Room temperature superconductivity, like quantum computing, fusion power, and em drives, and other similar "magic" technologies, have one thing in common, which is that the potential consequences of their existence are positive, substantial, and relatively easy to explain and to comprehend, while the difficulties preventing those technologies from seeing the light of day are complex, difficult, and a "bummer" to hear about.
The electricity grid has losses of about 30 percent, so a fully superconducting grid could increase delivered power by about 43 percent, not an order of magnitude more.
More compact MRI machines would be nice to have, certainly, but wouldn't materially change mortality.
Our electrical grid has losses of 30 percent, even after being designed to minimize those losses. Superconductivity wouldn't simply remove those losses; it would remove that design constraint, enabling (for example) solar panels in the Sahara to power households in Siberia. It would mostly fix the power storage problem for renewables.
The point is that at a certain level, a quantifiable increase in efficiency causes a qualitative change in capabilities.
Transmission lines are priced per kilometre. Superconducting transmission will almost certainly cost more than vanilla SCAW (steel cored aluminum wire), and you still have to pay for pylons, bridges, and/or directional drilling over land, or for laying if on the sea bed.
Return on capital employed drives investment decisions. With the cost of PV, wind, and storage falling rapidly, and the efficiency of PV rising, the numbers are starting to fall out in favour of overbuilding supply near demand (in Siberia, to take your example), not building long transmission lines.
No one lives in Siberia anyway, to a first approximation. No market, no investment.
Is that true for RTSCs? In the last month of this saga, every time I saw someone comment on some amazing new technology that RTSC would enable, another expert would chime in and explain why that’s not actually possible or feasible for various reasons. The only convincing gain I’ve seen is a ~10% drop in power transmission costs. But obviously this can’t be right because of how excited everyone gets about it.
If RTSCs turn out to be viable, they would reduce power transmission costs by maybe 10% for our current infrastructure. That's just because we don't build power lines over distances where the losses would be much greater than that, because it doesn't make sense.
But they would also enable new infrastructure beyond what is currently feasible, because we could transport power over much longer distances without any increased loss.
For example, you could transport solar power from the daylit side of the earth to the night side.
