I've forgotten how many times one of the most important thresholds in our times has been bumped up a bit. Now we seem to be offered heaven on a plate.

If superconductance can be reliably demonstrated at RTP (you wear a light cotton shirt, instead of 1cm thick fancy weaves involving an awful lot of rubber) then we are laughing all the way to ameliorating climate change.

Even if this result is confirmed then I think it will take at least 20 years to dig in to reversing climate change.

We live in unpleasant times.

If the argument is that superconductivity = better efficiency = less energy use, then I am afraid that Jevon's Paradox has some bad news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

No, the argument is that if this is true and it can be commercialized cost effectively that there may be an energy storage solution just over the horizon that would allow for all kinds of things that are currently impossible, such as summer/winter energy storage and other very nice to haves. It is obviously much too early to say anything about this so think of it as hope rather than anything more solid but it isn't necessarily about cheaper energy, just an almost perfect companion to cheap renewables whose main issue is that it is hard to store their output for the time when you need it most.

It may also make the energy (and economic) costs of fusion make a lot more sense, since superconductors are used to contain the plasma in fusion reactors.

There probably isn't a field that won't be affected by this if it holds up.

How would superconductivity help to reverse climate change? Honest question.

I'm not sure what the GP envisions but one thing you could use superconducting materials for that don't require a bunch of extra gear to operate is to store energy in loops of it. This may well allow for a relatively high storage density with near instant charge/discharge times. Kind of like a solid state version of a flywheel.

That in turn could power an energy revolution which has the potential to reduce carbon based fuel consumption dramatically.

That's SF right now, but there are pathways to very interesting futures unlocked by a material such as the one described in the paper, all of them subject to the usual caveats that it's a 'mere matter of engineering' and that it may prove to be far too costly in practice. And it wouldn't reverse climate change but it could help slow down the acceleration of climate change.

The figures I’ve seen for superconducting energy storage are in the regime of “10GWh per km of cable”.

Quite a bit more than chemical, in other words, the chief problem being what happens if it quenches. Or the cables break.

And cost.

Room temperature super conductors don't quench. Or at least, not until they reach the temperature at which they no longer work as superconductors, which for this one is 127 degrees Celsius.

That does make for an interesting failure mode if anything should every cause a small spot on a longer conductor to reach that temperature...

"Beam of light shooting the heavens" value of "interesting", yes. Though I suppose it would look like a small tactical nuke in effect.

No, at the breach it will just burn up until the arc dissipates. But it will be an impressive fireworks display. A superconductor is in the end just another conductor, it has a well defined current carrying capacity while superconducting and if it stops doing that then that current will suddenly see an increased resistance, how much current is moving through it at the time it failes determines how fast and how violent it burns out when it goes, but it won't be unlike another transmission line failure. Those are still very impressive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zib4IV2TIg

It stays lit until the breaker goes at 3:57.

I believe the biggest envisioned possibility is superconducting power lines. Those would allow long-distance power transfer with minimal losses. In the most idealistic scenario, you could imagine a belt of solar power plants around the globe connected by superconducting power lines, providing solar power 24h a day.

Of course, there are huge hurdles to such a project even if we did have the superconducting lines, but there are more realistic similar applications that might actually work.

Yes.

We can easily generate more than enough renewable energy, just not when and where we need it. Being able to transmit energy over vast distances would greatly improve the economics of our existing renewable energy generation solutions.

>In the most idealistic scenario, you could imagine a belt of solar power plants around the globe connected by superconducting power lines

There's no technical impairment for doing this with current tech, and it's not clear the new tech (if it works) is cheaper.

Power lines are already very efficient, especially the long-distance ones. We would save a bit on converting from HVDC to AC but that's also very efficient.

The numbers I found on a quick search are 3% loss per 1000 km for HVDC lines. That's a pretty huge loss for the 20k+ km lines you'd need to transmit power from daytime to nighttime areas on the globe.

I thought these were mostly fixed conversion losses, but checking this again you're right, it's 3% per 1000km (not including the conversion loss at the stations).

There absolutely is. Once you think about this on a global scale HVDC doesn't quite cut it. You can extend the day/night cycle by a few hours each way, which is already very impressive but it isn't enough to cover 24 hours and it definitely isn't going to help you in winter when you want to transport energy from the sunny hemisphere to the darker one.

Fusion power require powerful magnets(essentially super conductivity is a requirement). Currently the best contender for commercial fusion is REBCO(see: Commonwealth Fusion Systems). With cheap fusion power, we can begin pumping that CO2 back into the ground and forget about using fossil fuels for energy entirely.

Instead of pumping CO2, why not biochar?

With cheap fusion power we can convert CO2 back into kerosene/fuel, and use it as energy storage.

It would be lovely ironic if in the future we all drove ICE cars, but just fuelled by clean and carbon-neutral gasoline.

Climate change can be real, and the world can not fall apart, those two things can co exist.

Everyone’s generation thought the world was falling apart.

But it continues to get better.