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The Last DC Power Grid Shut Down in NYC
cell-block-9 writes "Today the last section of the old Edison DC power grid will be shut down in Manhattan. 'The last snip of Con Ed's direct current system will take place at 10 East 40th Street, near the Mid-Manhattan Library. That building, like the thousands of other direct current users that have been transitioned over the last several years, now has a converter installed on the premises that can take alternating electricity from the Con Ed power grid and adapt it on premises.' I guess Tesla finally won the argument."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents
For short distances and for use within IC it's quite useful. The conversion from AC to DC at lower voltages for use within computers produces quite a bit of heat (hence the fan in your PSU, yes I realize that even DC from a higher voltage to DC at a lower voltage produces quite a bit of heat) and so you find that some data centers are moving to converting from AC to DC outside of the cases and transporting DC directly to the servers.
/. about this a while back and perhaps somebody who'd like to be modded up a bit can post the link.
There was an article on
internet like monkeys'
AC's advantage of high voltage transmission doesn't apply to subways as 1200V seems to be the limit for third rail. 2400VDC was tried in 1915 on the Michigan Railways (an electric interurban in central Michigan) with abysmal results - the voltage was changed to 1200V within a year of the initial installation.
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Do you have transmission lines that are three blocks in diameter? Then it's more efficient to convert at the source. What? You don't? Then I guess converting at the point of use is more efficient. Transporting the 5V and 12V levels that most consumer electronics use internally would be insane over more than a few feet because of voltage drop.
See Electric power transmission: History for more information.
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It keeps being repeated, even in this article which says "it can be transmitted long distances far more economically than direct current", that AC is more efficient. This is not really true. The advantage (and pretty much the only advantage) that AC has over DC is that it is relatively simple to change voltages.
Over the short-haul, this is good since losses are primarily resistive and losses are related to the amount of current flowing in the conductors. Power in my neighborhood is delivered at 12,000V and down-converted to 120/240 by transformers located every few houses. Delivering power at 120V would require 100 times the current and massively larger conductors. Once it gets to my house, with the exception of some motors and some lights, everything from TV to stereo to computer ends up having to take that power and reconvert it to DC.
But AC has far higher losses through capacitance and inductance which become severe over long distances. This is why some current and other planned long-haul transmission routes use DC. A good example of this is the 800-kilovolt DC line that connects into the Sylmar Terminal Station near Los Angeles.
Apparently, the use of Extra High Voltage DC is being proposed for a number of new long-haul transmission systems and it is the high losses incurred by AC over long distances that is driving the use of DC.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
It would be more efficient to transmit DC, if we are talking about the same voltages. AC is impeded by inductance as well as resistance, so in addition to the inefficiencies of converting, you also are better off transmitting DC if it is the same voltage.
The trick is, transmitting at higher voltages is more efficient than transmitting the same power at lower voltage. This is because to send the same power at low voltage, you must send more current, and more current means more energy wasted as heat from the resistance of the line. So voltages from the generator are stepped way up before being transmitted.
And the reason AC won out is that it is much, much cheaper and easier to step up AC voltage (you just need a transformer, which is nothing but a couple coils of wire around an iron core) than to step up DC voltages (which requires a boost converter, which at its heart is a giant transistor [big enough to survive the voltages and currents of a power plant in this case] and a huge inductor [big fat coil of wire] along with timing and firing circuits to control the action of the transistor).
Boost converters are expensive, but over a long enough run of transmission line the advantages of DC over AC do make up the difference (as I recall, the break-even point is about a 400 mile long line). So you do find some long distance transmission lines that are DC. I know there is one out here in Sylmar, California that runs up to Washington state somewhere.
Automated teller machine machine?
Personal identification number number?
Direct current current?
See wiki .
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric
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DC doesn't require high voltages, a DC line at a given voltage is slightly more efficiant than an AC line of the same voltage.
DC has two main problems
1: it is a pain to voltage convert. Voltage conversion is pretty vital to our modern use of electricity, you don't want 11KV in your home but you don't want to be transmitting 240/415 three phase or worse 120/240 split phase any significant distance. You also want much lower voltages for loads of equipment.
For equipment power supplies it isn't so bad, they generally don't have particularlly high efficiancies anyway, they tend to run at fairly low power and they tend to be in a nice indoor environment but building a DC equivilent of a pole pig with similar efficiancy and reliability would get pretty expensive.
2: DC is a pain to switch, switches and breakers would have to be either much bigger or much more complex for a given DC voltage than for the same AC voltage (the zero crossings of AC tend to break arcs).
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