Why is it important?
In 2023, HTS technology has been named by Department of Energy’s strategy as one of the few enabling tools to reduce leveraged cost of energy for future off-shore wind farms. Superconductors help making wind generators smaller (and thus reducing cost of construction) drastically – especially for very high power.
Further, superconductors are best poised to solve main problems of long-range transmission of electrical power: reduce voltage while keeping power transmission high, reduce losses, reduce cable weight. Furthermore, low-voltage, high-power transmission enables smaller and lower-cost off-shore converter stations.
What's holding us back?
Although benefits of using HTS to improve wind power projects have already been proven (at least, for low-speed, high-torque generators), a lot more efforts are needed to increase maturity of this technology. For example, to date there have been no pilot projects for off-shore superconductor installations.