4 ms·

> I'm convinced that is the way of the future. What effect would "turning the hose on an d off" have on efficiency?

• devb 3y ago
  Did you just invent alternating current?
• femto 3y ago
  They are the sorts of questions that make it such an interesting problem. Maybe it's not as simple as turning it on and off? Maybe there is something to be drawn from the world of adiabatic logic? Maybe the answer is some sort of resonant system or waveform which "sloshes" energy from place to place instead of a hard on/off (yeah, related to AC). Maybe there is a system to smartly manage the boundaries between packets, to avoid unnecessary switching? I don't think we have the answers (yet), but I think there will be benefits if we can find the answers. For example, we could truly leave the current generator/consumer model behind: just like the web enabled everyone to become a publisher, everyone could become a generator in their own right. No doubt we will then be talking about the Goolalisation of the energy network, where a theoretically distributed system becomes dominated by a small number of monopolies and people talk about how it's not worth running your own generator since Powersoft refuses to accept energy packets from smaller generators.
  • ilyt 3y ago
    > Maybe the answer is some sort of resonant system or waveform which "sloshes" energy from place to place instead of a hard on/off (yeah, related to AC). Most definitely not. You want to limit is as much as possible, as the reactive power (the "bounce back") still goes thru the resistance of the wire, generating losses. In fact big consumers often get charged when their power factor (the amount of energy "received" vs bounced back) is below a certain value.
• actionfromafar 3y ago
  Isn’t that AC current? So, pretty great, probably. I like the idea.