The Room-Temperature Revolution
In 1911, the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered something extraordinary. He had cooled mercury to just four degrees above absolute zero, roughly minus two hundred and sixty-nine degrees Celsius, when suddenly its electrical resistance vanished. Current flowed through the metal with no loss whatsoever. It was as if friction itself had ceased to exist. Onnes had discovered superconductivity, a phenomenon so strange that it would take nearly half a century before physicists fully understood why it happened.
For over a hundred years, superconductivity has remained stubbornly impractical for most applications. The materials that exhibit it require extreme cold, typically achieved only with liquid helium, itself expensive and difficult to handle. Despite this limitation, superconductors have found uses where no alternative exists: in the powerful magnets of magnetic resonance imaging machines, in the beam-steering systems of particle accelerators, in the maglev trains of Japan. These applications justify the expense and complexity of cooling because nothing else can do what superconductors do.
But what if superconductivity could work at room temperature? What if we could transmit electricity across continents without losing a single watt to resistance? What if every motor, every transformer, every power line could operate with perfect efficiency? This is not an idle fantasy. In December 2025, researchers at the Max Planck Institute achieved a breakthrough in understanding high-temperature superconductors that brings this possibility closer than it has ever been. Combined with a parallel revolution in battery technology, where sodium-ion cells now last twenty-five years and cost a tenth of their predecessors, the basic infrastructure of energy is approaching a transformation as fundamental as the shift from coal to electricity.
What Superconductivity Actually Is
To understand why superconductors matter, you must first understand what electrical resistance is and why we cannot simply engineer it away.
When electricity flows through an ordinary wire, electrons collide with the atoms that make up the metal. Each collision transfers a small amount of energy from the electron to the atom, causing the atom to vibrate more intensely. We perceive these vibrations as heat. This is why wires warm up when current flows through them and why power lines lose energy over distance. The energy does not disappear; it transforms into heat and radiates away. Globally, electrical transmission and distribution losses amount to roughly ten percent of all electricity generated. In some countries, the figure reaches sixteen percent.
At the scale of modern power grids, ten percent is an enormous number. It means that one out of every ten power plants exists solely to replace energy lost in transmission. It means that renewable energy generated in sunny deserts or windy plains loses significant power on its way to distant cities. It means that the geography of generation matters as much as the economics of generation.
Superconductivity eliminates this problem by changing how electrons move. In an ordinary metal, electrons move independently, each one bouncing off atoms on its own chaotic path. In a superconductor, something remarkable happens. Electrons pair up, forming what physicists call Cooper pairs after Leon Cooper, who first explained the phenomenon. These paired electrons behave collectively, entering a quantum state that prevents them from scattering off atoms. The entire flow of current moves as a coherent wave, unimpeded by the lattice of atoms through which it passes.
The catch is that Cooper pairs are fragile. They exist only when thermal vibrations, the random jiggling of atoms due to temperature, are weak enough not to break them apart. In most known superconductors, this means temperatures near absolute zero. The mercury that Onnes studied becomes superconducting at four degrees above absolute zero. Niobium-titanium, the material used in most magnetic resonance imaging machines, works at nine degrees above absolute zero. These temperatures require liquid helium, which boils at four degrees above absolute zero and costs tens of dollars per liter.
In 1986, Georg Bednorz and Karl Muller discovered a class of ceramic materials that superconducted at much higher temperatures, eventually above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, which is seventy-seven degrees above absolute zero. Liquid nitrogen costs roughly the same as milk. This discovery, which won Bednorz and Muller the Nobel Prize, raised hopes that room-temperature superconductivity might be achievable. But for nearly four decades, progress stalled. The highest confirmed superconducting temperatures remained far below room temperature, and the materials that achieved them required pressures of millions of atmospheres, producible only in tiny laboratory samples.
The Hydrogen Sulfide Breakthrough
The path toward room-temperature superconductivity took an unexpected turn in 2015. Mikhail Eremets and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry discovered that hydrogen sulfide, the gas responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, becomes superconducting at two hundred and three degrees above absolute zero when compressed to 1.5 million times atmospheric pressure. This is minus seventy degrees Celsius, still cold but warm by superconductor standards. More importantly, it demonstrated that extreme temperatures were not an absolute barrier.
The key insight involved hydrogen. Hydrogen is the lightest element, and when packed densely under enormous pressure, it can form metallic hydrogen or hydrogen-rich compounds with unusual properties. The vibrations of hydrogen atoms in these compounds occur at frequencies that match the energy scale of Cooper pairing. Theory had predicted this behavior decades earlier, but actually achieving it required pressures that only diamond anvil cells could produce.
Following hydrogen sulfide, researchers explored other hydrogen-rich materials. Lanthanum decahydride, a compound of lanthanum and hydrogen, achieved superconductivity at two hundred and fifty degrees above absolute zero, roughly minus twenty-three degrees Celsius, barely colder than a household freezer. Other compounds pushed temperatures higher still, though always under crushing pressures.
In December 2025, the Max Planck team achieved something that had eluded researchers for years. They directly measured the superconducting gap in hydrogen sulfide, the energy difference that keeps Cooper pairs stable, using a new tunneling technique that works under extreme pressure. This measurement confirmed why hydrogen-rich superconductors work so well and pointed toward materials that might work at lower pressures or higher temperatures. Dr. Mikhail Eremets, who passed away in November 2024, had called this work the most important advance in hydride superconductivity since the original 2015 discovery.
Room-temperature superconductivity is no longer a theoretical speculation. It has been achieved, albeit under laboratory conditions with samples measured in cubic microns. The question now is whether practical materials, ones that work at atmospheric pressure and in quantities useful for engineering, can be developed.
Why This Matters Beyond the Laboratory
Imagine a world where electrical transmission has no losses. The implications cascade through every aspect of energy infrastructure.
Power grids currently require that generation happen relatively close to consumption. Long-distance transmission accumulates losses that make distant generation economically unattractive. This is why cities build power plants nearby even when better generation sites exist far away. It is why rooftop solar competes with utility-scale solar despite lower efficiency: the rooftop has no transmission losses.
With lossless transmission, geography ceases to matter for electricity. Solar farms in the Sahara could power factories in Europe. Wind turbines in the plains of Kansas could light homes in New York. Hydroelectric dams in Canada could serve the entire North American continent. The best sites for renewable generation, not the nearest ones, could supply power everywhere.
The numbers involved are substantial. Currently, generating capacity must be built not just to meet demand but to compensate for transmission losses. Eliminating those losses would reduce the need for generation by roughly ten percent globally. It would enable renewable energy installations in locations where they are most productive rather than most convenient. It would make energy storage more valuable because stored energy could be transmitted anywhere without degradation.
Motors and generators would also transform. Electric motors convert electrical energy into mechanical energy, and generators do the reverse. Both involve current flowing through wires wound around magnetic cores. The resistance of those wires dissipates energy as heat. Superconducting motors and generators would be smaller, lighter, and more efficient than their conventional counterparts. They already exist in specialized applications, such as the ship propulsion systems of the German navy, but room-temperature superconductivity would make them practical for everyday use.
Magnetic resonance imaging machines illustrate both the potential and the limitations of current technology. These devices use superconducting magnets to produce the intense, stable magnetic fields required for imaging. The magnets are cooled by liquid helium, which must be regularly replenished and carefully managed. The cooling systems are complex, expensive, and sensitive. Room-temperature superconductors would eliminate all of this, making the machines smaller, cheaper, and more portable. Imaging that currently requires dedicated hospital facilities could become available in clinics, mobile units, or even homes.
The Battery Revolution
While physicists have pursued superconductivity, chemists and engineers have achieved a parallel revolution in energy storage. The story is less dramatic but more immediately practical.
Lithium-ion batteries, the technology that powers smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles, have improved steadily since their commercialization in 1991. Energy density has roughly tripled. Costs have fallen by over ninety percent. But lithium itself is a scarce element, concentrated in a few countries, subject to volatile pricing and geopolitical risk. And the cycle life of lithium batteries, the number of times they can be charged and discharged before degrading, typically ranges from one thousand to four thousand cycles depending on chemistry. For grid storage applications, which might cycle daily for decades, this limits economic viability.
Sodium-ion batteries offer an alternative. Sodium is the sixth most abundant element in the Earth's crust, available essentially everywhere at low cost. The chemistry is similar to lithium-ion, which means manufacturing processes can be adapted rather than reinvented. The trade-off has been performance: sodium is heavier than lithium, so sodium-ion batteries have lower energy density. They store less energy per kilogram.
In April 2025, the Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited, known as CATL, launched a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra that changed the equation. The battery achieves one hundred and seventy-five watt-hours per kilogram, approaching the one hundred and eighty-five watt-hours per kilogram of lithium iron phosphate batteries. More remarkably, it lasts for over ten thousand charge-discharge cycles while retaining significant capacity. Under normal use patterns, this translates to a lifespan of twenty-five years.
Consider what a twenty-five-year battery means for energy infrastructure. A grid storage installation built today with Naxtra batteries would still be operational in 2050. It would have cycled through its full capacity perhaps seven thousand times, storing and releasing energy to balance grid fluctuations, smooth renewable intermittency, and shift power from times of surplus to times of shortage. The capital investment would be amortized over a quarter century. The cost per cycle falls to levels that make fossil fuel peaker plants obsolete.
BYD, another major Chinese manufacturer, is building a thirty gigawatt-hour sodium-ion factory with similar technology. The Chinese government projects that by 2030, over ninety percent of global sodium-ion battery production will occur in China. The Western dependence on Chinese lithium-ion batteries may simply shift to dependence on Chinese sodium-ion batteries. The technology advances regardless of who captures its economic value.
The Convergence
Superconductors and batteries address different problems, but their convergence creates something greater than either alone.
The fundamental challenge of renewable energy is intermittency. The sun sets. The wind calms. Demand peaks in the evening when solar generation declines. Managing a grid with high renewable penetration requires either massive overcapacity, to ensure enough generation even in low-production periods, or storage, to shift energy from high-production to high-demand periods. Currently, storage is expensive and transmission is lossy, so we build overcapacity and accept curtailment when generation exceeds what the grid can absorb.
Cheap, long-lasting batteries change the storage equation. A battery that lasts twenty-five years with minimal degradation can store energy for cents per kilowatt-hour. At those costs, storing a week of electricity for a household becomes economical. Storing months of electricity for a utility becomes conceivable. The intermittency of renewables ceases to be a technical barrier.
Lossless transmission changes the geography equation. If moving electricity from one location to another costs nothing in energy terms, the optimal sites for generation can serve the entire grid regardless of where they are located. Solar installations can go where the sun is strongest. Wind farms can go where the wind is steadiest. Hydroelectric plants can serve loads thousands of kilometers away.
Combine these two advances and the constraints that have shaped energy infrastructure for a century dissolve. Generation can happen where it is most efficient. Storage can happen where it is most economical. Transmission connects everything without loss. The result is a grid designed from first principles rather than accumulated from historical compromises.
What the Transition Looks Like
Transitions in energy infrastructure happen slowly, measured in decades rather than years. The electrical grid of today was built over more than a century, starting with Edison's Pearl Street Station in 1882. It incorporates technologies from every era since: generators, transformers, transmission lines, substations, all layered atop one another and interconnected in ways that reflect the economics and capabilities of their times.
A transition to superconducting transmission and advanced battery storage would not replace this infrastructure overnight. It would add to it, initially in applications where the benefits are greatest and the barriers lowest.
Urban power distribution is one such application. In dense cities, the cost of land makes underground cables preferable to overhead lines. Underground cables face thermal limits: the heat from resistance accumulates in enclosed spaces and must be dissipated. Superconducting cables, which generate no heat from resistance, can carry far more power in the same physical space. In Essen, Germany, a one-kilometer superconducting cable has supplied ten thousand households since 2014. It fit into spaces where conventional cables could not.
Long-distance transmission is another application, but one that requires room-temperature superconductors rather than the cryogenic materials available today. The cooling systems for current superconducting cables add cost and complexity that limit their use to specialized installations. If superconductors worked without cooling, transmission lines could span continents at costs comparable to or below conventional lines while eliminating losses entirely.
Battery storage is already scaling rapidly. China's sodium-ion market is projected to grow from ten gigawatt-hours in 2025 to nearly three hundred gigawatt-hours by 2034. Investment in capacity construction during 2025 has targeted nearly one hundred and eighty gigawatt-hours of new sodium-ion production. These numbers suggest that within a decade, sodium-ion batteries will be a standard component of grid infrastructure.
The Countries
Energy transitions are geopolitical events. The countries that develop and manufacture new energy technologies capture economic value and strategic advantage. The countries that depend on imports become vulnerable.
China dominates battery manufacturing as it once dominated solar panel manufacturing. CATL and BYD together hold over fifty percent of the global electric vehicle battery market. China's lead in sodium-ion technology is even more pronounced. The collapse of Natron Energy, an American sodium-ion startup, in 2025 illustrated the fragility of Western efforts to compete. The United States has the research capacity to develop these technologies but has struggled to translate research into manufacturing.
Superconductivity research remains more globally distributed. The Max Planck Institute in Germany, national laboratories in the United States, and research groups in Japan and South Korea all contribute to advancing the field. But research does not guarantee manufacturing. If room-temperature superconductors are developed, the question of who will produce them at scale remains open.
Energy importers have the most to gain from these transitions. Countries that currently import fossil fuels could become energy-independent if they can generate, store, and transmit renewable electricity effectively. Japan, which imports nearly all its fossil fuels, has invested heavily in superconductor research and maglev trains. Singapore, which imports both fuel and food, has explored alternative proteins and advanced battery technology. Island nations and geographically isolated countries could reduce their dependence on fuel shipments and undersea cables.
Energy exporters face a more complex calculation. Countries whose economies depend on fossil fuel exports would see that revenue decline as renewable electricity displaces oil and gas. Some, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have begun investing in renewable capacity and battery manufacturing. Others may resist the transition or fail to adapt.
The Physics That Remains
Room-temperature superconductivity is not inevitable. The materials that achieve it under extreme pressure may not have analogues that work at normal conditions. The physics that makes hydrogen-rich compounds superconduct may not translate to materials that can be manufactured at scale.
Researchers are pursuing several pathways. One involves computational materials discovery, using artificial intelligence to predict which compounds might exhibit high-temperature superconductivity. The approach is similar to how AlphaFold predicted protein structures: train models on known superconductors, learn which features correlate with superconductivity, and propose candidates for experimental testing.
Another pathway involves understanding the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity more deeply. The December 2025 breakthrough, which measured the superconducting gap in hydrogen sulfide directly, contributes to this understanding. If researchers know precisely why certain materials superconduct at high temperatures, they can design materials to optimize those properties.
A third pathway involves topological superconductors, materials whose superconducting properties arise from their geometry rather than their composition. Platinum bismuth two, discovered in 2025, exhibits superconductivity only on its surfaces. The edges of these superconducting surfaces naturally host exotic particles called Majorana fermions, which have potential applications in quantum computing. These materials behave differently from conventional superconductors and may point toward new mechanisms.
None of these pathways is guaranteed to succeed. The history of superconductivity research includes multiple periods when breakthroughs seemed imminent but failed to materialize. The optimism of the late 1980s, following the discovery of high-temperature ceramic superconductors, gave way to decades of incremental progress. The current moment may be different, or it may not be.
What Victory Looks Like
If room-temperature superconductivity becomes practical, and if sodium-ion or successor battery technologies achieve the performance already demonstrated in laboratories, the world of 2050 could differ from today as fundamentally as 2025 differs from 1950.
Power generation would be decoupled from power consumption. The sun sets in Tokyo when it rises in Berlin; with lossless intercontinental transmission, electricity could follow the daylight around the globe, reducing the need for storage. Wind in Argentina could power homes in South Africa. Hydroelectric dams in Norway could supply factories in India.
Energy storage would become a form of capital rather than a consumable. A battery that lasts twenty-five years with minimal maintenance is not a replacement part but a permanent installation. The economics shift from operating expenses to capital investments. The value of stored energy appreciates over time as degradation costs approach zero.
Vehicles would become mobile power plants. Electric cars with long-lasting batteries could participate in grid stabilization, absorbing excess generation and returning it during peaks. The distinction between transportation and energy infrastructure would blur.
Industrial processes that currently require fossil fuels for heat would shift to electricity. Steel production, cement manufacturing, and chemical synthesis all require high temperatures traditionally provided by burning coal or gas. If electricity is abundant and cheap, electric arc furnaces and resistance heating become competitive. Industrial carbon emissions decline not because of mandates but because of economics.
The environmental implications would be profound. Transmission losses currently account for roughly five percent of global electricity generation. Eliminating those losses reduces the generation required and the emissions associated with that generation. Enabling renewable energy to serve distant loads makes the best renewable sites economically accessible. Longer-lasting batteries reduce the mining and manufacturing associated with frequent replacements.
What Victory Costs
Transitions create losers as well as winners. The post-animal economy threatens ranchers; the post-scarcity energy economy threatens different groups.
Fossil fuel industries would decline. Coal, oil, and natural gas currently provide over eighty percent of global energy. Companies, workers, and regions dependent on these industries would face disruption. Some could adapt: oil companies could become energy companies, diversifying into renewables and storage. Others might not.
Grid operators would face obsolescence. The current model of electricity distribution involves complex balancing of generation and load, transmission scheduling, and market management. If storage is abundant and cheap, and transmission is lossless, much of this complexity disappears. The skills that grid operators have developed over decades may become less valuable.
Certain geographies would lose relevance. Cities located near fossil fuel deposits grew because of that proximity. Houston became an energy capital because of Texas oil. Pittsburgh became an industrial center because of Pennsylvania coal. If energy can be transmitted from anywhere without loss, the advantages of proximity vanish.
The transition itself would require enormous investment. Replacing existing transmission infrastructure with superconducting cables would cost trillions of dollars globally. Building battery storage capacity sufficient to handle grid-scale intermittency would require similar amounts. These investments might pay for themselves over time, but they must be made before the benefits arrive.
The Uncertainty
Writing about the future is an exercise in uncertainty. The technologies described here exist in laboratories and early deployments. Whether they will scale, and how quickly, depends on scientific discoveries not yet made, engineering problems not yet solved, and economic forces not yet in motion.
Room-temperature superconductivity may remain perpetually out of reach, always promised but never delivered. The materials that work under extreme pressure may have no practical counterparts. The physics may simply not permit what we hope to achieve.
Sodium-ion batteries may hit limits that are not yet apparent. The twenty-five-year lifespan of current cells may degrade under real-world conditions in ways that laboratory testing has not revealed. Competing technologies, perhaps lithium-sulfur or solid-state batteries, may prove superior.
The economics may not favor adoption. Even if the technologies work, existing infrastructure represents trillions of dollars of sunk investment. Utilities, grid operators, and energy companies have every incentive to extract value from existing assets rather than replace them with new ones. Policy, politics, and incumbency advantages can delay transitions for decades.
What is certain is that the research is happening, the investments are being made, and the results are accumulating. The questions have shifted from whether these technologies are possible to when and how they will be deployed. That shift, from physics to engineering, from science to economics, is itself a kind of progress.
The Present Moment
In December 2025, the Max Planck Institute announced the most significant advance in superconductivity research since 2015. In April 2025, CATL launched a sodium-ion battery that lasts twenty-five years. China is building factories to produce hundreds of gigawatt-hours of storage capacity annually. Researchers across the world are using artificial intelligence to design new materials faster than ever before.
These are not the final steps of a completed transition. They are the early signs of one beginning. The energy infrastructure of 2050 will not look like the infrastructure of 2025, just as 2025 does not look like 1975. Something is changing, even if the full shape of the change remains unclear.
The room-temperature revolution may arrive in a decade or may take half a century. It may come gradually, through incremental improvements in existing technologies, or suddenly, through a breakthrough that changes everything. What seems certain is that the direction of progress points toward a world where energy flows without loss and stores without degradation. Getting there is a matter of time, investment, and discovery. The physics says it is possible. The engineering is catching up.