Transmission lines play a critical role in electrical infrastructure. They help actualise the single most important feature of electrical energy. The ability to transport it over large continental scale distances. In recent years there have been concerns about a shortage of copper to meet the demands of transmission lines but there are 2 counter arguments to that. First the total known reserves of copper are around 1 billion tonnes while the annual production is merely 23M tonnes. For a 1000KM long HVDC link only about 30 thousand tonnes would be required. 20MT of copper would suffice to meet all of 3TW of power required globally with plenty left as a backup for future demand. And that's just copper, there is even more aluminium which is quite close to copper in conductivity and could easily fill in gaps left by the copper supply chain. If all else fails there is always steel. It has 50 times lower conductivity than copper but even then it's good at high voltages. There is an ...
17 March 2026 I thank Infineon technologies for organising the hotly anticipated, annual, wide band gap developer forum for a discussion on cutting edge research and latest developments related to SiC and GaN semiconductor devices. Electrification is seen as one of the most effective ways of bringing down global greenhouse gas emissions and enabling transition to a green economy. However, unlike carbon based energy sources electrical energy generation, transmission ,distribution and its final application is far more complicated than simple extract, transport and burn processes of fuels. These require functional materials that have very specific properties which can be applied to a particular stage in electrical energy use. Magnets for energy generation, Electrical steel for voltage transformation,copper or Al for energy transmission and of course all sorts of resistors,inductors and capacitors for managing & manipulating the flow of energy. Another complicati...