07-10-2024, 08:37 AM
(07-09-2024, 01:00 PM)BeyondKnowledge Wrote: NASA has recently published a report on ADC energy transmission. It proposes the transmission of DC electricity on the regular AC electricity grid.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/2023...-Final.pdf
As shown in the paper, it does in fact eliminate the disadvantages of the losses due to energy conversion from DC to AC and then back again. The problem is this advantage is only short lived. It fails to consider that over long distances, AC is much better because it can be easily changed to much higher voltages but the low voltage DC cannot.
To transmit electrical power over a long distance, the voltage is increased to reduce the current the wire needs to handle. The voltage of the wire is dependent only on the insulation of the wire. The current of the wire is dependent on the physical diameter of the wire. This means that if a wire can handle 30 amps, it doesn't care if it is 12 volts DC, 120 volts AC, or 12,000 Volts AC.
Power is the energy that can be used and measured in electricity. It is dependent on the voltage and current available. In the voltages listed above the 120 VAC power is roughly 10 times what is available from the 12 VDC source and 1/100 of what is available from the 12,000 VAC source. The problem is all these three examples will heat the wire they are traveling through to the same amount at the same current. You either have to go up with the voltage or go up with the wire size to get the same power out of the transmission system.
The power available from the low voltage DC is not readily changeable to higher voltage DC without the lossy conversion systems the ADC transmission is proposed to eliminate.
It is still more efficient to make the low voltage DC into AC for transmission because the voltage is easily increased many fold to transmit it long distances. By long distances I am meaning more than a couple of miles. What percentage of homes and businesses are located within a couple of miles of a wind farm or solar farm? Very few.
In the paper from NASA, they have proven in a lab that ADC power distribution works in short distances. They never consulted an electrician about any distances involved in the real world.
In my opinion, this is just another case of the highly educated idiots making something look good on paper that would work better as a paper airplane. It could be useful in small niche applications but not on the general electrical power grid.
I am not saying NASA is dumb but they put electronics engineers on an electrical engineering problem an came up with a mostly useless answer.
Any discussion?
My first thoughts on this:
I thought this was already hashed out between Tesla and Edison?
Nothing has changed with the physics.
