New superconductors could slash the price of power transmission
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY is a major contributor to global warming. The energy consumed by all those data centres has created a volume of CO2, that’s pushing a polar bear’s head below the surface, as we type. The whole planet is in jeopardy, according to some experts.
So we’re literally paying the earth for IT.
But a saviour is on the horizon. It’s not a bird from Greenpeace, or a plane carrying Bono? No, it’s Superconductor!
A Japanese superhero has developed new technology with zero electrical resistance, reports Nikkei.net. Sumitomo and Tokyo Electric Power plan to start tests of these superconducting cables at a transformer substation in 2010.
The potential benefits are that electricity can be made, and supplied, far more cheaply. Maybe electrical energy will still be viable.
But there’s still a few challenges. It’s tricky to make wires and cables of any meaningful length out of a superconductor. Sumitomo got lucky by choosing to work on a bismuth-type superconductor, ever since this oxide’s superconducting materials came to light in 1988. Other start-ups (mostly Japanese and American) have struggled with the problem of having to cool superconductor materials. Liquid hydrogen was one form of cooling, but it’s a bit dangerous, while liquid nitrogen is too expensive.
But Sumitomo persevered with its R&D and, luckily for it, global warming and rising oil prices have justified the gamble. It now has the means of mass-producing the material cost effectively.
The savings? If an energy company has 400km of underground power cables to carry high-voltage power to its service area, it will need the following. Voltage of over 270kV that will transmit around 40,000kW to supply 100,000 homes. Much is lost as heat. With superconducting cables, the transmission loss would apparently halve.
For more technical detail, click here www.nikkei.net (needs subs cription) µ
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"INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY is a major contributor to global warming."

On what do you base this statement? Can you back it up with some numbers from a decent analysis?
@ hoohoo, I'm guessing that it's due to all the hot air and CO2 those IT types spout :)

With regards to the article: Liquid H2 is more expensive than liquid N2 and is not very dangerous at all... why? Because liquid H2 won't catch fire or explode.... it's only when it's mixed with oxygen in the right quantities as a gas that it's dangerous.... and even then only when there's a spark.

The question is what temperature does this material superconduct at? It's obviously not at room temperature otherwise there would have been lots of news about this... and since i can't read the article (or translate if i could) i can't discern what's going on here... As far as i'm aware no Bismuth-based superconductor is known to operate at higher than the already 'high temperature SC materials out there.
Found the website: 

http://www.sei.co.jp/sn/2004/323/feature_article.html

It looks like they do use liquid N2 after all... so it's obviously not 'too expensive'.... and in my honest opinion it's quite impractical to run cables with flowing liquid N2 over long distances so not sure how great a 'discovery' this application is...
Nick Booth's spews of hot air at the Inquirer are major contributors to global warming.
American Superconductor has already installed working BSCCO power transmission cables on Long Island. I know we love saying that Japan is first in everything high-tech, but that's taking it too far.

Furthermore, you can already get those cables on eBay. How's THAT for mature tech?
Assuming you meant liquid Helium, you're quite right. The difference in price is ~ $4/liter vs. ~$0.05/liter for liquid nitrogen.

But anybody who'd even write liquid hydrogen in connection with power distribution isn't thinking very clearly. The danger of the vapor (and you will get boil off) is too great, especially near something that could generate a spark.
Nick your article is quite misleading and confusing : First,you almost state that this Japanese.."superhero" invented superconducting materials!Second,you appear to clearly imply that Sumitomo's bismuth-based "new" cables require no cooling at all(!!),while others still have to cool the stuff(...).Was room temperature SC achieved and the whole world knows nothing about it?
A room-temperature superconductor is a material yet to be discovered which would be capable of exhibiting superconducting properties at temperatures above 0° C (273.15 K). This is of course not strictly speaking "room temperature" (20–25°C); however, it can be reached very cheaply.

Since the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, several materials have been claimed as being room-temperature superconductors. In every case, independent investigation has quickly proven these claims false.[citation needed] As a result, most condensed matter physicists now welcome with extreme skepticism any further claims of this nature.

As of 2006, the highest-temperature superconductor (at ambient pressure) is mercury thallium barium calcium copper oxide (Hg12Tl3Ba30Ca30Cu45O125), at 138 K, though there are claims that this can be raised to 164 K by applying high pressure to the superconductor.

A potential candidate for room temperature superconductivity (though at extreme pressure) is metallic hydrogen; research into this possibility (and into how to reduce the pressure requirements) has resulted in the discovery of superconductivity in Silane (SiH4).[1][2]
Just over 1% of all electricity in the US goes to data centres.

Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption
in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to
1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions.
The resistance of existing wires is extremely low when the voltages are at or exceed 25kV. Really the heat generated by the wire is almost nothing. Take a thermal IR sensor and shoot any HV lines, you'll see they're around or less than ambient air. Hence the reason birds can sit on them all the time.

A similar hype came out 6 years ago when a project was announced to use carbon wire and wires manufactured with carbon nano-tubes. Still nothing on the horizon.
Better look at http://superconductors.org/ ... and it would have been a good idea to read the wikipedia entries at least before rewriting a rough PR release as a news item. E.g. the UK national grid wastes less than 4% of power in transmission, and most of that is in transformers and not cables.
this guy actually gets paid to write this?
there is bull crapping, and then there is nick booth
Well, everything gets blamed for global warming these days. But cast your mind back to the 70s, remember we were on the verge of an imminent ice age back then? 

We had a really hot summer a few years ago and everyone blames global warming. We have had a cool summer this year and everyone blames global warming.

They can't even predict what temperature its going to be next week so how do they know in a 100 years what it will be.

Keeping this in context the mathematical models for global warming produce the result the modeller intended. They are making predictions over a period of a few years of data, when the earth is billions of years old. Keeping it simple this is like predicting the weather for end of the year based on the first few microseconds at the beginning of the year.

In short its a tax and commercial convenience.

Did you know there is global warming on Mars at the moment, I guess it must be the army of commuters in their cars and all those computer users on Mars having the same effect there.
"Well, everything gets blamed for global warming these days. But cast your mind back to the 70s, remember we were on the verge of an imminent ice age back then?"

I seem to remember there being a single study of the cooling effects of sulfate particulate emissions that used quite alarming language and was overhyped in the media and widely ignored by actual climate scientists; if that's what you're refering to.