5 ms·
This was brought up in a Fresh Air interview I listened to recently. Nowadays most of our devices use DC, and our grid is also on the verge of becoming much les
by zymhan 10y ago
This was brought up in a Fresh Air interview I listened to recently. Nowadays most of our devices use DC, and our grid is also on the verge of becoming much less centralized.
You could reap some easy efficiency gains by omitting the DC-AC-DC conversion of a solar panel powering a house that charges a laptop.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoDC sucks for transmission over more than a few meters. I'm thinking, even in a house, you still want AC in the walls.
- nraynaud 10y agocan you explain a bit more?
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoHeat in wire is ~ current squared times resistance. If you use low-voltage DC, and you're supplying any significant power, then the current is high and the losses to wire heating are high. Inefficient and dangerous (fires). AC at high voltage can be low current, you can use much smaller wires for a given power.
- hx87 10y agoDC doesn't have to be low voltage though. Before high power solid state electronics became reliable, it was difficult to do DC-DC voltage conversion without going through AC first, but that isn't true today. Plenty of power is delivered across different grids using HVDC.
- samatman 10y agoThis is true of low-voltage DC (V), but very much untrue of high-voltage (MV). Irrelevant to the use case under discussion, of course, but someone reading this thread might find HVDC long-range power transmission interesting.