SuperGrid

The SuperGrid is a proposed power grid concept that would use liquid hydrogen both as a fuel source and as insulation around the advanced powerlines so as to cool them down and render them superconducting.

One proposed design for a superconducting cable includes a pair of DC superconducting wires, one at plus 50,000 volts, the other at minus 50,000 volts, and both carrying 50,000 amps, transmitting about five gigawatts for several hundred kilometers at nearly zero resistance and line loss. [http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-power-grid-for-the-hydr-2006-07]

Even before a large-scale supergrid is realized, such cables can be used to efficiently interconnect regional power grids of conventional design.

The term “supergrid” is also being used to describe a proposed European distribution network interconnecting producers and consumers of electricity across Europe and into northern Africa that would use non-cryogenic high-voltage DC cables in its first-generation implementation. An initial project proposed by Scottish wind farm developer Airtricity and Swiss engineering firm ABB would provide a chain of undersea cable connections extending from the Baltic Sea southward to Spain and servicing areas between the endpoints. Proponents of the project claim that this western corridor could be in service as early as 2015. The first segments would provide two 5000 megawatt links connecting a new 10,000 megawatt group of wind parks in the North Sea with consumers in the UK and continental Europe. [http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=oil&id=16595]

External links

* [http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00003872-159C-1498-959C83414B7F0000&pageNumber=4&catID=2 Article] in the Scientific American (June 2006)
* [http://supergrid.uiuc.edu/ SuperGrid Workshop] at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign