From the article:
“By now, many BS detectors will be ringing at full volume. I get it. This sounds like magic beans.”
Yup. The more I read the article, the more I thought the exact same thing.
I was in the power generation business for about 25 years, the mechanical side, not the electrical.
The article is really about a company selling snake oil in my opinion.
Yep. Most of the loss is in converting fuels to electricity. When they start comparing BTUs and say our grid wasted its BS. Like burning coal to heat water to turn a turbine to make electricity to heat water to turn a turbine to see how much we got out. STUPID.
Like my nephew who was 22 at the time showing me magnets on a wheel causing it to spin with another magnet in his hand. Then asking me why we can’t create electricity for free doing that. He really thought he had created a solution to the world. I tried in vain to explain but gave up and just said yep. Public education is failed. It did turn out that he is crazy not ha ha crazy but pass the lithium crazy.
The article is really about a company selling snake oil in my opinion.
I knew that we were in trouble from the third long sentence in the article, “But power is also lost in between, on the grid, as it is carried along hundreds of miles of wires, repeatedly shifted between different voltages, and converted from AC to DC and back, all in the split second between the time it enters the grid and the time it powers your computer.”
Power is not repeatedly “converted from AC to DC and back” on the grid. If someone starts his article with a massive misconception... it is very obvious that the rest of the article is likely to be complete nonsense.
Another example: “The problem is, we’re still not measuring electricity digitally, continuously, using real data about real electrons passing through wires.” Almost all metering installed in the last quarter of a century from the meter on your house to the meters at substations to the meters at the power station have been DIGITAL meters. We had digital meters installed at our lumber mill 35 years ago. What is this clown talking about? And analog measuring equipment is not necessarily any less accurate.
From the article, “Here’s the problem, though: It is a devil to explain.” The person who wrote the article has a good imagination but very little understanding of the finer points of electrical theory. Could he explain the difference between inductance and capacitance? He mentions technical terms but only to make his piece sound more authentic to people who do not know what they mean. The BS in this article was so thick that I found my inner voice calling the author a dumbsh*t basically from the beginning to the end.