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Every year divisible by four with remainder one, adventurous geeks hold an outdoor festival in the Netherlands. This year, about 6000 people are expected to attend a long weekend.
Among them will be a group of experimenters who will be testing a 42 volt direct current grid. Specifically, a cluster of tents within the festival will receive approximately 50 × 4 Amperé supplies and 8 × 16 Amperé supplies. Hopefully, this will be run by solar power but there will also be a backup generator. Switching a high load of direct current is more complicated than alternating current and losses around the example MOSFET circuit are expected to be less than 0.2W per junction. Although people are expected to bring together previously untested circuitry, it is hoped that pieces of the project will inspire multiple direct current grids in more permanent locations.
Hopefully, electrocution or voltage drop doesn't halt electrical distribution at the festival.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday July 02 2017, @09:41AM
With AC, the advantage is the transformers and price to pay is the large diameter conductors due to skin effect [wikipedia.org]. DC doesn't show skin effect, but it's a pain to raise the voltage.
In any case, AC or DC is costly at low voltages - to draw enough power, one needs to crank up the current. And ohmic losses go up with the square of the current, which mean thicker wires for lower resistivity. Last time I checked. copper is not that cheap and the next contender, aluminium, is worse in respect with:
a. bend-fatigue - which matters a lot when connecting the ends. Also, the resistivity of bent regions tend to be higher
b. soldering - at least not as easy as copper (brazing can work)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford