Yes, you’ve read it right. Upbraiding, not upgrading.
Twenty-six years ago, in early 1986, Georg Bednorz and Alex Mueller discovered high-temperature superconductivity in the family of copper oxide perovskites. The field exploded later that year and in early 1987 when Paul Chu and his collaborators at the Universities of Houston and Alabama sighted telltale signs of superconductivity onsets above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, 77K. These developments unleashed a flurry of studies, especially in the U.S. and Japan, predicting markets eventually exceeding several hundreds of billions of dollars, mostly centered around electric power applications.
25 Years of Investment
The summit of this euphoria occurred in July 1987, when President Ronald Reagan convened the White House Conference on Superconductivity in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in central Washington, D.C. The president announced a series of initiatives that were embodied in the Superconductivity Competitiveness Act of 1988. This legislation created the Department of Energy Initiative for Power Applications of Superconductivity, a $30 million (average) annual program designed to “upgrade” American electric utilities and power equipment manufacturers to face the looming energy demand challenges of the coming 21st century. After retiring from IBM in 1993 to join the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), I became actively involved in the DOE efforts as a co-funder, peer reviewer, and, yes, an occasional congressional lobbyist.
So, here we are today, almost 25 years since that first conference and $700 million to $800 million dollars later, plus perhaps half that amount additionally invested by the private sector. Numerous successful demonstrations, employing both low- and high-temperature superconductors, in almost every type of power equipment—cables, transformers, rotating machinery, fault current limiters, storage and power conditioning devices—have been undertaken in America and elsewhere. The U.S. National Laboratories—particularly Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Brookhaven—in conjunction with private companies such as American Superconductor and SuperPower, have developed high-performance, “second generation,” long-length (hundreds of meters), and reliable superconducting tape suitable for deployment in all the above applications.
Several U.S. utilities have very generously donated talent and facilities, and redirected a portion of their EPRI dues for financial assistance in support of such efforts. The fruits of their labors now “sit on the shelf” awaiting insertion into the American electric power infrastructure. Beginning in 2010, funding for the Power Applications of Superconductivity program was removed as a “line item” in the DOE’s congressional appropriation, and I believe justifiably so. If Ronald Reagan were still with us, he might say, albeit perhaps tongue-in-cheek, “Mission accomplished.”
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