Superconductors Saving Thousands In Your Energy Bill?!
A century + 12 years later and low-input, zero-loss electricity seems closer than ever
A new hydrogen-based compound may lead to an energy revolution by unlocking the key to our massive hunt for the perfect superconductor. To provide us with fast, cheap electricity and maybe even let us fly around on hover cars instead of our clunky ground-dependent vehicles; so long as it actually exists.
TL;DR
- Superconductors only have potential if they can work at practical temperatures and pressures
- The new practical temperature and pressure superconductor: N-doped lutetium hydride, poses an interesting future, but it’s not certain
- Practical superconductors would revolutionize how we use our energy with cheap energy transmission and storage for fusion, MRIs, and ultra-efficient power grids
Superconductors, different from ordinary conductors and semiconductors, are special materials capable of carrying a current free of any electrical resistance. This superconductivity makes them an incredibly attractive toy for scientists and engineers since they never loose any energy when current flows through them — eliminating Joule heating.
Joule heating is when current passes through an electrical conductor and creates thermal energy, heat.
Superconductors are used to make powerful magnetic fields for medical imaging like MRIs, high-speed levitating trains like the Shanghai Maglev train in China, and faster electricity in circuitry for electronics.
But there’s still one fundamental blocker with superconductors… they must be kept at extremely cold temperatures, like below -140 degrees Celsius (133 Kelvin), much lower for most. With tin at -269.428 degrees Celsius, aluminium at -271.95 degrees Celsius, and tungsten at -273.1346 degrees Celsius. Cooling anything to these temperatures is tedious and impractical.
So, scientists have been working for years to create a superconductor that could function at ambient temperatures to make them more practical.
This goal isn’t entirely out of reach. A few research groups have come very close to room temperature superconductors, with a hydrogen-lanthanum compound superconducting at -13 degrees Celsius in 2018, and in 2015 a group created a hydrogen-sulfur compound that superconducted at -70 degrees Celsius — both of which were recorded highs at their times.
However, a common problem that still plagues all close-to-room temperature superconductor discoveries is that they need to run under extremely high pressures, like beyond 200 gigapascals (200,000,000 kbar) which is around 2 million times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere.
Lutetium at Ambient Temperature & Pressure
In March 2023, a group of researchers reported being successful in creating a superconductor at room temperature and low pressure (32 kbar!).
The group created a material made of hydrogen, nitrogen and the rare-earth metal: lutetium.
To make it, the group crushed hydrogen, nitrogen, and lutetium between two diamonds up to 32 kbar of pressure, using a diamond anvil cell. This device can make huge amounts of pressure because the force is applied to a really small area.
This pressure actually caused the superconductor to change colours, from blue to red as pressure increased.
However, the group has faced significant skepticism though due to rumors of falsified data of a hydrogen-sulfur and carbon compound they claimed to have produced in 2020 that superconducted at -15 degrees Celsius, which led to their paper getting retracted.
Future with Practical Superconductors
Superconductors at room temperature and low-pressure open thousands of new doors and avenues of research in the world of energy production to create cheap and efficient energy more widespread for both household and industrial use around the world.
Room temperature superconductors also significantly help with our global warming problem in the race to scale green energies and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Efficient Energy Transmission and Cheaper Bills
Practical superconductors would reduce the size of electricity transmission cables (“ultra-effecient energy grids”), making them lighter and taking up less space with smaller transformers. So, your electric bills would be cheaper with less energy loss from zero electrical resistance, in the process making your home appliances more efficient.
Efficient Electric Motors
Superconductors would reduce energy loss to create more compact electric motors and generators with the potential for 99.9% efficiency and make renewable wind, solar, and hydroelectricity, as well as electric cars and airplanes significantly cheaper.
Ultra-powerful Magnets: Better Fusion Reactors, Levitating Transportation, Medical Imaging
With practical superconductors, we could build ultra-powerful magnets that would make it cheaper to build more modes of high-speed transportation, like the Shanghai Maglev train, without the extreme cooling requirements of current superconducting magnets. Fusion plasma would also be easier to contain, and medical imaging, such as MRIs, would also be cheaper with more powerful magnets.
Superconductors at higher temperatures beyond room temperature, high-temperature superconductors (HTS), would make stronger magnetic fields and be able to contain denser amounts of plasma in fusion reactors using magnetic confinement. With denser plasma, you can make smaller fusion reactors, and if you double the density of plasma under fusion conditions, you will get four times more power out. So, we get smaller reactors with more energy output!
However, there are still several other problems with fusion: reliable fuels, heating the fuels to plasma conditions, reactor materials, and many more.
Both quantum computers and fusion reactors have the potential to aid in the development of more practical room-temperature superconductors by testing how high-temperature superconductors behave.
For now, we are just waiting to see if more research groups can reproduce this potentially incredible discovery. But a superconductor that could work at virtually any temperature would open a world’s worth of new applications.
More resources on superconductivity
- The Map of Superconductivity: Video about superconductivity, theories around it, and types of superconductors
- Diamond Anvil Cells Reimagined: Article about the devices used to crush materials into superconductors
- Capturing a Magnetic Field With a Superconductor: Video about how to make and measure properties of superconductors at home
Hey! I’m Julia, thanks so much for reading my article. Right now, I’m curious about exploring solutions in brain cancers with the new generation of drug delivery, nanotech!
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