Move over AC. High Voltage Direct Current is the wave of the future, in transporting large amounts of electricity, long distances, cheaply.

Tesla vs. Tesla: The Juice In Your Car Will Increasingly Come Through HVDC, Edison's Preferred Current

So that's HVDC and why the electricity you use will increasingly come through HVDC transmission. It gets more power delivered over longer distances, it's increasingly economically viable, it works better underground, it works better underwater, it can dodge NIMBYs and it reduces the challenge of variable renewable generation.

 Me ,There has been a lot of news about HVDC electrical wires. Here is an article that explains why they are better than AC electrical wires. I have taken a few snippets out but it is an interesting article to read in full."

From article, (This is partially a Thomas Edison vs Nikola Tesla story. Edison was committed to direct current, but Tesla liked alternating current. Alternating current was easier to step up and down and DC couldn’t be transformed reliably, so it became the transmission and distribution standard for electricity. Edison did some ugly things to try to win the fight, but lost. Then he won economically anyway.

Until 1954, there was no real alternative. That’s the year that the problem of reliably changing the voltage of direct current up and down was cracked. ABB, a major player in this space, built a submerged 96 kilometer HVDC transmission line between the Swedish mainland and an island.

HVDC lines always deliver more of the power put into them regardless of the distance that the electricity travels. But the big reason this is important is that it’s cheaper at longer distances and at very short distances underwater and underground.

“Over a certain distance, the so called ‘break-even distance’ (approx. 600 – 800 km) [373 - 497 miles] , the HVDC alternative will always provide the lowest cost.

“The break-even distance is much smaller for subsea cables (typically about 50 km) [31 miles] than for an overhead line transmission.”

alternating current, means huge towers and lines marching across long distances. And that means a lot of people protesting because they hate change, they don’t want their views spoiled, they think that their land is somehow special and shouldn’t have a tower on it, or because they have an irrational fear of the electromagnetic spectrum.

HVDC holds the promise of being able to dodge this problem in a lot of places. Where it’s impossible to overcome local outrage at the thought of big metal towers, it is possible to bury the line for a few miles. It’s more expensive, but it’s a way to dodge a lot of the problems.

And the last thing you can do with HVDC that’s interesting is that you can string it on existing AC tower paths, effectively making your existing, accepted transmission route deliver a lot more electricity to highly populated areas. That typically avoids NIMBY complaints too.)

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