I wonder what the limits are on transmitting power around the world? Like, if we wanted to connect Northern Africa to the North American power grid, how feasible would it be, and what would the losses and power capacity be?
It seems that with all the interest in using ReBCO tape in tokomaks due to its ability to transmit more power at higher temperatures than the materials that preceded it (used, for example in ITER) that it could be used to transmit power over long distances. Has anyone actually done it yet, or is it just too expensive? (Apparently the current capacity of superconducting cable is finite; if you run too much current through it, it'll transition to becoming non-superconducting. So maybe the amount of ReBCO tape needed per unit of power or the amount of active cooling needed makes it impractical.)
Eventually, to be able to usefully transmit power from daytime sun to nighttime will require crossing oceans. Which I imagine would be tough to do with a cable has to be actively cooled and work for many years without maintenance. Maybe for my hypothetical North America to North Africa route, you'd run a superconducting cable down through Central and South America over to Brazil, then have a normal high-voltage DC line across the Atlantic, with another superconducting cable that crosses the Sahara.