My favorite application for room-temp superconductors is low-speed generators. They have exactly one application, but it’s big: Wind towers without a giant gearbox. Wind power is cheap, but without the truck-sized gearbox with a bazillion moving parts that you can’t lift without the biggest cranes known to man, it’s even cheaper.
Can you expand on how that works please ? The gearbox converts the slow rotational speed of the turbine into a high rpm output because that is needed for the generator to make useful power as I understand it.
How does the superconductor convert that slow rpm ?
I like that you can build a global energy grid with superconductor. Power Europe at night with the solar panels in Australia, that kind of thing.
Would possibly take care of my country’s little problem of having 30 minutes of sunlight a day in the winter.
We don’t have nuclear either so you can imagine how nasty our energy mix gets in the winter.
I look forward to the next LK-99
Right? You got to love the fancy gauge package on what looks like a busty old lab power supply. And what looks like half of Thor Labs inexplicably just sitting on top… Did I actually read the article or (presumably) the related paper, which is no doubt cramp was so many buzz words that I wouldn’t understand it with a dictionary? No I did not 😅 But that gizmo ain’t really making sense… I suppose as some kind of measurement apparatus? I guess just holding up the actual superconducting material would not be enough to really keep a press conference entertained… OK, I’ll just show myself out of the physics lab 🥸
