eeka chu said:
So we'll end up using kilowatts for computers and that could even go on to megawatts I suppose.
And not to forget the airco that will evacuate the heat in the room
I don't think that's such a problem. The key is, not to be wasteful. Just because we have a lot of free energy to hand, let's spend and extra five minute designing a better chip that saves some juice per calculation.
I think you underestimate the efforts of the engineers designing all that pretty stuff: cutting down on power is a MAJOR issue. Not so much for ecological reasons, but because waste heat is a major engineering pain.
Car manufacturers for instance. It shouldn't be an option for them to produce an engine that wastes more than 50% of it's fuel as heat in the same way that it's not tolerated if the car spontaneously burst into flames.
The 50% is dictated by thermodynamics. A combustion engine will never be 100% (or even 80%) efficient. Internal combustion engines are already pretty efficient when it comes down to comparing them to what they potentially COULD do, within the limits of thermodynamics.
Perhaps as space based platforms become cheaper we might be able to deploy some form of solar collector farm in space, where the wattage will be much higher, and then direct the energy back through the atmosphere in a form that will undergo reduced absorption?
The problem is: getting the stuff up there. Costs a lot of energy and exhaust gasses.
But I think fusion is probably the way it's going to go. We can't be far off now. And superconduction is still edging it's way forward with updates of the theory and some new conductors with impressive temperature requirements.
I wonder what's this obsession with superconductors. In fact, I've SEEN several popular "scientific" documentaries (aimed at promoting the benefits of research on superconductors) telling the FALSE FACT that superconductors would give us "energy for free" or things like that, but that is BLUNTLY NOT TRUE. Electricity generation, transformation and transport IS ALREADY 90+% efficient. Big transformers and generators easily score in the 98% range. Transport is a matter of economy: you can make the transport as efficient as you want (section of the cables, voltage used - hence insulators used). You can go for 99.99% if you want to. But from a certain point onward, the investment becomes ridiculously high as compared to the efficiency gain. And if the transformer is 98% efficient, then there's not much use in having the line being 99.9% efficient: you can cut the cost roughly by 10 by making it only 99% efficient.
So if we replace all that conventional stuff by expensive superconductors (which shouldn't be cooled, because if they need to, you need to account for the energy in the cryogenics, which makes them also less than 100% efficient), you'll go from an overall, say, 95% to 99.8% or something.
Not 100% in any case, because there WILL still be losses, be it from radiation, friction in the generators, etc...
So all that pain for less than 4% gain.
However, there's one TRUE potential application for superconductors in electricity distribution, which is instantaneous power storage and relief. The MAJOR difficulty for a utility is to adapt its production to consumption. There's no way of storing electricity in huge amounts, so production needs to follow consumption. And consumption is highly erratic, which means that utilities need to have at their disposition "rapid-reaction" generators, like gas turbines. Big power plants, such as fission (and certainly fusion!) reactors do not have time constants of a few seconds.
So if one could construct devices which could store huge amounts of electrical energy, that would be great: during the day, they could charge up, and in the evening, for instance, they could provide for the extra demand, hence smoothing out the demand on raw production, so that expensive and wasteful means (such as gas turbines) can be disposed off.
Now, one such technique would be huge coils in which one sets currents of billions of amps circulating, and THAT would be nice with superconductors. Kinds of "magnetic flywheels". But the problem is that superconductors don't like magnetic fields, and don't support high current densities.
