the need for more throughput from power cables ? local energy generation... like solar panels in roofs.
it's a problem looking for a solution. it may have some very niche applications. specially for extremely high energy demanding situations, but overall it's so complicated and expensive that it doesn't justify replacing the powergrid with it.
The best way to reduce losses is constrain peak demand. Dynamic losses are the square of the power delivered. Static losses are proportional to the size of the equipment (larger equipment needed to support larger peak).
Modern battery systems, placed at the zone substation, may save more energy by flattening peaks than they lose charging and discharging.
@@danilooliveira6580 agreed, many better things to optimize than the cables
Just to play devil's advocate, it has been suggested that only 2,000 square miles (20 x40 miles) of solar panels in the desert could supply the entire US grid. The reason this has not been considered feasible is exactly because of transmission loss. If this powerline is actually feasible, then we may have just found a good use for a whole bunch of usless desert.
I didn't know ceramics could be drawn into wires.
Ever heard of glass fiber?
@@armandaneshjoo i absolutely agree with you. I just answered to the question if wires can be made from ceramics and since glass is more or less a ceramic material i mentioned glass fibers. Of course manufacturing superconducting fibers is much more challenging (but obviously not impossible).
Can you tell me why the grain structure is so important? I know that the stochiometric composition plays an important role but didnt know that the microstructure is also that important.
@@bec1111 Glass isn't a ceramic. it is an amorphous solid (and it does not flow at human environment temperatures).
@@avsystem3142 silica glass and ceramic share a lot of properties due to similar bonding types (ionic, covalent) therefore its also an brittle insulator with similar mechanical properties. And i sayed more or less
There are also metallic glasses which are also amorph but also are reflective like metals and also are no insulators like ceramics.
There is already an operating cable in Essen, Germany.
I read an article about replacing steel core transmission lines with composite fiber cored ones which can carry more current without sagging as much.
Is anyone seriously suggesting suspended cyro cables, rather than buried?
Well, if they can make it work with the sun beating down on it in the summer, they can make it work buried. I suspect they just want to be able to get at it for measurements or to swap it out for different trials, or something.
@@jamesvandamme7786 My main concern with suspended cables is you are asking for a whole load of extra problems when you're trying to demonstrate viability. Using suspended cables with wind loading, wind oscillation, ice loading and their attendant flexor issues are rather much, speaking as someone who worked as a test engineer on the space shuttle fuel cell fueling system. Those were all rigid piping except for a few of the couplings for thermal expansion. I'm saying they are begging to fail.
You want to bury something this complex? Maintenance on regular buried cables is already a financial nightmare.
So a downed power line of this type would be both an electrical hazard and also spew liquid nitrogen? XD
Well, nitrogen isn't toxic, at least
@richtheobald4390 It's not toxic, but it is deadly. In a confined space it can replace the oxygen and cause asphyxiation in seconds.
I recently visited a dermatologist. They use liquid nitrogen to freeze skin abnormalities. The doctor made some comment about exploding nitrogen. I informed her that nitrogen is inert and cannot explode. She then asked me where I got my degree. I informed her that I have none. She then went on to relate the occurrence that made her believe that nitrogen had exploded. She was apparently working with the substance and wanted to transport it. She poured some into an ordinary thermos bottle and capped it and placed it in the trunk of a car. Subsequently, there was an explosion. It wasn't the nitrogen that exploded, it was the thermos, from the overpressure when the nitrogen warmed and became gaseous and greatly increased the pressure in a vessel with no pressure relief valve. Apparently, MD's don't study physics.
If the nitrogen is lost, it won't be conducting much. As I understand it, most high temperature superconductors make really good insulators once they get warm; it's one reason they can explode if they're carrying large amounts of current when superconductivity is lost.
@avsystem3142 What difference does it make? In practical terms, it was the liquid nitrogen that caused an explosion. The main point being, just because it's inert, doesn't mean if not handled properly, it can't cause great damage or harm.
There is another problem that stems from the essence of superconducting: not enough loss to maintain stability. Every moment generation must equal loss plus load, and that loss is an underrated asset. Imagine all generated sources having to somehow agree about voltage and phase.
It is a concern we all accept but never think about. We have pneumatic rubber tires on our road vehicles for a couple of reasons. Traction, of course, has no correlate in bulk electric power. Ride smoothness has a critical counterpart in electric power transmission; we don't want much loss but we sure don't want to overstress anything.
Still, if we are ready to take the leap I hope we would finally make the switch to DC.
Ohh good point. So over time you would get a lot of high frequency noise bouncing around between end points of the superconductive segments of the power grid. Maybe the lines could be periodically surrounded by dissipator circuits that inductively couple only to higher frequency components.
Over very long transmission lines DC is already being used: high voltage dc transmission lines
They could only be HVDC cables. Superconductors don't like AC.
The electric correlate to traction is phase matching. When your phase crests grip your motor and spin it, you have traction. When they don't grip it strongly enough and the crest goes by without pushing the motor, you're skidding.
There has been reports of using LNG pipeline for cooling. Not sure how big of a scale or how practical it is, but essentially a few years ago Chinese planted superconducting wires into LNG pipelines, which transports cold LNG anyway.
For the icicles, here techniques used in Canada : Hitting high tension lines with telephone poles attached to a helicopter (really), temporarily pushing more power to heat the cables (most superconductors are not conductors when warm, so I guess this one might now work), or putting some kind of device on the cables capable of making them move remotely (they mostly use explosives, but maybe a bunch of N64 rumble packs could do the trick ;)
Check with Simon Rattle; he’s a super conductor.
Badadumm Tschingg!
I ran into a super conductor today in a train. He sold me a ticket.
He also works best at room temperature
How about we BURY the cables? Novel idea, I know, but buried electrical cable has the advantage of already being grounded… 😂
A lot of networks in the UK are undergrounded. They are more resilient than overhead lines, however there are disadvantages if there is a fault you have to locate it and dig up the cable and replace.
@@Fluxdeluxe1 Realistically, you could just put an underground tunnel next to the cables, making maintenance substantially easier. At the price of initial costs increasing.
Just a quick mention didnt see this point anywhere. Superconductors could in some cases make the grid more unstable, as if enough superconductors is introduced it would also mean the resistance is smaller. Smaller resistance means smaller losses, but also larger oscillations.
Her razor sharp wit is commensurate with her knowledge of science and physics. I definitely would not want to go to battle against her on any intellectual matter.
I work on MRI scanners, the above liquid nitrogen temperature superconductor would dramatically lower cost EXCEPT the wires are too brittle, as in a high magnetic field would create forces that break the windings.
There are problems to solve.
You are the most important source of awesomeness and for making things make sense for a fake polar bear in Norway. One tha tis not so clever but willing to learn from those that know how. Thank you so much for all your videos.
2:15 - Or with high-tension lines, you have a steel cable (for strength) and an aluminium shell (for weight and conduction) because the skin depth at 60Hz is such that the steel cable doesn't get involved in conducting electricity...
For each mile of cable there is a non-zero risk of a leak that causes a loss of superconductivity per day. So, it's a chain that will fail entirely if just one link is broken. That means that the risk of failure anywhere on the line goes up exponentially with the distance, so the viability of the system depends heavily on how reliable you can make it. All the pumps and tubes must be able to chuck along for years on end without failure.
Underground. Earthquake then becomes your largest concern. Bonus: eliminating trees also eliminates pigeons.
@@afterthesmash Eliminating trees also elminates oxygen. Putting cables below ground is a better idea. Oh, I didn't know we had frequent earth quakes? Oh wait, we don't!
Failure risk goes up linearly with distance (actually slightly less, since the *number* of failures goes up linearly, but with sufficiently many segments, some of the probability weight corresponds to multiple simultaneous failures, which practically still is a single disruption).
The electric grid national transmission lines only lose 10% in summer and 5% in winter so superconducting cables will make negligible difference.
that's a massive amount of money lost
@@RWZiggy So if they went to the vast expense of replacing the national grid with superconducting cables, do you think your electricity bill would fall by 5%?
Do you have any idea what’s 5 to 10% of entire terwatts of power? That would be the equivalent of several nuclear power plants!
@@juimymary9951 Do you have any idea how many nuclear power plants could be built for the same price as replacing the national grid with superconducting cables?
If it were me and I had these lovely superconducting cables, I would not be stringing them on poles... I'd bury them. You'd have to adjust the outer jacketing to deal with any alkalinity or acidity in the soil, but I'd imagine you could have these last a good 30-50 years. The issue with current direct bury (DB) cables is that you have to dissipate the heat into the ground, and since the ground is a much better thermal insulator than open air, you can't pass as much current through them as you could an open wire... but if you're supercooling the cables anyways, then you'd WANT more insulation. I mean, hell, you could even install them inside of an outer duct for even more protection and insulation which also makes it a lot easier to replace in the future, provided the duct is still good enough. What is that, three birds one stone? I think these would be most beneficial to use as main power transfer from power stations to substations. Then you could just use normal distribution architecture (poles, wires, buried cables, etc) to get the power to where it is needed.
As for my expertise: I'm a Electric Utilities designer... I'm the guy who makes the plans that tells the crews where to install poles and transformers and other pieces of equipment... so I'd say I have a fair amount of knowledge in this area.
The problem of losses occurs in all transmission lines of the grid. But back in the 70,s Broun Bovarie SPA. Italy designed a system for underground 1megavolt line DC. Power the coaxial cable is charged like a capacitor and at the other end a static converter turns it back to 3 phase 415 mains power again. The resistance of the cable was the most significant loss but that line capacitance stabilized the system against surges that a normal transmission line cannot. The high voltage converter was most interesting to me as they stacked the switching SCR,s vertically like a big insulator stack and they used optical signals to control them.
Love Sabine, her sense of humour and her way of simplifying complicated science topics of that moment.
Also love the high level of comments debate and tech talk back and forth among electrical engineers here, debating what factors
limit the application of super conducting in the real world, and regret my mere science degree in chemistry and math, cannot compete.
Meanwhile, May the research- ... ... ... continue.
The Proceedings of the IEEE carried an article about it 55 or more years ago when I was a student. It went into quite a lot of detail about a proposed design and talked about current and magnetic field densities and the required refrigeration system. If memory serves, for some reason it had to carry only direct current, which complicated matters.
Here in the states both V and E have been used interchangeably to denote Voltage in equations. When I attended US Navy tech schools, E was used to denote voltage and then when I attended university, V was used to denote voltage--- and then you go to your Physics class...
I spent more than half of my life overseas, I always feel amazed at how much more technologically advanced it is in USA.
Very intelligent lady >> Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976) is a German theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, author, science communicator, and UA-camr. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology, and Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
also thinks -196°C is *above* room temperature 😂 also thinks they would put the cables in the air 😂 and they wouldn't insulate the cables so that birds could freeze there 😂
I assumed they would go with subterranean cables, where you can easily stack insulation layers.
But this is also a ~cool~ idea
There are a 3 issues I see with this.
1. While evaporative cooling will be better for maintaining temperature, the total cooling per meter is not changed. The only difference is, that instead of cooling the whole lot by a small amount, they'd be cooling a small volume by large amount (from outside temperature air all the way to liquid nitrogen).
2. There needs to be a fail-state reboot option that does not require the grid to be operational.
Basically, if the power fails for several days and the cooling stations go offline, there needs to be a way to start them back up and cool the whole powergrid to operational temperature, before it goes back online.
3. It needs to be fail-safe. What happens if a cooling station goes out and there is nothing to cool the cable? There must either be safety vents, that will vent the expanding nitrogen into the atmosphere, or the cables must be able to withstand nitrogen's vapor pressure at 100°C at least (I am putting a safety margin here, in case something else goes wrong too, and I am assuming the cables are painted white.)
The following two thoughts popped to my electrical engineer mind:
(1) Why do we hang the cable? As it looks like from the drawing the cable is isolated? (I am a bit confused how the phases can be so close..). By burying it in the ground we will not only miss the opportunity for cryogenic birds but also slay the biggest problem with building new high-capacity transmission lines: nobody appreciates their backyard being decorated by electrical engineers.
(2) The key property you want a transmission line to have is reliability. Aluminum/Steel cables as used in overhead lines have that -- unless physically damaged or subject to off the charts weather conditions they work. If your cooling station looses power (unless they come with a transformer..) or has some other failure, suddenly you cannot use a major link in the transmission network.
We used niobium titanium in liquid helium at BNL RHIC and Fermilab accelerator magnets .
Very very intense cryogenic refrigeration machines.
Expensive.
DC no skin effect for powerlines now being constructed. HVDC .
Interesting idea 👍
Learned something new. I didn't know/realize that superconducting material can not be penetrated by magnetic fields. Cool!
Also if the cooling system fails or is degraded, the cables go almost instantly into thermal overload. CERN manages this in the LHC with trip sensors along the cables. Something similar would be needed in the transmission system.
spending energy on liquid nitrogen is much better than conventional conductors, because amount of energy needed doesn't depend on electric current. i.e. this line can transmit any power with same constant energy use. that means above some power it's cheaper than conventional conductors
Losses in transmission are not normally very large. A 275kV transmission line with a power capacity of 500MW with a cable of resistance 3 Ohms only loses about 2% of the energy.
In 1997 I was in my physics lab and I and a few other students were talking with the professor about hi fidelity audio systems and their limitations. I asked the professor if superconducting cables were possible, since they could be used to eliminate resistance both in the audio cables, and the electrical components within the speakers. He simply asked "why would you want to do that?". He didn't say it in a curious way, but rather in a skeptical way. I simply replied that it may yield almost perfect audio and be the ultimate audiophile system. He didn't really seem to follow. I don't think he was interested in such things. I never dug deep enough into the idea to figure out whether applying superconductor technology to audio systems and related wiring would be feasible, but for him to ask me that in the way he did always bugged me.
Sabine, you have a great channel :)
I love how you break down complicate topics.
Above -196 degrees would be easy, you meant bellow.
I love your videos keep doing them you are very interesting to watch and I love your non biased opinions
The problem is the nitrogen evaporation. Either the pump stations have to have a constant supply to replenish the lines or compress and condense nitrogen on site. Either way it is cost inefficient to do. Simply cooling it by letting the nitrogen evaporate is a solution to a problem that ignores a greater fundamental problem.
Liquid nitrogen transportation is quite expensive, and direct extraction of the air is usually the best option, but probably there are some applications that, hypothetically speaking, can be used. One of them is extracting energy from the thermal gradient. Cool evaporated nitrogen can be used to power pumps (just use it for refrigeration applications or wait) inflate tires, or industrial applications.
Bury the cables. The ground temperature is more constant and less susceptible to fluctuations in temperature so you can have a more consistent system for cooling/insulating
oh great. Now I will want to get a burrito every time I look at electrical transmission wires over head. Thanks Sabine ! ;)
hm, from memory, the resasons it had not been done already.
- it takes energy to keep them cold.
- superconductors don't like high di/dt
- quench ( loss of superconductivity, e.g. from damage to the cooling loop) creates a hotspot which propagates, potentially damaging large part of the cable.
- overcurrent fault may lead to quenching.
- cuprates and other high temperature superconductors are ceramic, not great for making cables.
- many forms of insulating material at the required temperature are brittle.
These are only material and engineering problems though, traditionally it was considered not worth the effort.
High pressure might be far more practical, you would only need a thin layer of material and something squeezing in on it, then surround that layer within a fluid that resist changes in density due to pressure or temp. They do something similar for deep sea drones, you can fill portions of it with a fluid (I think mineral oil is some times used, I could be miss remembering that though), that pushes back against the water pressure outside protecting the electronics. You could do some similar, so the inside pressure isn't trying to push out, letting it remain at a pressure.
The question is, just how much pressure does it take? Is my idea stupid and impractical because it takes an absurd amount of pressure? I don't know.
It has some scientific uses. The impact on field lines alone is a big, means high currents, means supercomputers about to take a leap ahead.
People like Sabine are so smart that they make me feel as though I may have been born an entirely different and far less intelligent species! 🥴
Tbh a new technology that gets Sabine to only have broad critiques like this is a good sign that things are coming along pretty well