andrewducker | (Reply)

From:

It's written in electrical engineer. As a mechanical engineer working in electronics manufacturing, I might be able to translate.

Transmission lines use high voltage. Homes use medium voltage. Solar panels make low voltage. Transformers change the voltage of electricity to be whatever you need.

In traditional transformers, you wrap transmission line wires many times around a piece of iron. You then wrap home wires around the same piece of iron, but with fewer turns. The pulsing electricity in the high transmission line wire creates a pulsing magnetic field in the iron core. The pulsing magnetic field in the iron core makes a pulsing, lower-voltage magnetic field in the home wires. This keeps the high-voltage transmission line electricity from frying your home appliances designed to work at safer, lower voltages.

However, traditional transformers have several problems.

1) Turning electricity into magnetic fields into electricity wastes energy. Some of the magnetism turns into heat in the iron core. Heat-resistant insulators used in transformers are sometimes toxic.

2. In the mains current, the voltage and electron flow are supposed to peak at the same time, at exactly the same rate (50 times per second in the UK). If the wind suddenly changes, a wind turbine might briefly send electricity pulses faster or slower than it should. If you turn on a washing machine, it puts a brief drag on the mains current, messing up electricity for your neighbours. This wastes energy too.

Instead of using coils of wire wrapped around a piece of iron, you can use lots of computer chips. Each computer chip sucks up a little bit of electricity, and then spits it out again a fraction of a second later. A computer tells the chips when to spit it out, instead of the timing of the mains current. So, if you turn on your washing machine and put a brief drag on your local electrical grid, or the wind suddenly speeds up a wind turbine, the chips will still spit out electricity at the same rate of 50 times per second.

So, instead of a box full of coiled wires and iron cores, transformers could be a box full of chips.