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.
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.
Spoken like a man who's never tried to maintain acres and acres of hamsters.
Our solar pv system uses Enphase mini-inverters. One for each 240 watt panel. Much better than DC to one big inverter.
And even the “best for solar” is a canard. They have to step up the output of solar panels with what? AC technology (inverters). The choice of the type of output from the inverters can be either AC or DC; the fact that the panel output was originally DC is irrelevant.