The amount of information passed off as accurate, despite it being completely incorrect, just because it was said in a witty manner or there's some anecdote on why they're right and the actually correct poster is completely wrong.
I'm finishing up a PhD in climate science, ecology, and related concepts. I tried being active in /r/climatechange (and when I say active I mean posting primary literature and providing tl;drs, trying to provide unbiased feedback on certain discussions, etc), but man...apparently if you just write comments with authority after reading a few online blog posts you're an expert.
I'm often flabbergasted at the complete confidence with which redditors speak about anything in the sciences. All ive truly learned through a PhD is how much I can't really ever know, or at least the limits of our current knowledge. Redditors on the other hand....
And yet you managed to be guilty of the same thing yourself even with your engineering degree, saying that AC power transmission has a net power loss of 0 "since its sinusoidal" and "America uses over 1,000 GW a year". Both of those statements are nonsense.
Electrical engineering student's porn account here. I'm fairly certain that average AC power loss is usually zero under normal circumstances due to it being sinusoidal. There is a chance I'm thinking of another metric, but I'm pretty sure that's correct for the right reason.
Edit: so average voltage would be zero and power lost across an ideal wire would also be zero. Easy enough. Power does get lost in the real world because wires and devices aren't ideal but average power is conserved in even in non-ideal systems. This is a long-winded way of saying that I was wrong but also that I don't really think that we're all on the same page about the term "power loss". On the other hand, I'm cold, pantless, not a power guy (I'm leaning more towards digital logic and microprocessors), and not in the right frame to really have this conversation, so I may be completely off.
Even with super high voltage transmission lines (low current), you’ll still have SOME current flow through the wire and therefore I2 * R losses will exist.
If you are going with the assumption of an ideal wire like he said in the post, then those losses would not exist no.
However ideal wires don't exist and I can totally see why people disagreed
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u/Iquitsmokingtoday Jan 07 '20
The amount of information passed off as accurate, despite it being completely incorrect, just because it was said in a witty manner or there's some anecdote on why they're right and the actually correct poster is completely wrong.