05-DC comes home.doc

DC, Come Home By Brian T. Patterson Most discussions about ac versus dc electricty include a retelling of the famous technical and commercial battle between Edison and Westinghouse/Tesla. It’s a story about everything from electrocuting elephants at state fairs to the ambitious work of electrifying both urban and rural America. It’s the tale of one of man’s greatest engineering feats. It tells of a centralized power generation system based on the dominant use of incandescent light bulbs and ac constant-speed motors. In the end though, it is a retelling of history–and unfortunately, it is a history that doesn’t project well into the future. This article is about making history in the power world. It’s about the rebirth of the earliest form of electrical power–dc power–and its potential to change the world once again. It is being reborn with the help of modern solid-state power electronics technology. The story is also about the work of EMerge Alliance (EA), a nonprofit open industry association that is creating and promoting new standards based on the contemporary use of dc technology for power generation, storage, distribution, and use. This quickly growing alliance–it already includes more than 100 organizations from industry, government, and academia–was conceived by and is populated with thought leaders motivated by the need for a phase change in the way we think about electric power. EA was born into a world searching for ways to move away from its almost exclusive dependence on synchronous fossil-fueled centralized power generation and ac macro grid transmission and distribution toward a system that can adaptively and efficiently include highly distributed, native dc electrical power generation and storage and deliver it an evolved predominance of natively dc loads. In the end, it’s about a new energy network, or “enernet.” The future of civilized progress is increasingly underwritten by our use of electrons to do work. So their sourcing, distribution, and eff