Good explainer, thanks for posting.

Volts 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/ .

It's not particularly cheap or effective. From the article:

> 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.

These cables can run much hotter and so have better capacity. BUT there is a big downside. Because they run so hot (you can grill a burger on them with ease), there will be a lot more resistance resulting in net losses. Also fun, because they can run so hot when rain hits it literally sizzles and cooks resulting in extra noise.

I was hoping Ultraconductors[1,1a] would make it out of the lab, and into general use... but the crash of 2008 apparently killed them off. (OR... it was a scam all along. The patent they reference [2] is for a polymer about as conductive as the nichrome wires you use in your toaster)

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...

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5777292A/en

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6552883/en

There is also a parallel technology that does a better job of understanding line conditions with regards to heat, humidity, etc. and enables higher utilization as well (versus having to rate the lines to the worst 20 year scenario).

The article doesn't say much about it but I am sure there is significant work being done at the transmission substations as well to support the extra capacity.

previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39485940

Strange not to mention wire weight which I gather is an extremely important factor. If these are also heavier, they may sag more for strictly physical reasons and that would cause problems. I guess the modeling behind this article probably takes that into account.

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