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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."
most people don't even know who Tesla was or that he pushed for the system that we now use to distribute electricity.
But Edison electrocuted an elephant, which quite frankly is just an awesome smear campaign.
it makes math pretty easy, and your computer is currently running on it.
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The advantages of AC are mostly in transportation from the power station to the consumer. Internally, electronics use mostly DC, I think (correct me if I'm wrong here). Batteries store and release DC current, a computer's power supply converts to DC, etc.
Depends if you are an elephant or not.
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'
Do ATM machines (where we enter our PIN numbers) run on DC current?
I did it for Johnny.
Frankly, I'm shocked that there was still a DC power system in use in the US.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Okay, so if the building was running DC, what did the electronics and appliances inside plug into?
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
When I lived in Cambridge, I sometimes visited friends in Boston who had 600VDC elevators using power from the city.
Later elevators still used 600VDC but used a dynamotor; that whine you used to hear when you pressed an elevator button elsewhere was the dynamotor starting, to convert to 600VDC from the 120VAC line current. Eventually, elevator manufacturers stopped using it, but when you hear that whine in a medium-old elevator, you know what is is.
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.
do you have a superior system than capitalism in mind?
people are fond of pointing out democracy's many failures too
but the real overriding realization with democracy and capitalism is that however much you think they suck, and they do suck in many ways, they are still better than any other system we can think of and have tried
so please, criticize capitalism. but unless you can enunciate a superior alternative, your criticism means absolutely nothing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
First of all, let me tell you that Tesla is one of my role models. He is one of the reasons I studied electrical engineering - with a passion. And AC, if you want, is the "winner" for all intents and purposes. The future really validated Tesla's AC system. There have been other folks that helped the adoption of the AC system, like Proteus, another role model for me.
Said all that however, high-voltage DC, a transport technology that starts to make sense nowadays, thanks to high-power solid-state switching elements, has many advantages over AC in terms of losses and cable utilization. You can transport more energy via DC than AC, across the same thickness cable. And you have practically no losses due to parasitic capacitances and inductances. The corona effect is much easier to control, too.
So, if I was forced at gunpoint to make a prediction for the electricity transportation in 150 years from now, I'd say hihg-voltage DC.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
No, it's Con Ed for Consolidated Edison.
Idiot.
A few, but not very many. The main one is that many power uses require DC in the end, so AC has to be rectified and filtered before it's used -- and in doing so, some power is lost. When/where you're using a lot of power in a relatively restricted area, that can make a meaningful difference. Automobiles, for one obvious example, mostly use 12V DC systems (nominally 12V -- really around 14V). Aircraft, for another example, mostly run on 48V DC (IIRC). Some data centers have also gone to having a single big power supply, and then piping DC around to the individual computers. I haven't measured it personally, but they claim this can cut power usage by around 30% in some cases.
Another difference is that getting shocked by DC tends to be slightly less dangerous than the same shock from AC. A 110V DC shock to bare (unbroken) skin is is quite mild feeling, where most people in the US have found (sometime or other) than 110V AC is fairly uncomfortable, though usually not particularly dangerous (i.e. for every person who dies of electrocution, an unknown but certainly large number of others are shocked with no real consequence beyond surprise and discomfort).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Without Tesla there's be nothing to watch the Super Bowl on. I'm pretty sure I could live without the Bengals or the 49ers (some might disagree with me).
Quack, quack.
As related here high-voltage DC transmission is more efficient than high voltage AC transmission for a number of reasons, and it has other benefits as well in allowing potentially unsynchronized AC systems to transfer power. The main problem is efficient voltage conversion, which requires more infrastructure than an AC system with equivalent power transfer capability.
Less is more.
DC power has many advantages over AC. Lower peak voltages for the same power delivered. No reactive losses. You don't need to synchronize generators feeding the system.
AC power has one HUGE advantage and maybe other smaller ones. You can cheaply and easily step the voltage up and down. Stepping A DC voltage up and down is much more complex. DC to DC converters are getting cheaper and better to the point that people are proposing and building high voltage DC power distribution systems.
Actually DC current is more efficient than AC in transmitting power due to there being no reactive component of the power. The main problem with DC is that it cannot be transformed to higher voltages which save a lot of energy losses. There is actually a very long DC transmission line to California that uses DC power. They convert to AC at the end of the line. AC is also a much safer means for transmitting power. It is nearly impossible to extinquish a fault on a DC line because the voltage never reaches a zero point. Protection devices on AC lines rely upon the zero point to extinquish faults.
I know an excellent surgeon who can remove that foot from your mouth.
You never, ever, have to say "correct me if I am wrong" on Slashdot. Someone will gleefully correct you if you are wrong.
He was too busy DISCOVERING how these things worked to be able to "read" them all laid out nicely in some book. Yes, some of his inventions were a bit crazy, but we owe a lot of progress to the man. If it weren't for him, we'd be stuck with Edison's crappy DC systems and the modern electrical systems we have today would not exist. Edison helped ruin the poor man just to sell his crap and he did it via evil fearmongering, doing things like electrocuting an elephant with AC.
Also, the wireless power transfer IS possible. Too dangerous to actually use, but possible. And he left behind plenty of shocked people to prove it (literally...).
What's so funny about all the TLA acronyms?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
Kinda sad to me but it was in the way of progress. Lots and lots of buildings still use the old DC elevators here in New York City. Just yesterday I loaded in to Bayard's in downtown Manhattan into a 4x4 foot elevator that I swear Otis himself must have installed. I love how you have to hold the lever to go up and down and manually align the elevator to the floor. The elevator lights are powered by the DC current as well. At Pratt Institute they used to have those old DC elevators that were powered by an ancient motor generator set that was dated back to the 30's. Hell up until 1999 the MTA still had an old DC substation that had Rotary converters for the subway. ConEd also kept the 25 cycle plants running to feed those substations until the early 90's.
If you want a feel of old DC equipment from the days when if you wanted power you had to make your own, head down to Pratt Institute (located in Brooklyn on Willoughby ave. and Hall st.). They still have 3 steam driven reciprocating piston dynamos built by Ames Iron Works. They work but are only for show. And to top it off they also have a steam turbine dynamo all of which is hooked to a large open marble panel board with knife switches, carbon arc circuit breakers and blade fuses. The panel is still live on the AC side. The Motor generator I mentioned is still there. You can go down to the Pratt engine room and get a tour from Conrad Milster, the Chief engineer who keeps the place running. The large 1930's brick steam boiler still heats the campus and the surrounding neighborhood. The site is an IEEE land mark and walking down there is like going back in time, a real treat.
Seems like a DC grid would be a lot easier to have people feed surplus power into from solar cells.
One could easily apply this to economic systems as well. The only thing I could think of that would be better would be some Deus Ex-type computer-AI directing or at least regulating human activities. Self regulation seems to be one of our biggest difficulties.
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DC is actually used extensively in modern power grids, the main advantage being that there is no need to synchronize the phase from different generating stations or subgrids. For example, the Pacific Intertie transmits three gigawatts of direct current between Los Angeles and eastern Washington state. (Power is sent from LA to Washington in the winter, covering the demand of electric heating in the pacific northwest; and from Washington to LA in the summer to power our air conditioners.)
all you did is enunciate standard real world checks and balances on the ideas
no one expects pure capitalism or pure democracy to ever be able to exist
i'm taking umbrage with radical fundamental departures from the core concepts: communism instead of capitalism, for example, or theocracy versus democracy
not capitalism, tweaked, or democracy, tweaked
the core ideas are always tweaked in one way or another to fit in the real world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
for those who don't get it http://www.roadsideamerica.com/pet/topsy.html
but I didn't realise that anything was still being served anything other then AC out of the wall. I guess in the New york area was some of the original electrical installations. It is a shame that Tesla's lab was destroyed because I would bet that he could have come up with some more stuff that even today would make peoples jaws drop.
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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...and even if you are right...
actually no, that means 80+ years ago that was true but now a high voltage dc transmission system is in fact more efficient, uses less condutors, eliminates need for sychnonization between different systems. HVDC also preferred for undersea long distance transmission because of less capacitive losses.
Yep, for ever expanding definitions of "short distances." High voltage high power DC silicon is getting better and cheaper, so we're already seeing a few long-haul DC lines where the reduced radiative losses and increased carrying ability of the cables makes it more efficient. On the other end, DC converters are becoming ubiquitous inside electronics. Google wants to standardize on only one voltage (12V) coming from your computer's PSU, and anything that wants another voltage just has its own converter. All of this will make power distribution and conversion cheaper, smaller, and more efficient. And some places are already moving to distributing DC to the rack-mount cabinets, at (iirc) 48V, and converting DC-DC from there.
On the flip side, I absolutely hate DC converters when trying to do analog work. If you buy a 16-bit analog to digital signal capture board, they run off a switching power supply -- a power supply that generates lots of high frequency noise. I've worked with ones that simply can't do better than about 12-13 bits -- the last 3-4 are basically worthless from the noise. I worked on a project that had need of a voltage monitor on a large battery-powered system involving a large number of sensors and controls. We installed a nice little digital LED voltmeter. It had a tiny, noisy switching converter in it. Not only did it dirty up all our data, it actually kicked back enough noise that it lit up LEDs that should have been electrically isolated from it (capacitative coupling through a long cable). Needless to say, we ripped it out and installed an analog (as in coil, magnet, needle) voltmeter.
Even good (read: expensive, as in $1/W or more) sine wave inverters are a pain. One we worked with produced wonderfully clean AC output -- but also created significant radiated noise, and dirtied up the DC input! Capacitors and ferrite beads helped, but not enough -- we eventually just moved it far away and ran the AC through a long extension cord.
So... DC/DC converters are wonderful for space, efficiency, and cost, but they can be quite the pain to work with if you actually care about having any sort of analog precision anywhere nearby. That sort of noise is amazingly hard to get rid of, and you often can't get rid of all the switching supplies these days.
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
Score: -1, Turd ?? :^P
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 .
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Some people disagree with the Slashdot system that "funny" mods don't contribute to karma. So some people choose a different positive mod to use when something's funny.
I tend to agree. If I find something worthy of using a mod point for any reason, then I think it should be reflected in that user's karma. Why discriminate against humor?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric
GE's divisions include GE Commercial Finance, GE Industrial, GE Infrastructure (including GE-Aviation and Smiths Aerospace), GE Consumer Finance, GE Healthcare, and NBC Universal, an entertainment company.
"um the fact that we use AC for long distances means that it is in fact better..."
Ah, yes, the old "I've been doing it this way for twenty years" reasoning. I can't think of a more dumb way to prove something than to say the reason is because "we've been doing it this way".
and especially if you say direct current current
In Chicago it's ComEd, for Commonwealth Edison. In New York, it's Con Ed for Consolidated Edison. I think Massachusetts used to have a ComEd, though not sure if that was the same company as in Chicago, it stood for Commonwealth Edison (but these days it's called NSTAR in Mass).
There are some advantages (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission):
- Undersea cables, where high capacitance causes additional AC losses. (e.g. 250 km Baltic Cable between Sweden and Germany[9]).
- Endpoint-to-endpoint long-haul bulk power transmission without intermediate 'taps', for example, in remote areas.
- Increasing the capacity of an existing power grid in situations where additional wires are difficult or expensive to install.
- Allowing power transmission between unsynchronised AC distribution systems.
- Reducing the profile of wiring and pylons for a given power transmission capacity.
- Connecting remote generating plant to the distribution grid, for example Nelson River Bipole.
- Stabilizing a predominantly AC power-grid, without increasing maximum prospective short circuit current.
- Reducing line cost since HVDC transmission requires fewer conductors (i.e. 2 conductors; one is positive another is negative)
Shoot, it's used in the US and UK (in the "Chunnel").Here's a list of notable places that use it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
The sheer amount of High Voltage left the audience Thunderstruck, ready to Shoot to Thrill.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Tesla Man out of Time Which is a excellent book on what was going on then.
DC is still far more of a pain to convert than AC at least if you want high efficiancy and high reliability. While HVDC is certainly more efficiant for very long or undersea transmission lines it would be extremely difficult to build a power distribution grid based on it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Capitalism isn't the problem; thievery is.
If you're point had been that Tesla would be the rich, fat cat and that would be bad, then your moral compass would be off but at least your logic would be sound.
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).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This story explains what the original FA obscures; that some old buildings had elevators and pumps designed to run on DC. Sue me if the link doesn't work. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE7DF173DF93BA25750C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
BSA: "Would you like a free Software Audit"? me: "No, thanks. My software is all Free".
Yeah, but it is a pain to make HVDC or step it down to lower levels for distribution. After all there is no such thing as a DC transformer (which of course wouldn't make sense). People build contraptions like motor-generators and big SCR controlled devices to convert HVDC to AC for distribution. They are not particularly efficient or cheap. Add in the fact that DC has the big grounding issue while 3 phase AC will work just fine with a single ground (and transformers can isolate grounds between sections). And note that most industrial electric motors are 3 phase AC motors. I don't think we are going to see a big future with HVDC distribution systems.
That is one of the most shocking stories ever.
"I only speak the truth"
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Well, like I sort-of said at in my other reply to you (but I'll repeat here in case anyone needs more clarification), there is no such thing as a "DC transformer". A transformer relies on changing (AC) current to do its transforming, it won't work at all with DC. The equivalent devices for DC are Buck (for stepping down) or Boost (for stepping up) converters, and they are much more complicated devices that need a transistor (or similar switch) to rapidly switch current on and off to an inductor to do their converting.
I tend to agree. If I find something worthy of using a mod point for any reason, then I think it should be reflected in that user's karma. Why discriminate against humor? Because most of the "funny" posts aren't very funny at all (i.e. the quality of "funny" moderations is lower than the quality of other moderations)?
Because Slashdot is intended to generate informative and insightful discussion rather than humor?
Deliberately using the wrong category when moderating reduces the readers ability to filter the posts in the way that they want. Moderators are supposed to categorize posts. They are not supposed to care about the karma of the authors.
More and more industrial motors are being controlled by variable-frequency drives, which must internally convert incoming AC power to DC and then back to AC.
While there is no reason to replace a three phase AC motor with a DC motor, You might start powering variable-frequency drives directly from a DC distribution system.
The big issue I have with DC is that its a potential safety hazard. Unlike AC which you'll feel if you touch one of the wires, with DC you don't feel it unless you are grounded or touching both wires of the circuit. The problem is that when you're grounded is the worst time to just realize that you're holding a live wire.
With AC, the biggest concern is that you get it through either the heart or the brain, in most cases if you just touch the live wire in your house, you're most likely just going to get a tingle. Without any lasting consequences, worst case, your heart has a wrong rhythm to it. Except for the heart rhythm, that all applies to DC as well.
And for many years that's how electricians figured out if a wire was hot, they'd touch it, ensuring that they weren't grounded, if they got a jolt it was live, and if not it wasn't. That doesn't work with DC, by the time you realize you've hit a live wire, you're probably already badly burned or worse.
In practical terms, the problem is that you don't get that additional chance to avoid the more serious injury with DC. You accidentally put your hand on a cord with a subtly damaged cord, and you don't know it until its too late, with AC, you do that and you'll feel it.
I hope that the current HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray debate is resolved a bit quicker
What sort of electric devices even come with DC input? Most everything has a AC/DC converter built into it. Does that mean that every electronic device on the premises needs both a DC/AC converter and a AC/DC converter chained together? Wow...
Pain to convert doesn't even begin to describe it. AC can be both stepped up and stepped down with transformers. What are transformers? Basically coils of wire. You can step up and step down voltages HUGE amounts with basically more wire. Stepping up and stepping down DC are two different processes. Stepping down is really inefficient and stepping up requires caps (and caps don't really scale to voltages that high well). Also, it's waaay easier to turn AC into DC than the other way around. You can pretty easily turn AC into DC with a full wave rectifier. I can turn 120VAC at the wall to 12VDC for electronics with about 1 dollar in supplies. Try going the other way for that cheap.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I think the most beautiful piece of old AC to DC conversion technology was the mercury arc rectifier...apparently these devices were still used on some branches of the NYC subway until late in the 20th century. A video of one in operation can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt-a8fxgtno
A center-tapped transformer was connected to two anodes to form a full-wave rectifier(some had more anodes and were used for 3 phase power), and a pool of liquid mercury was used as the cathode material which would form an arc only if the anode was positive. A keep-alive electrode kept the interior full of vaporized mercury to facilitate the discharge. I'd sure like to have my own. Unfortunately an average sized mercury arc rectifier contains around 2 pounds of liquid mercury, so if it ever broke, my neighborhood would have to be decontaminated, my home razed to the ground, and the rubble buried in a concrete encasement.
It's true that AC is much easier to step up and down. However, DC isn't stepped the way you are thinking. There are switching DC-DC converters that can step DC up or down with high efficiencies and don't need any particularly large capacitors, as they use inductors. They are far more complex, expensive, and failure-prone than transformers for high power, and don't work at all beyond a few thousand volts or so, but they exist.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Yes, DC wins when using cables with high capacitance and also between power grids of different frequency. About 5 mins walk from my house is the anchor point for the UK France cross-channel HVDC link. The converter station is at Sellinge, about 10 miles away, and can ship up to 2GW in either direction. However, due to higher capacity on the French side (they have more nuclear), I understand the UK are net consumers of energy.
Although the UK and France both operate at a nominal 50Hz, it is normal for actual grid frequency to vary slightly throughout the day. The way this was explained to me was fairly intuitive: when you load the grid, you load the generators and in turn they load the turbines, which slow down ever so slightly. Because turbines have very large inertia, their response time to step loads is rather long. In order to pump power into the grid, a generator has to have a phase lead to overcome its self inductance. A shift in the phase means a shift in the power being pumped.
France is 1 hour ahead of the UK and have different norms regarding hours of work, cooking etc, all of which mean they have a different load profile. Combining the UK and French grids would only be possible if the link were much greater than 2GW thus able to cope with the difference in power swing. The link was never intended to serve that purpose. Perhaps, like Concord[e] and the Chunnel, it was more a punctuation of the ongoing Entente Cordiale than a technical necessity.
So they're not DC transformers, they're DC-DC converters
(Why yes, as a matter of fact I do know a lot about AC to AC, AC to DC, DC to AC, and DC to DC power conversion - at least, up to the 10's of kilowatts level...)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I didn't say anything about the "power supply", I was talking about the Motherboard, which feeds electricity to that power hungry CPU, taking in the 5VDC at 20 Amps and convert it to 1.33 VDC at 60 amps per unit
Now we have multi-CPU and multi-core CPU; that easily hundreds of amps on a MOBO; it mind boggling but your computer might be consuming as many amps at 1.33 volts as you4 entire house at 225/117VAC.
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You've been modded "Funny" because you've GOT TO BE KIDDING. Fun has always been an integral part of Slashdot. Are you new here?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Don't forget that most AC-DC converters (like 110V->9V) are in fact DC-DC converters. The AC power is rectified immediately and then a switched DC converter is used, which can achieve efficiencies of more than 98%, using very small transformers, coils and capacitors.
I don't see AC transformers for a long time now. Only SMPS.
The only way you are going to convert one DC voltage to a higher DC voltage is:
The CNN article has a much more informative article than the New York Times article cited in the Slashdot article.