LS Cable & System (Chairman Koo Cha-yub)has started a demonstration of the world’s first superconducting DC cable. The company had completed installation of an 80kV superconducting DC cables at its Superconducting Power System Center on Jeju Island at the end of October, and on Nov. 19 started a system demonstration that will last for six months. This is a turning point for Korea because despite starting development of superconducting cable technology much later than the U.S. and Germany, the country has now become an industry leader after about ten years of technological development.
The size of a superconducting cable is only 20 percent that of a copper cable, yet transmission volume is five times larger for AC and as much as ten times for DC transmission. Developed to take advantage of the property of “superconductivity” whereby electric resistance disappears at -196°C, superconducting cables involve almost no electricity loss during transmission.
A superconducting cable is highly usable in congested urban areas where power demand is on the rise even though underground space for cables is already saturated by cable tunnels and conduits. Thus, a drastic wattage increase can be achieved by simply replacing existing cables with superconducting cables while continuing to use existing infrastructure. In addition, when it becomes necessary to build a new cable tunnel, the cross-section of the tunnel can be reduced by more than 60 percent.
When commercialization and technological development are carried out in a greater extent, superconducting cables can be used for long-distance power transmission, thus lowering power facility costs. For example, while as many as five substations are typically needed to send power from a power plant to a downtown area, using superconducting cables reduces it down to one. In addition, as long-distance power transmission is possible as there is not any power loss even when AC is not converted to DC, superconducting cables can replace HVDC (high voltage direct current) cables, and thus a power conversion station will no longer be necessary.
“Superconducting cable is no longer a ‘dream cable.’ Related projects to a scale of hundreds of billions of won are being deployed in around ten countries including the U.S. and China as well as Korea,” said LS Cable & System President &CEO Koo Ja-Eun. “LS Cable & System will contribute to high-efficiency and eco-friendly energy industry development by continuously promoting technology development and overseas market entry.”
Having started superconducting cable development in 2001, LS Cable & System succeeded in producing an AC cable in 2004 -- the fourth country in the world to do so, following Denmark, the U.S. and Japan. In 2013, the company developed a DC superconducting cable for the first time in the world, thus becoming the only company in the world possessing both AC and DC superconducting technologies. DC products involve electricity loss only one tenth that of AC products. Therefore, these products can be used to significantly reduce facility costs, such as coolers.
At present, other than LS Cable & System, only four companies in the world possess superconducting cable technologies, including Nexans of France and Sumitomo of Japan.
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