Duffman -
Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
Not an electrical engineer are you?
HVDC is very efficient. I know Hydro Quebec uses it and it is used extesively by Manitoba Hydro where the bulk of the provinces power is generated in the north and used or sold to the south.
http://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/ar/...ilitiesMap.pdf
Converter Stations
As I understand it, there is no inductive resistance with DC and there is a phenominon in AC where the current clings to the perimeter of the conductor, so the conductance of the core is wasted. |
I thought the big reason DC lost was because of transmission line losses :
War of Currents - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Quote:
Transmission loss
The advantage of AC for distributing power over a distance is due to the ease of changing voltages with a transformer. Power is the product current × voltage (P = IV). For a given amount of power, a low voltage requires a higher current and a higher voltage requires a lower current. Since metal conducting wires have a certain resistance, some power will be wasted as heat in the wires. This power loss is given by P = I˛R. Thus, if the overall transmitted power is the same, and given the constraints of practical conductor sizes, low-voltage, high-current transmissions will suffer a much greater power loss than high-voltage, low-current ones. This holds whether DC or AC is used.
Transforming DC power from one voltage to another was difficult and expensive due to the need for a large spinning rotary converter or motor-generator set, whereas with AC the voltage changes can be done with simple and efficient transformer coils that have no moving parts and require no maintenance. This was the key to the success of the AC system. Modern transmission grids regularly use AC voltages up to 765,000 volts. [10]
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If you generate the electricity locally, i.e. your roof, then DC is fine. The problem, of course, is we live in an AC world, so you need the DC-to-AC inverter to "work with" the legacy infrastructure.
CarloSW2