WHOA great story! DC power grid? For real? Apparently China has been working on it for years. This is nuts. I asked my engineering friends over at FB for any critiques, because this could save the planet. No joke.
Simple version: most houses and electrical grids are wired for AC (alternating current) electricity. The majority of consumer electronics are designed to use AC power. However, solar and other forms of energy are DC (direct current). One of the things about installed PV solar systems in your home is that you usually have to get a converter (which converts your DC power to AC power), which is inefficient and causes you to lose some of that electricity you generated with your panels.
For years the talk has been that solar is wasteful and inefficient, because for over a hundred years we’ve set up entire national electrical grids based on AC. But this newer technology changes that. Apparently China has been on top of this, and has been installing ultra high voltage direct current (UHVDC) projects, to move energy all around their country.
The author points out at the end of the story that this isn’t truly a technological problem - we apparently have most of the technology we need for this - the problem once again is the political will to implement such projects.
For all the Tesla fans out there, DC was his baby.
But holy shit this could change everything.
This is very cool. I’ve collected some links to HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current) Projects below
Growing DC Power - US (discussion)
HVDC has a very important role to play in transmission networks and is an economical viable option at ultra-high voltages (800 kV) in several regions in the USA. These DC links need to operate as hybrid HVAC and HVDC networks for integrating and controlling remote renewable resources, and they are well established to interconnect asynchronous areas. At the relative low capacity factors of wind (40%) and solar PV (20%) power production, HVAC networks are not utilized at an economic level for integrating these intermittent resources to the load centers, especially over long distances
North-East Agra project is planned for commissioning in 2016. It will be rated 8000 MW, 800 kV using four bipolar lines, and will transmit power from two converter stations in the east to a converter at Agra, a distance of 1728 km.
The HVDC Sileru–Barsoor is a high voltage direct current transmission system between Sileru, India and Barsoor, India, which went in service in 1989 as the first HVDC line in India.The HVDC Sileru Barsoor couples two asynchronously operated parts of Indian electricity mains over a 196 kilometers long overhead line, which was originally a double-circuit 220 kV AC line from which three conductors are parallelized.
There is a great deal of technical factors that influence the type of HVDC required for site to site wikipedia is very detailed on this subject.
And lastly for those that enjoy Tesla nerdiness - I love this section on wikipedia about the last holdouts in the ‘War of Currents’.
War of Currents
This was the building in which AC pioneer Nikola Tesla spent his last years, and where he died in 1943. In January 1998, Consolidated Edison started to eliminate DC service. At that time there were 4,600 DC customers. By 2006, there were only 60 customers using DC service, and on November 14, 2007, the last direct-current distribution by Con Edison was shut down.