conductivity - Graphene Vs Copper?

I was wondering about the amazing conductive properties of graphene, lets assume a large copper bar that is 10 kg, current of 1kA and probably more can flow in it, what about graphene? It certainly can since its a better conductor, but it would be much lighter? In the milligrams possibly?

Also, can graphene replace the heavy busbars that carry MW of power? Making it much lighter?

Answer

The trick with graphene is that a lot of its amazing properties only work when you have continuous perfect sheets of it, and making graphene like this is currently beyond us, for large scales anyways. It is true that graphene has very high electron mobility $\approx10^{5}~\mathrm{cm^2/Vs}$ at room temperature, which works out to on the order of $10~\mathrm{n\Omega\cdot m}$ in bulk (which assumes you can make a perfect multilayer structure that maintains the properties of a single sheet). An impressive figure, but only $\approx40\%$ better than copper.

Of course, copper is about 6 times more dense than graphene, so if mass is the main concern, graphene would be a pretty good improvement. Still, we're not talking about replacing $10~\mathrm{kg}$ of copper with a few milligrams. Given how much cheaper and easier it is to make metal wires, we're not at the point of using graphene for this kind of bulk application. There are also some more mundane problems to sort out, e.g. graphene is brittle like a ceramic, which might cause mechanical issues.