For anyone who doubts the long term influence of commercial competition consider that if the Thomas Edison backed General Electric Company proposal to light up the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with DC current had beaten out Westinghouse’s, Nikola Tesla alternating current proposal, the United States might well be a more efficient DC nation today. For a fascinating history on the fateful decision to power the Chicago World’s Fair, read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson.
Today, power generation design in the United States is tied and constrained by the precedent set by the cost conscious commissioners lighting the Emerald City. Converting DC to something usable to the average household or integrating DC with the grid requires inversion to the 60HZ AC system first designed by Tesla before the turn of the 20th century. This is done all the time and there are many ways to achieve it but most all are self limiting beyond even the limits of the AC grid. So if a clean system can be developed to store electrons before they are inverted and fed to the system, ultimately and with the inevitable advent of smart grid technology, a transition period might be developed to wean renewable energy away from grid constraints.
Rogue River Wind views clean storage and the control circuitry required to make it work as part of a total energy package. The control circuitry can be used with a saturable reactor inductive design generator and offset related cogging issues or with a non inductive rotor stator design which has no cogging issues. The successful development of wide scale distributed energy smart/micro-grid systems will benefit from capacitive clean storage and will hopefully revamp the way power delivery is thought of in the future.
