The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Is the LK-99 Superconductor the Key to Green Energy? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Is the superconductor of every Green's dreams finally here? I hate to burst your bubble, but the LK-99 is just too good to be true. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/is-the-lk-99-superconductor-the-key-to-green-energy

Hey everybody, Peter Zine, coming to you from the peak of Mount Evans. Behind me is Mount Berstadt and Square Top and behind that Geneva and Silver and Decatur and Treasure and all the others. Today we're going to talk about something a lot of you have written in about and that is the LK99 superconductor information that has recently been leaked onto Twitter and Reddit. The idea of a superconductor is it doesn't lose any of its throughput regardless of distance. And if you can do that over long distances, you can transfer power from anywhere to. to anywhere relatively easily and cheaply. That's the idea anyway. The short version for LK99 is that it's probably nothing.

The reports in question date back over 15 years, and the only thing that's new is that they were leaked and they were put online. And a number of institutions within Korea, because that's where the first tests were done, I've already come out and saying that at best they're flawed, but none of them have ever been replicated, including by the team that did the original report. So there's probably nothing here. It's just that it's getting a little bit of fresh air all of a sudden. Now, if you want to bet on semiconductors, I welcome you to do it.

It's one of the material sciences breakthroughs that we really need if we're going to make the green transition stick. One of the problems we have with the green transition is that you can generate a lot of solar in the southwest, a lot of wind power in the Great Plains, but that's where most of the American population lives. And even in the United States where people only live a couple thousand miles, away from those zones, that's much better than you've got in, say, Europe, where you'd have to basically go to the Great Eurasian step for wind and into the Sahara for solar. So if you can solve the semiconductor and the transmission problem, great. There's also another issue. In the United States, because it's hard to transmit power, and very, very, very loose rule of thumb, if you transport power about 500 miles,

it costs almost as much to do that transmission because of the loss as it does to generate the power in the first place. So you're generally not going to send electricity very far. What that means is in the United States, most electrical concerns, all the utilities are local. So each town or each county has their own. There are very few large utilities in the United States. And if you want to make solar and wind work at scale, you either need larger and larger and larger entities, or you need the ability to transfer power across jurisdictional lines, especially state and grid boundaries. semiconductors would in theory allow us to do that technically but we still need the legal structure to do it now you can do high voltage lines which will double triple maybe even quadruple the distance you can send power in an economically viable manner

but until you can cross those boundaries it doesn't really matter so what we need now even before we get superconductors is uh multiple acts of congress to break down the legal jurisdictions to allow power to be sent large distances And as soon as Congress does that, a number of states will sue because right now this has been a local and a state legal prerogative. So we need a significant legal overhaul before we can really do the green transition, even if we did have superconductors. So I'd say start now and get the laws changed, and then hopefully we can have that physical science breakthrough that is necessary to do this at scale and over distance. Okay, that's it. Take care.