Quote:
Originally Posted by gary
There was the famous debate between Edison and Tesla
on DC versus AC. Rotating machinery and passive transformers made
the obvious choice based on the technology available at the time.
Based on the technology available today, the debate would probably be
even harder fought if we were starting afresh.
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Yes, back then AC at the rotational speed of generators was the only way of efficiently distributing electrical energy. That is because it could be transformed up and down to higher or lower voltages with relatively low loss, hence overland transmission lines could be operated at much higher voltages than what households were supplied, commensurate with much lower currents (and transmission losses) than otherwise.
Modern alternative power generation methods necessarily decouple themselves from AC sync restraints. Solar power plants are free to generate DC, as wind farms will be free to generate AC at the frequency the wind dictates. Thanks to modern power electronics they can both feed into the grid at the required specs and, as the article shows, even to the benefit of the grid.
With the new speculative very high voltage DC distribution grids Edison may eventually triumph over Tesla, as much as it pains me to say that
From the control theory point of view I don't think there are many open questions in principle, however the economics of distributed power generation pose interesting information processing and legal questions, to which cryptographic distributed ledgers could provide an answer.