Even if we found the perfect material, where it was easy and cheap to create long strong wires for power transmission as well as semiconductor-scale nano wires, we'd be gaining something like (wild ass guess) 20% gain in efficiency. 20% would be nice but would it really beat the last hundred years of discoveries? I don't think so, especially with digital tech's profound world-reshaping continuing to accelerate.
Specifically you could lay undersea superconducting cables around the world and rely on a global electrical grid which allows for nearly 100% solar generation.
Superconducting magnets become cheap and widely available which allows for maglev trains at massive scale. Costs for the LHC and similar experiments would drop dramatically. MRIs would only require air conditioning, if that; Modern cell phones are sufficient to compute tomography. Magnetic confinement fusion also becomes cheaper and easier. Electric cars could use superconducting motor magnets allowing for even greater power to weight ratios and efficiency.
Just a few things off the top of my non-mechanical-engineer head.
I think not just maglev: a lot of typical bearings could possibly be switched from ball / roll to maglev, saving a lot on friction and maintenance.
Undersea cables are a pie in the sky; current high-load cables in urban an industrial areas could be made much smaller, simpler, and lossless.
I wonder if transformers, currently huge and expensive, could be made better with this, too; at least the ohmic losses could be removed, and thus a lot of need for cooling, and the fire hazards.
> Specifically you could lay undersea superconducting cables around the world and rely on a global electrical grid which allows for nearly 100% solar generation.
Not really, when the sun is up over the Pacific ocean, there's not that much sun over land. Maybe a global grid happens anyway, but cabling losses aren't the only source of cost, so I'd put my money on more localized improvements.
Better interconnection between and within local grids (maybe a viable Tres Amigas interconnection, but even just better connections between sections of the major grids would help with grid management. Improvements in motors, MRIs, magnetic bearings, transformers, etc.
You could also build power transformers that are more efficient. Transformers can be up to 95-98% efficient when running at their ideal power levels, but those numbers fall off when they are operating outside of that range. So you're probably looking at an almost 10% reduction of power usage by electronic equipment even before you get to making superconducting integrated circuits.
Global electric grids aren't on a common standard. They're not all the same frequency or voltage, so you can't just wire them together. And changing over would be a mess. MRIs require very high field strength that this superconductor likely cannot sustain.
But the interties between grids are often high voltage DC which would work fine between incompatible AC grids. I think, but am not sure, that you'd always want DC superconducting transmission lines to avoid inductive losses.
EMF becomes a fungible energy medium. Imagine storing energy in a field, just as we do with MRI machines, momentarily in the poles of motor windings, essentially anything inductive, or that operates as an electromagnet. Apart from dielectric losses and other environmental factors that are inescapable, the magnetic field becomes elastic like air [in] a balloon. The potential for this to modify energy consumption patterns is mind-boggling.
I'm not an expert, and everything that follows comes from a quick reading of this Wikipedia article.
It seems like (counter-intuitively) refrigeration isn't a significant cost compared to all the other stuff that's necessary. So at first glance it seems like high-temperature superconductors might not make a big difference.
However, that Wikipedia article does say this:
> The critical temperature of a superconductor also has a strong correlation with the critical current. A substance with a high critical temperature will also have a high critical current. This higher critical current will raise the energy storage exponentially. This will massively increase the use of a SMES system.
Right now, superconducting energy storage has a lot of advantages, but it doesn't have very good energy density (by mass). Not even a tenth of what lithium-ion batteries have. I assume you couldn't power a car with it. But it has some compelling advantages in other areas. It has unlimited charge/discharge cycles. It has zero self-discharge. It has unlimited (in theory) power density, so you could charge or discharge it arbitrarily fast.
Depending on what the energy density ends up being, it might suddenly become way more useful. It would have to be a gigantic leap in energy density, though.
Also, not needing refrigeration could potentially open up smaller scale applications. Maybe you could have a residential superconductor storage system for your solar panels. (Although I don't know about its safety, so maybe not.)
All this assumes the cost to build it is reasonable compared to other alternatives, that the discovery is real, etc.
