Can Reengineered Aluminum Help Fill the Demand for Copper?

Consider, for a moment, the electrical wire, a pervasive technology that’s extremely easy to forget. “If you want something really highly conductive, then you’ve just got to go pure,” says Keerti Kappagantula, a materials scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. She’ll take a metal like aluminum and throw in additives like graphene or carbon nanotubes, producing an alloy. The point, in this case, is to create aluminum that can compete with copper in electrical devices—a metal that’s nearly twice as conductive, but also costs about twice as much. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie, an energy-focused research firm, estimated that offshore wind farms will demand 5.5 megatons of the metal over 10 years, mostly for the massive system of cables within generators and for carrying the electrons the turbines produce to the shore.