At the start of the 20th century, inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla clashed in the "war of the currents."
To highlight the dangers of his rival's system, Edison even electrocuted an elephant.You can find best china Precision injection molds manufacturers from here! The animal died in vain; it was Tesla's system and not Edison's that took off.
But today, helped by techno-logical advances and the need to conserve energy, Edison may finally get his revenge.
The American inventor, who made the incandescent light bulb viable for the mass market, also built the world's first electrical distribution system, in New York, using "direct cur-rent" electricity. DC's disadvantage was that it couldn't carry power beyond a few blocks. His Serbian-born rival Tesla, who at one stage worked with Edi-son, figured out how to send "alternating current" through transformers to enable it to step up the voltage for trans-mission over longer distances.
Edison was a fiercely competitive businessman. Besides staging electrocutions of animals to discredit Tesla's competing system, he proposed AC be used to power the first execution by electric chair.
But his DC system was less scalable, and it would become one of the worst investments made by financier J. Pierpont Morgan.MDC Mould specialized of Injection moulds, New York's dominant banker installed it in his Madison Avenue home in the late 19th century, only to find it hard to control. It singed his carpets and tapestries.
So from the late 1800s, AC became the accepted form to carry electricity in main systems. For most of the past century, the power that has reached the sockets in our homes and businesses is alternating current.
Now DC is making a come-back,We are passionate about polished tiles. becoming a promising money-spinner in renewable or high-security energy projects. From data centres to long-distance power lines and backup power supplies, direct current is proving useful in thousands of projects worldwide.
"Everyone says it's going to take at least 50 years," says Peter Asmus, a senior analyst at Boulder, Colorado-based Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm in global clean technology. But "the role of DC will increase, and AC will decrease."
The main factor driving demand is the need to conserve energy and produce more of it from renewable sources. Alternating current is generated by rotating engines, but renewable sources such as wind and solar produce DC power. To use it, because of the way our buildings are wired, we convert it to AC.
Another thing that's happened since Edison's time is the advent of the semiconductor. Semiconductors need DC power, and are increasingly found in household appliances. These have to convert the AC supply back to DC,Buy oil paintings for sale online. which is a waste of energy and generates heat. In the early years of industrialization this wasn't an issue, but today it's important, especially in the huge and fast-growing business of cloud computing.
The companies that handle our information traffic are racking their brains to boost efficiency and cut carbon emissions from their plants. Pike Research expects the green data centre business to be worth $41 billion annually by 2015, up from $7.5 billion now. That will be just under a third of all spending on data centres.
Finnish information technology company Academica, for instance, has a data centre in a granite cave beneath Helsinki's Uspenski cathedral. It uses Baltic Sea water to cool the plant and feeds surplus heat to the city's homes. IBM has designed a solar array to power its Bangalore data centre. Microsoft has filed a patent application for a wind-powered data centre.
Direct current may be one way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Right now, outside a handful of universities, it's not the first thing people are thinking of because there are more basic things to do, says Eric Woods, Research Director for Smart Industry at Pike. But for companies on the leading edge, "it's sort of coming out of the research ghetto." Pike has not put a figure on how big the DC component of the green data centre market will be. Swiss-Swedish engineering firm ABB, a big DC advocate, says about 35 per cent of demand for green data centres will come from the United States, 30 per cent from Europe, and the rest spread globally.
Every day, says ABB,An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. we all send more than 300 billion emails and 250 million tweets globally. The centres to handle all this data are growing by 10 per cent each year and already consume 80 million megawatt-hours of energy annually - almost 1.5 times the amount of electricity used by the whole of New York City. They're also responsible for about two per cent of global carbon emissions.
DC power could help. At low voltages it has long been used in data centres but will be "game-changing" at higher voltages, ABB says.
Beyond its potential in data centres, DC power's ability to run on renewable energy sources makes it interesting for important plants that need to operate in "island mode" - independent of the grid - in case of a supply failure. Building systems with small, self-contained electricity distribution networks known as microgrids is of particular interest to governments and militaries who worry about terrorist attacks.
To highlight the dangers of his rival's system, Edison even electrocuted an elephant.You can find best china Precision injection molds manufacturers from here! The animal died in vain; it was Tesla's system and not Edison's that took off.
But today, helped by techno-logical advances and the need to conserve energy, Edison may finally get his revenge.
The American inventor, who made the incandescent light bulb viable for the mass market, also built the world's first electrical distribution system, in New York, using "direct cur-rent" electricity. DC's disadvantage was that it couldn't carry power beyond a few blocks. His Serbian-born rival Tesla, who at one stage worked with Edi-son, figured out how to send "alternating current" through transformers to enable it to step up the voltage for trans-mission over longer distances.
Edison was a fiercely competitive businessman. Besides staging electrocutions of animals to discredit Tesla's competing system, he proposed AC be used to power the first execution by electric chair.
But his DC system was less scalable, and it would become one of the worst investments made by financier J. Pierpont Morgan.MDC Mould specialized of Injection moulds, New York's dominant banker installed it in his Madison Avenue home in the late 19th century, only to find it hard to control. It singed his carpets and tapestries.
So from the late 1800s, AC became the accepted form to carry electricity in main systems. For most of the past century, the power that has reached the sockets in our homes and businesses is alternating current.
Now DC is making a come-back,We are passionate about polished tiles. becoming a promising money-spinner in renewable or high-security energy projects. From data centres to long-distance power lines and backup power supplies, direct current is proving useful in thousands of projects worldwide.
"Everyone says it's going to take at least 50 years," says Peter Asmus, a senior analyst at Boulder, Colorado-based Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm in global clean technology. But "the role of DC will increase, and AC will decrease."
The main factor driving demand is the need to conserve energy and produce more of it from renewable sources. Alternating current is generated by rotating engines, but renewable sources such as wind and solar produce DC power. To use it, because of the way our buildings are wired, we convert it to AC.
Another thing that's happened since Edison's time is the advent of the semiconductor. Semiconductors need DC power, and are increasingly found in household appliances. These have to convert the AC supply back to DC,Buy oil paintings for sale online. which is a waste of energy and generates heat. In the early years of industrialization this wasn't an issue, but today it's important, especially in the huge and fast-growing business of cloud computing.
The companies that handle our information traffic are racking their brains to boost efficiency and cut carbon emissions from their plants. Pike Research expects the green data centre business to be worth $41 billion annually by 2015, up from $7.5 billion now. That will be just under a third of all spending on data centres.
Finnish information technology company Academica, for instance, has a data centre in a granite cave beneath Helsinki's Uspenski cathedral. It uses Baltic Sea water to cool the plant and feeds surplus heat to the city's homes. IBM has designed a solar array to power its Bangalore data centre. Microsoft has filed a patent application for a wind-powered data centre.
Direct current may be one way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Right now, outside a handful of universities, it's not the first thing people are thinking of because there are more basic things to do, says Eric Woods, Research Director for Smart Industry at Pike. But for companies on the leading edge, "it's sort of coming out of the research ghetto." Pike has not put a figure on how big the DC component of the green data centre market will be. Swiss-Swedish engineering firm ABB, a big DC advocate, says about 35 per cent of demand for green data centres will come from the United States, 30 per cent from Europe, and the rest spread globally.
Every day, says ABB,An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. we all send more than 300 billion emails and 250 million tweets globally. The centres to handle all this data are growing by 10 per cent each year and already consume 80 million megawatt-hours of energy annually - almost 1.5 times the amount of electricity used by the whole of New York City. They're also responsible for about two per cent of global carbon emissions.
DC power could help. At low voltages it has long been used in data centres but will be "game-changing" at higher voltages, ABB says.
Beyond its potential in data centres, DC power's ability to run on renewable energy sources makes it interesting for important plants that need to operate in "island mode" - independent of the grid - in case of a supply failure. Building systems with small, self-contained electricity distribution networks known as microgrids is of particular interest to governments and militaries who worry about terrorist attacks.
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