When news articles appeared in 2021 about a slowdown in copper production and concerns about being able to meet future demand for the metal, Dr Anders Wulff became concerned.
As an engineer, Wulff understood better than most people that the current generation of power grids in Europe and elsewhere would be unable to function without copper. The reddish metal is the conductor in electricity cables and, without it, there’d be no way to transmit power over long distances.
Ceramic cable
Wulff is involved in an innovation project that received EU funding to develop a cable made of something very different: ceramics.
‘It’s basically the same material you would use for coffee cups or plates,’ said Wulff, who is chief executive officer of SUBRA, a Danish superconductor manufacturer. ‘My coffee cup is rigid, but if I thin down the walls to a few micrometres I can start bending it.’
SUBRA makes electric cables based on superconductor technology and is accelerating this work in a new EU-backed project called SUBRACABLE, which will run for two years until August 2025.
Superconductors are materials that, at low temperatures, conduct electricity without any electrical resistance. A special type of ceramics are among numerous materials that can become superconducting at low temperatures.
One advantage of superconductor technology is that it is much less reliant on copper, which is used in these new cables only to a limited extent to provide structural support for the otherwise brittle superconductor.
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Another key advantage is that, because of the lack of electrical resistance, superconductors waste much less energy.
To understand how, consider the basics of an electric current and the example of a toaster.
When an electric current runs through a material, there is some resistance. In a toaster, the heating element, called the coil, has a particularly high resistance to electricity.