You can build a coal-fired power plant just about anywhere. Renewables, on the other hand, are finicky. The strongest winds blow across the high plains. The sun shines brightest on the desert. Transporting that energy into cities hundreds of kilometers away will be one of the great challenges of the switch to renewable energy.
The most advanced superconducting cable can move those megawatts thousands of kilometers with losses of only a few percent. Yet there is a catch: the cable must be kept in a bath of liquid nitrogen at 77 kelvins (or –196 degrees Celsius). This kind of deployment, in turn, requires pumps and refrigeration units every kilometer or so, greatly increasing the cost and complexity of superconducting cable projects.
Superconductors that work at ordinary temperatures and pressures would enable a truly global energy supply. The Saharan sun could power western Europe via superconducting cables strung across the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. Yet the trick to making a room-temperature superconductor is just as much of a mystery today as it was in 1986, when researchers constructed the first superconducting materials that worked at the relatively high temperatures of liquid nitrogen (previous substances needed to be chilled down to 23 kelvins or less).
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Two years ago the discovery of an entirely new class of superconductor—one based on iron—raised hopes that theorists might be able to divine the mechanism at work in high-temperature superconductors [see “An Iron Key to High-Temperature Superconductivity?” by Graham P. Collins; Scientific American, August 2009]. With such insights in hand, perhaps a path toward room-temperature superconductors would come into view. But progress has remained slow. The winds of change don’t always blow on cue.