The world is transitioning to renewable energy, and this is causing demand for conductive metals for motors and wiring to grow significantly. Copper has traditionally been the metal of choice, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to extract and produce, so people are trying to offer alternatives. One of the most curious alternatives is a surprise, especially since we are talking about aluminum, which is not a metal with good conductivity... until we add some ingredients and create a much more promising alloy.

The future needs (lots of) cables. An electric vehicle needs four times more copper than a normal car, and things are going to get even more interesting when we consider that new renewable energy plants will need a lot of cabling to distribute that electricity.

Experts at Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm in this field, estimate, for example, that offshore wind farms will require 5.5 megatons of metal over 10 years, mainly for the huge cabling systems in the generators and to carry that electricity from the turbines to the coast.

Copper is the new oil. The price of copper has skyrocketed in recent years, and growing shortages in the face of demand have led Goldman Sachs to label it "the new oil."

Fitch analysts expect annual production to increase by 3.1% between 2020 and 2029. Australia, Canada, and Chile are major players here, along with Peru and the US, but the truth is that extraction is becoming increasingly difficult and costly. The solution, of course, is to find a better alternative.

Aluminum to the fore. Several companies and industries have been making this partial transition from copper to aluminum for years, which allows for cost savings: Saudi Electricity Co. saved $640 million on its infrastructure six years ago, and manufacturers such as Toyota have confirmed that they use aluminum instead of copper in models such as the Land Cruiser.

In search of superaluminum. This metal is a poorer conductor, but it is cheaper to produce and, in certain scenarios, using it pays off. In others, it does not, and that is where research such as that conducted by Keerti Kappagantula, a materials scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab, comes in.

Traditionally, obtaining a more conductive metal was based on achieving metals that were as pure as possible, but this scientist is going in the opposite direction and "contaminating" aluminum with additives such as graphene or carbon nanotubes to produce a promising alloy.

Not as good as copper... The research hopes to eventually offer this alloy with improved conductivity. Even so, its conductivity is expected to be at most half that of copper, but it will also be half the cost to produce.

But it makes sense to use it.So whyuse it?Because aluminum has its advantages. It is much lighter than copper, but it is also the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust (about 1,000 times more), which makes it cheaper and easier to obtain. Research is ongoing and so far they have not achieved their goal, but those responsible believe they are "on the right track." We will see if this is the case.