This is part of a series on UK Energy Security: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V. In the previous parts of this series, we documented the physical unraveling of the UK grid: the hollow generation mix, the reliance on weather-dependent interconnectors, and the alarming “frequency thrash” visible in the data.
  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    6·
    3 days ago

    Boooo! This is AI slop.

    See, the header images, the “header + blurb” formatting, the nebulous rambling, and vague definition of what it’s even arguing for. But as far as I can tell, it’s:

    parallel DC infrastructure

    …What?

    We use AC for a reason, namely it’s actually practical to transmit and wire.

    • eleitl@lemmy.zipOPM
      24·
      3 days ago

      The illustration is made by gen AI, not the content, as far as I can tell. DC does just fine with transmission, in fact long-distance lines are all HVDC. 3-phase uses less metal for given power, but this is easily countered by using a higher voltage with DC. The case is being made that building parallel DC infrastructure is eschewed for refitting AC infra, so it will be too late since we will run out of energy and minerals.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        I mean, it has a lot of ‘LLM speak’. Tons of headings, bulleted lists, markdown, em dashes, bringing up philosophical concepts out of the blue then going on about them.

        I am not part of the ‘Fuck AI’ lemmy crowd; I don’t mind LLMs, I use them a ton. But this smells like substack LLM spam to me.

        That aside, yeah, DC is great for long distance transmission. I’m all for that.

        …But low voltage/short distance? That doesn’t make any sense.

        And that’s what confuses me. The article is not even clear (to me) about what it’s advocating for, other than bringing up the cost of machinery for (long distance?) AC transmission.

  • fake_meows@sopuli.xyz
    4·
    3 days ago

    Under “The Wrong Machine”, it says:

    We have the parts for a highly efficient Smart DC Microgrid architecture.

    I actually don’t know for sure, but I believe there is a huge error here.

    I think very little, perhaps almost none of the existing grid / transmission system can be used in a DC power scheme. Practically all the components and design of what we currently have would be wrong. For example, all the power lines we have now use 3 phase wiring, and under DC you’d need 2 wires and they would need to be quadruple the diameter. DC doesnt use step down transformers etc etc. I suspect a lot of these problems and solutions are doable in theory but very very hard at scale.

    This is a bit of a hand-wavey dodge of the complications. There are probably significant constraints on what a big system overhaul could look like.

    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence