Last year in Woburn, Massachusetts, a power line was deployed across a 100-foot stretch of land. Passersby wouldn’t have found much interesting about the installation: The line was supported by standard utility poles, the likes of which most of us have driven by millions of times. In fact, the familiarity of the sight is a key part of the technology’s promise.

The lines are designed to transport five to 10 times the amount of power of conventional transmission lines, using essentially the same footprint and voltage level. That will be key to helping them overcome the regulatory hurdles and community opposition that has made increasing transmission capacity nearly impossible across large swaths of the globe, particularly in America and Europe, where new power distribution systems play a vital role in the shift to renewable energy and the resilience of the grid.

The lines are the product of years of work by the startup VEIR, which was co-founded by Tim Heidel ’05, SM ’06, SM ’09, PhD ’10. They make use of superconducting cables and a proprietary cooling system that will enable initial transmission capacity up to 400 megawatts and, in future versions, up to several gigawatts.