Yeah at those kinds of scales I get doubtful. At those scales the electrical fields themselves begin to exert inertia on things, to the point that you could cut most power lines and they wouldn't stop catastrophically, they'd continue catastrophically (a problem that only gets worse with superconductors, as happened to CERN when they accidentally vaporised a length of superconductor that had become conductive).

It could definitely open up the road to long distance high capacity power lines, but somewhere along the line reality is going to make things difficult. It's not magic after all, just sufficiently advanced technology.

You could bury them or have very high overhead lines. Being able to have near instantaneous, lossless energy transfer would make it worth it (minus whatever impediment the GOP tries to put in the way to bolster gas/oil, but that’s just political).

Could you spot me a link to that CERN incident or on the topic of superconductors becoming conductive (looooool)? All I got for CERN was reports about gas leaks but I find myself very curious about the way superconductors fail now

Here is their own article on the incident: https://home.cern/news/press-release/cern/cern-releases-anal...

Doesn't sound too spectacular but it took them over a year to fix all the damage.

The superconducting effect of LK99 seems to top out at around 150 mA / cm^2. Maybe more research will bear fruit here, but for now we're not looking at HVDC lines.

To my knowledge, that number from the original researchers and no one has yet independently verified it.

External researchers have not even begun to purify and test the limits of this material.

It's the most strange figure from that whole paper, there is just so little context for it.