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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: 2) by VLM on Sunday July 02 2017, @11:15PM
Its interesting that we're days/weeks away from ham radio field day which has a great pile of PR gimmick, mostly exists to camp drink beer and play with radios, and without any fanfare the hams set up greta thundering weird 12 volt DC networks at their camp.
Tons of standardized gear and techniques and frankly its boring and the DC bus is not the most exciting part of ham radio field day.
Part of what killed the great conversion to 42V car batteries a decade or two ago is cheap power supply technology. My wife's prius has multiple DC bus, the legacy 12V for the radio and not a heck of a lot else, some weird voltage for the electric air conditioner (not belt driven) and the main DC bank. Its entirely possible there will never, ever, be a standard DC bus for cars beyond maybe 12V at the radio port and 5V for USB charging because switching power supplies are just too cheap. Your alternator runs at highest efficiency at 90V, well let it. Your LED headlights run best at 3.2 volts? Cool dude, run then at 3.2 volts. Your engine computer CPU runs as 0.9V cmos or WTF? Cool, run at that.