| Abstract |
From the very earliest days of electrical power transmission, in the 1880s, the advantages of DC (aspromoted by Thomas Edison) were already clear but despite this, the "Battle of the Currents" was won by Westinghouse and Tesla's AC solution, mainly because two 19th century inventions, the transformer and the circuit-breaker, were much easier to realise using AC than DC. Nevertheless, the use of DC in certain, niche point-to-point transmission applications never completely went away, with the first electromechanical conversion systems installed in the 1890s and electronic AC/DC conversion starting to appear in the 1930s. Today, HVDC is widely used for point-to-point power transmission applications where very high powers need to be transmitted for long distances, and the first commercial applications of meshed HVDC grids and medium-voltage DC (MVDC) for reinforcement of distribution grids, are starting to appear. With the drive for ever-increasing levels of renewable energy generation, along with drastic changes in consumption patterns as transportation and domestic heating are electrified, much greater use of DC for both transmission and distribution are inevitable. This talk will present a short historical perspective of how the industry got to its present position, a description of the present state of the art and predictions of how the grid will evolve in the coming decades. |
