[svetb]

Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons - even though copper has better conductivity.

If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.

[tsimionescu]

> it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.

Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you need for something to be an economically efficient power line. While superconductors are by definition excellent in terms of electrical resistance, there is nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't be too brittle, or too heavy, or too hard to mould into the required shape, or simply require materials that are too rare on Earth. And all of these would not be things that can just be worked around with better production processes or smart engineering - they would be fundamental limitations of the specific material, just like the low temperature requirements of currently known superconductors will never be improved with more research.

So this isn't a matter of when they would reach the point of being better economically, it's also very much a matter of if they would ever reach that point. Hopefully, we'll get lucky one day and find a material that is superconducting at room temperature and above, that is study and light and easy to make into wires and made out of abundantly available elements. LK-99 certainly wasn't most of these things. Even if it had been superconducting, it wasn't a good candidate for any of the other properties we want anyway, so it likely wouldn't have been much better than other known materials for most applications.

[pclmulqdq]

The pace of development of computing seems to have trained people to think in terms of "when" for science and engineering problems. The normal paradigm is to think in terms of "if," and that aligns well with most non-computing inventions.

There is a good chance that they never reach the exponential breakpoints that everyone likes to fantasize about.

[u320]

In theory, we could have had a much better power grid with more transmission. The reasons we don't have nothing to do with the price of aluminium, or the resistive losses of it. It's just difficult to build large-scale infrastructure. Transmission projects typically spend longer in court than actually building them. Superconductors would not change a thing, unless it changed that.

[Tuna-Fish]

Aluminum vs Copper is not that simple. Aluminum has worse conductivity for the same area, but area is in no way fixed. And aluminum has actually better conductivity than copper for the same weight. You just have to make the cables a bit thicker.

[anamexis]

I think the relevant metric here is conductivity for the same cost.

[Joker_vD]

In some desperate places, people would cut down aluminum power lines and sell them to scrapyards for some quick buck. But copper power lines? Those would be in a similar danger in many more places.

[Roark66]

Not only in desperate places. I heard last year (or the year before) someone stole few km of train wire in Germany. Although to this day some people think it was a Russian sabotage rather than genuine theft. Previously (for example in Poland) I used to hear about things like this all the time until maybe a decade ago.

[pbhjpbhj]

They steal buried copper cables in rural locations (UK) by attaching one end to a truck and driving off. Mostly seems to be communication lines.

[chias]

Silver is even more conductive than copper!

[dgoldstein0]

And gold too.

Very expensive to build anything sizable out of it

[elihu]

Aluminum vs copper is a good example. Another is that we already do use superconducting transmission lines in a few places. We could do more of that, but presumably it's expensive to install and/or maintain otherwise we'd be using it everywhere. I'm not sure what the longest or highest capacity superconducting links currently in existence are.

[SamBam]

That have to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen, so it would have to be pretty darn short.