Superconducting DC transmission line trial in Manhattan

Brief mention as one of American Superconductor's deployments. Not developed.

Now, twenty-some years later, American Superconductor is kind of limping along, if you read about them in the paper. The Chinese have stolen their wind turbine technology software, and their stock's falling. They put in some transmission lines in New York City. But we're not riding on magnetically levitated trains, are we. That was my prediction of twenty-five years ago. Now it's not our grandchildren's lifetime, but my grandchildren have been born since then, and we'll see if sometime in the next fifty years we will be riding on superconducting magnetically levitated trains. I will bet we will not.

Half-mile trial in Manhattan because underground is crowded. Tom doesn't know if anything went beyond the trial.

But it has found a niche — actually two niches. They've tried to put a DC transmission line in the center of New York City. It has to be DC because superconductors don't work well with AC, that's another story. There's not a lot of room underground in New York City, it's all kinds of wires and pipes and everything else, and things are very crowded in Manhattan. So they put in half a mile or something as a trial, a number of years ago. I don't know if they've ever done anything beyond that trial. All the technology that had to go with that was horrendous. And there are applications for looking for submarines from space — superconducting quantum interference devices. But most of the great promises of high-temperature superconductors have not held up.