Posted on 11/20/2011 9:56:06 PM PST by neverdem
Thomas Edison and his direct current, or DC, technology lost the so-called War of the Currents to alternating current, or AC, in the 1890s after it became clear that AC was far more efficient at transmitting electricity over long distances.
Today, AC is still the standard for the electricity that comes out of our wall sockets. But DC is staging a roaring comeback in pockets of the electrical grid.
Alstom, ABB, Siemens and other conglomerates are erecting high-voltage DC grids to carry gigawatts of electricity from wind farms in remote places like western China and the North Sea to faraway cities. Companies like SAP and Facebook that operate huge data centers are using more DC to reduce waste heat. Panasonic is even talking about building eco-friendly homes that use direct current.
In a DC grid, electrons flow from a battery or power station to a home or appliance, and then continue to flow in a complete circuit back to the original source. In AC, electrons flow back and forth between generators and appliances in a precisely synchronized manner — imagine a set of interlocking canals where water continually surges back and forth but the water level at any given point stays constant.
Direct current was the electrical transmission technology when Edison started rolling out electric wires in the 19th century. Alternating current, which operated at higher voltages, was later championed by the Edison rivals Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse.
The AC forces won when Tesla and Westinghouse figured out how to fine-tune AC transmission so that it required far fewer power plants and copper cable.
DC didn’t die, however.
AT&T adopted direct current for the phone system because of its inherent stability, which is part of the reason that landline phones often survive storms better than the electric grid...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Shocking!
The real reason for AC is to torture electrical engineering students.
This is all part of the windmill hype. The electric grid is the sustaining lifeblood of modern civilization, and these guys want to trash it for some kind of green steam punk vision. Don’t get me started.
Direct-current transmission is also better suited to handle the electricity produced by solar and wind farms, which starts out as direct current.
Um, solar sure. Wind farms (and pretty much all mainstream power sources) not so much, since they create energy by spinning an electromagnetic induction AC generator. So this part of the argument only works for solar, the most abysmally inefficient of all available sources. Hamsters on a treadmill are more efficient than solar.
I thought it was to torture live sound guys with 60 hertz hum.
That too. More than torture electrical engineers it is especially cruel to budding engineers from other disciplines who have to take basic electrical circuits as an engineering science elective.
Say what?
Methinks that something got lost in the translation.
I always thought it was so the practical joker in the class (why are you all looking at ME?) could turn electrolytic capacitors into fircrackers by using a suicide cord and a wall outlet.
That’s the real reason. EE’s never feared E-Sci, as we called it. If someone was in the EE program and didn’t like E-sci, we told them to get out, because it was just going to get worse... much worse... when we got to Fields and Waves.
AC circuitry isn’t all that difficult to understand once you get the hang of complex math and lagrangian analysis of motors/generators.
I thought that was due to phones being relatively low power and all the central offices having battery backup.
Say what?
Methinks that something got lost in the translation.
That part's true. POTS uses +24VDC TIP and -24VDC Ring.
Edison had an elephant electrocuted to try to get his picked.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr6xBz-h99U&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fresults%3Fsearch_query%3Delephant%2Belectrocuted%26oq%3Delephant%2Belectrocuted%26aq%3Df%26aqi%3D%26aql%3D%26gs_sm%3De%26gs_upl%3D5751l10835l0l12163l8l8l0l0l0l0l2538l2538l9-1l1l0
The excerpt posted is so piss-poorly written that I won’t bother with the whole article.
The writer has no clue about electricity and nearly everything he/she said about what AC and DC is and does is wrong.
The reason AC was used is because you can step the voltage up and down as needed with transformers. You can’t do that with DC.
The reason you need to transmit power at high voltages is because power (watts) = Amps X Volts. If you double the voltage, you can get the same power with half the current (Amps). The reason this is important is because the higher the current, the higher the losses due to circuit resistance.
To simplify it greatly- you can use thinner wire to transmit the same power by simply increasing the voltage. High voltages in the hundreds of kilovolt range are stepped down by the use of transformers until they are stepped down to 220 and 110 volts for your household use.
You can’t do that with DC using transformers and so AC was adopted for the electric system.
Why reporters can’t just look it up before they write bullshtuff like this is beyond me.
It always reminds me of the time a TV news guy who was doing a report on a twin engine plane crash walks up to a mechanic working on a Cessna 172 or something like that and asked the mechanic “Will this plane fly safely on one engine?” to which the mechanic looked at the reporter with an “are-you-stupid” look and replied with much sarcasm in his voice “It flies best with one engine! It’s only GOT one engine!”
Reporters - it seems the only thing required of them nowadays is that they have an extreme left wing bias.
“I always thought it was so the practical joker in the class (why are you all looking at ME?) could turn electrolytic capacitors into fircrackers by using a suicide cord and a wall outlet.”
They took all the fun out of when they started scoring the tops of the cans with an X. Now they just go “PHHHSSSS”.
Not if you blob some solder on the top of the can first. Just sayin’.
I had a Model T spark coil. Great for creating a high voltage arc. Excellent for charging a Sprague Orange Drop capacitor. The go "snap" in the palms of unsuspecting folks. Also lots of fun if you fancy the Star Wars "light saber" accomplished with a fluorescent tube glowing from the spark coil. Even better if you have the patience to construct a sizable Tesla coil. Little "fingers" of electricity arcing all the way to the walls (while the foolish sat out in the hallway to watch).
Not sure what you mean by this. Hamsters may be considered as solar powered devices based on consumption of photosynthetically produced fuel. On what basis would they be compared to a solar cell? It seems to me that a solar cell provides about the most efficient imaginable conversion of the solar flux to electric power, on the basis of square footage of exposure. The hamsters require not only the agricultural square footage for their food ( in itself presumably much greater than the requirement for solar cells of equal output, ) but many ancillary fossil fuel based inputs, so that the net efficiency of a hypothetical hamster based electric power system would be, as one might suppose, ridiculously abysmal.
****If someone was in the EE program and didn’t like E-sci, we told them to get out, because it was just going to get worse... much worse... when we got to Fields and Waves.****
Designing circuitry on a micron level that includes the elegant dance with Fields and Waves has worn out many calculators. An ever changing field that requires constant study and diligence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.