Solar panel power up!

I get jealous everytime you post pics of her...
 
I tend to recall hearing that dc is more efficient over distances, as in power transmission lines, as it does not degrade over distances like ac. The problem however still remains that it needs to be converted to ac before being consumed.
 
It's not so much DC or AC but rather the current. The power loss along a transmission line is current squared times electrical resistance. Power transmitted is voltage times current so to minimize loss, increase the voltage and decrease the current.

That's why transmission lines have tens or hundreds of kilo volts. China has started installing million volt transmission lines.

To change the voltage, it's easier and more efficient to use AC and transformers than DC

@Uncle, you're going to need a lot of copper to power your oven at 12 volts DC.
 
Cronk said:
It's not so much DC or AC but rather the current. The power loss along a transmission line is current squared times electrical resistance. Power transmitted is voltage times current so to minimize loss, increase the voltage and decrease the current.

That's why transmission lines have tens or hundreds of kilo volts. China has started installing million volt transmission lines.

To change the voltage, it's easier and more efficient to use AC and transformers than DC

@Uncle, you're going to need a lot of copper to power your oven at 12 volts DC.
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Sorry Cronk, I ran that through Google Translate and it still didn't help me. :unsure:
 
One watt is the power being generated by one volt with one amp. The formula is P (power) = V (voltage) * I (amps)

A circuit along which the current is flowing has certain resistance (ohms). The power loss when power is transmitted can be calculated by
I squared * R (resistance)

By halving the current, the power loss is reduced to 25%. However to get the same power through the circuit, if the current is halved the voltage needs to be doubled (formula first line).

A high power transmission line of say 100 Mw, could be configured 10 kV with 10 kAmps but the power loss would be reduced to one in a 100,000 by having 100 amps at 100 Mvolt

It's a lot easy to increase AC to higher voltages using transformer and then to decrease to lower voltages at the consumer end. It could be done with DC but it is more expensive and less efficient ie increased losses.

Hope that is more enlightening.
 
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