Wire power

Zenergy Power has produced a complete set of superconducting coils for a 1.7MW hydro power generator that will be installed into E.ON Wasserkraft's hydro power station in Bavaria, south east Germany, in the early part of 2010.

Zenergy Power shipped all 28 electromagnetic coils, based on its 1G superconducting wire, for the generator to Converteam, its collaborative development partner, which is responsible for the overall generator design.

The hydro power project was originally a European Commission project named Hydrogenie that received European funding to install a 1.25MW superconducting generator into E.ON's commercial hydro power plant. In January 2008, however, E.ON decided to fund an upgrade of the generator's electrical capacity to1.7MW.

As the Bavarian hydro-electric power generator moves into its final assembly stages, researchers at Zenergy Power are turning their attention to developing the company's second-generation, or 2G superconducting wire.

First-generation (1G) superconducting wire is available commercially from a number of companies around the world. During manufacture, the powdered superconductive bismuth-strontium-calcium-copper-oxide material is filled into silver alloy pipes, which are subsequently processed into a multi-filament high-temperature superconducting wire by means of a batch process.