It seems to me that the future holds more distribution, more decentralization, of electrical power, with more and more people having photovoltaic (solar) panels or wind generators. The primary mode of these is direct current (DC), and most systems incorporate inverters of various power (wattage) capacities, to energize the various appliances and utilities which require alternating current (AC). All of these devices that have semiconductor circuitry then rectify the AC back into DC.
Since it is more efficient for long-distance transmission to use AC, and centralized power generation has efficiencies of scale, the trend was to move from local DC generation, to having distributed AC, during the early phase of industrialization, so appliances were designed to use AC, when they could have been designed to use DC. I suppose that consumer demand was for ease of incorporation into the distributed AC system, rather than them needing to have rectifier systems requiring management.
Now, with a resurgence of distributed DC generation, having wiring appropriate to interfaces for various DC voltages shall become more affordable and manageable, and it’ll make less sense to bear with the losses due to less than perfect efficiency in DC to AC inversion, and AC to DC rectification. Thus, it’ll be more efficient, in use of locally generated electricity, for most devices to directly use the DC.
Hence, there shall be more demand for DC-only appliances, and producers should anticipate this demand, by producing more.
Views: 466
