Japan's First Test on High-Temperature Superconducting Cable Starts

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Mayekawa Mfg. Co., announced on October 29, 2012, that they launched the first demonstration test in Japan on the transmission of power to the electrical grid via high-temperature superconducting cable. The test is part of a demonstration project hosted by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Using superconducting cable developed through previous technical research by NEDO, the project will build a superconducting cable system that integrates a kind of cooling technology with the superconducting cable for application in a power supply system, an essential type of infrastructure.

Approximately 240 meters of superconducting cable placed in insulated pipes were installed at TEPCO's Asahi transformer substation (Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture). The cable consists of three high-temperature superconducting cable cores with the world's largest capacity (200,000 kilovolt-ampere class). The three companies will verify the operability, reliability, and security of the cable when connected to an actual electrical grid and its superconducting state is maintained using liquid nitrogen.