BusinessTN

A new buffer layer for superconducting wires developed by Oak Ridge scientists will likely play a big role in reshaping America's power grid. SuperPower Inc. of Schenectady, N.Y., which licensed the technology from ORNL in January, says it is three years away from deploying the new wires commercially. In March, the company broke a world record by successfully powering homes and businesses with a 935-meters-long superconducting wire installed between two substations in Albany, N.Y. (The previous world record was 790 meters.)

The innovation exploits the superconducting quality of certain compounds—a phenomenon of physics discovered in the 20th century—which allows wires to transmit electricity with no resistance at extremely low temperatures. First-generation superconductors were too costly to hoist on every light post, but now, thanks in part to the work of the members of ORNL's superconductivity program team (managed by Dominic Lee), expect second-generation superconductors at a power station near you, and in medical applications such as high-field MRI magnets.

Coated with lanthanum-manganese-oxide by Lee and his team of researchers, the wires must be kept at a temperature of -200 degrees Celsius to maintain their superconducting qualities. (To achieve that temperature, the wires are cooled with environmentally friendly liquid nitrogen—a huge improvement over first-generation superconductors, which were coated in silver and had to be cooled to much lower temperatures with costly helium gas.) While the new buffer coating is cheap compared to the coating required by first-generation superconducting technology, SuperPower's new wire still commands a price seven times that of regular copper wire—but it carries roughly 200 times the electric current of the previous generation and requires half as much output from the power station.

Lee and team took a year and a half to perfect the special coating for the superconducting wire, which SuperPower, a fully owned, 60-employee subsidiary of Royal Philips Electronics, was glad to license from ORNL. "When we started, we licensed some technology from Los Alamos," says SuperPower's marketing chief Trudy Lehner. That technology came in the form of a one-centimeter length of superconducting wire. The wire was enough to prove the technology viable, but no commercial application presented itself at the time. "Scaling up took eight years.," she says. "As we're moving from product development to manufacturing, it's nice to have ORNL to help us be more successful."

The success of SuperPower's Albany experiment further solidified the company's position as king of the hill in superconducting research—a fierce competition with players such as American Superconductor of Massachusetts, Japan's Fujikura and EHTS of Europe. Out of 12 licensing agreements signed by ORNL in a given year, lab officials call the January agreement with SuperPower "quite significant in terms of potential impact." Even though such government speak is hardly bombastic, take note. After all, the folks who brought us the A-bomb know a little something about significant developments.