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Hacker News Hacker NewsVolts recently interviewed Emilia Chojkiewicz of UC Berkeley (quoted in article) and Jason Huang of TS Conductor.
"One easy way to boost the grid: upgrade the power lines" [Jan 31, 2024] https://www.volts.wtf/p/one-easy-way-to-boost-the-grid-upgra...
Here's a prior episode about "grid enhancing technologies" in general, including reconductoring.
"Getting more out of the grid we've already built" [Sep 13, 2023] https://www.volts.wtf/p/getting-more-out-of-the-grid-weve
Grids are a common topic on Volts. Permitting, policy, intransigent utilities, open data standards, biz models, decentralization, virtual power plants, creating a national grid, etc.
A handful of climate crisis / net-zero podcasts like Volts connect and catalyze people, resulting in new startups, legislation, and giving people hope & energy.
Highest recommendation.
Aside:
INTERGRID is my term for our future perfect grid-of-grids. Inspired by the internet, of course. One such effort is (Alphabet) X & AES' Tapestry project https://x.company/projects/tapestry/ .
> Chojkiewicz says her team’s modeling neglected those alternatives because their goal was simply to lay out the “nationwide potential,” of reconductoring.
They only compared it to buying new land and putting in completely new lines.
They ignored simply increasing the voltage, switching to HVDC and any solution other than "putting in whole new lines".
In particular, the fact that they just ignored HVDC is problematic. HVDC gets you not just cheaper transmission but lower losses so makes better use of what you have even if you don't immediately boost capacity.
The other patent they reference[3]... does claim 10^11 S/cm, which is about a million times as conductive as silver.
Imagine what you could do with power cables a million times as conductive as silver.
[1] http://www.superconductors.org/ultra.htm
[1a] https://web.archive.org/web/20090201200804/http://ultracondu...