The progresses of superconducting technology for power grid last decade in China

With the increasing development of renewable energy, it is expected that large-scale renewable power would be transported from the west and north area of China to the east and south area. For this reason, it will be necessary to develop a wide-area power grid in which the renewable energy would be the dominant power source, and the power grid will be faced by some critical challenges such as long-distance large-capacity power transmission, the stability of the wide-area power grid and the land use problem for the power grid. The superconducting technology for power (STP) would be a possible alternative for the development of China's future power grid. In last decade, STP has been extensively developed in China. In this paper, we present an overview of the R&D of STP last decade in China including: 1) the development of high temperature superconducting (HTS) materials, 2) DC power cables, 3) superconducting power substations, 4) fault current limiters and 5) superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES).