Time for a new look at direct current?

opinion@dailylobo.com

I’m here today to discuss one of the classic debates of our time: that of AC/DC.

Now, you can put away your Angus Young signature edition Gibson guitar and your turntable. I’m talking about alternating current versus direct current, the two ways of transmitting electricity from a power plant to your home or business.

For over a century the electricity transmission method of choice in the U.S. has been alternating current. This standard, popularized by George Westinghouse in the 1890s, involves sending electricity over long distances from a power plant to consumers by converting various types of higher-voltage direct current into a single lower-voltage alternating current for easier transmission. Upon reaching its destination, the low-voltage current is converted back into the several different types of higher voltages through the use of transformers.

However, such transmission wasn’t perfect. Some electricity is lost while stepping down the voltage from resistance while the current travels through the line, and also while stepping the voltage back up.

In contrast, direct current — popularized by light bulb inventor Thomas Edison — could be sent exactly where it needed to go without any electricity loss or need for transformers over short distances, though its efficiency decreased over longer distances.

Because of the lack of voltage loss in transmission, it was also much better than alternating current at powering the electrical appliances of the day.

As you can see, neither standard was perfect, yet alternating current won out. Why?

A main reason that alternating current won out over direct current was the nature of power plants in the late nineteenth century.

Large, soot-spewing coal plants produced the electricity transmitted through the power lines. Naturally, it wasn’t in anyone’s best interests to live or work near one if they could help it.

Also, direct current required different types of lines for different voltage types, unlike alternating current’s one-line-fits-all approach, since it wasn’t easily convertible to different intensities. This led to city streets being cluttered by several types of power lines, which became hazardous in some cases. A notable instance of this was the multiple deaths during the Great Blizzard of 1888 in New York City that were attributed to iced-up, fallen direct-current power lines.

Direct current simply wasn’t practical given those infrastructure-based caveats. Under that system, power plants would crowd urban areas in order to satisfy local electricity needs, and those areas would in turn require a clutter of power lines to satisfy differing voltage needs.

That, of course, didn’t stop Edison, Westinghouse and their European affiliates from battling it out in a brutal “War of the Currents,” which involved fear-mongering, deception and the botched electrocution of a death-row inmate. But I digress.

Direct current has since been used in a number of specialized applications, most notably in the telecommunications industry.

However, with the arrival of practical off-the-grid green electricity options, the widespread use of direct current could help bring thousands of homes off main electricity lines and reduce dependence on fossil fuel power.

Homes and businesses can now generate their own electricity on location with solar panel arrays and wind turbines. Such applications are natural avenues for direct-current transmission, since the electricity would be traveling only a few feet from source to usage, making alternating current unnecessary.

What immediate benefits would we see from a wide application of direct current? Well, we could all say goodbye to the brick-like transformers that all modern electronics use to convert alternating current from the socket into the direct current that devices such as laptops, video game consoles and phones require for their high power intensity needs.

There are several other bonuses. That brick creates a lot of waste heat due to the aforementioned electricity cost to transform alternating current into direct current. Besides preventing power brick fires, skipping that stage means that consumers could harness much more of their locally generated electricity.

The use of direct current would also create some benefits in the business world, especially in the areas of supercomputing and data storage. The use of direct current has been proven to increase energy efficiency use in high-tech, power-intensive applications by 15 percent, according to one study by the National University of Singapore’s Energy Studies Institute. Part of this is due to the lack of alternating-to-direct-current transformers, which cuts down on cooling costs needed to combat waste heat.

Sure, 15 percent may not sound like much, but it can really add up when you’re talking about a facility with hundreds, if not thousands, of computers running all day, every day. Also, taking such electricity-guzzling facilities off the grid would do a lot to reduce fossil fuel-generated electricity consumption overall.

Basically, increasing the use of direct current, paired with local electricity generation, makes long-term sense across several sectors. Residential consumers and business owners will be happy because their homes and businesses can enjoy higher energy efficiencies overall, and environmental advocates will be happy because fewer homes will be using fossil fuel-generated electricity to power their daily needs. And, of course, everyone will be happy that they won’t have to worry about forgetting their power bricks at home or work anymore.

So rest easy, Mr. Edison. Westinghouse may end up getting his comeuppance after all.