Journal Journal: I'm sick of AC power! 3
The second reason why AC is preferred is because that's how almost all electricity is generated. Some piece of rotating machinery (gas turbine, steam turbine driven by coal or nuclear or gas, windmill, etc) spins a generator, which produces AC. The only exception I can think of is photovoltaics, which at this point are still too expensive from a consumer's point of view.
Then why would you want DC? For bulk transmission of large amounts of power, DC is better for several reasons: You can put more DC current through the same wire, since DC uses the entire cross-section of the wire instead of only the surface, as AC does. With DC, you also do away with (or can ignore) capacitance between phases and capacitance between conductor and environment. It's also easier to control power flow with DC.
So AC is better on the generation side, DC is better on the transmission side, and AC is better for distribution. What a fun world we live in.
So why do I want DC? Simple: I recently took a quick survey of my house, and discovered something startling: Practically nothing in my house needs AC power. Seriously, almost everything in my house either already converts AC to DC, or could be fairly easily redesigned to use DC.
Now, this may seem kind of obvious. Computers naturally run off DC, as does everything associated with them--I lump printers, scanners, and network gear of all sorts in that group. Incandescent lights can run off DC just fine--they're fairly close to a simple resistive element in any case. Our stereo and VCR/DVD player run off DC (thanks to internal conversion), and almost everything inside the TV gets power after it's been converted to some sort of DC. Our fridge runs on AC, but fridges that run off DC exist--it's just a matter of using DC motors for the compressor and blowers instead of AC motors. Even fluorescent lighting, including CFLs, can easily work with DC; the electronics in the ballast that control current flow for AC can easily be designed to do the same for DC.
There's one more reason that's a bit of my personal fetish: power backup. That heavy brick of a UPS you have in the corner? It's converting AC power to DC in order to charge your batteries. When the power goes out, that same UPS then converts that DC back into AC to feed into your computer. Once it's in the computer, it gets converted once again to DC before it powers all the fun stuff inside. That's a fair amount of loss incurred through those three conversions, even if it's only when the power's out and only as long as the battery lasts. With a DC-powered house, however, the outside DC would run directly to a power conditioner in the PC, with very little loss along the way. Your UPS would enjoy much higher efficiencies. And if you had a big enough battery bank, your own house could serve to reduce the effect of startup current when your teenage daughter turns on the hairdryer or when someone turns on the vacuum cleaner.
But what about the costs of the inefficiency of converting AC to DC at the supplier's end? They don't matter. You see, you're paying $.xx/kWh for your electricity, and losing some of that energy through AC-to-DC conversion. In effect, you're paying more for each kWh of electricity that's actually doing something beneficial. Pushing the AC-to-DC conversion upstream towards the energy producers would increase the "sticker price" of the power you get, but you would end up using less of it, balancing out the cost.