Wacky Weekend: NERC to relax power grid frequency strictures

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Mon Jun 27 19:30:28 UTC 2011


On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:59 PM, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> 
> On Jun 25, 2011, at 4:47 PM, Andrew D Kirch wrote:
> 
>> On 6/25/2011 7:43 PM, Paul Graydon wrote:
>>> Take a guess what the datacenter our equipment is currently hosted in uses.  Yet another reason to be glad of a datacenter move that's coming up.
>>> 
>> Why can't we just all use DC and be happy?
> 
> motors don't produce DC?
> 
They can.

> tesla vs edison?
> 

Tesla was right, Edison was a better marketing person.

AC works better for long-distance transmission. AC could have been made much safer had we chosen a 2Khz+ frequency rather than a 60Hz
frequency.

> human safe dc voltage requires comically large conductors for the sorts of loads we energize?
> 

So does human safe AC voltage. The key difference is that AC voltage is much easier to change efficiently (transformers) whereas DC-DC
voltage transitions require either an inverter (DC->AC->DC) inefficient and usually mechanical, a motor/generator set (inefficient and mechanical),
or a DC-DC converter circuit which tends to be horribly inefficient and expensive, especially at high amperage.

Owen





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