The global circuit of the 50th parallel

I have recently discovered that room temperature superconductors are a thing, just at a stupidly high pressure.



This led me to the idea of what if you could create a vessel that could contain such a pressure.

This should be a simple scaling up, for example an aluminium pipe with an internal cross sectional area of 1m^2 could hold the pressure required for a hydrogen sulphide superconductor if the outer diameter was on the order 20m. That is a very thick wall but the superconducting ability of the internal superconductor would allow for some really interesting projects.

One of which comes to mind is the idea of a ring around the 50th parallel connecting a lot of the world's population to a shareable power source. That way when the wind blows in one location, or the sun shines in another, unwindy or nightly places can still get power.


How much would this cost to build at current aluminium prices, only a couple trillion per ring.

Given the ability to arbitrage solar energy prices between day and night locations it really wouldn’t take long to recover the cost, not to mention the benefit to the green energy transition it would help with.

Long distance electrical transmission is a super hard problem, it’s what’s stopping the world from tapping into the sort of solar power prices Saudi Arabia is getting which in a recent project were as low as $10/MWh

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