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.
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.
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.