Edison Was Right we took a century-long detour because nikola tesla figured out you could wiggle electrons up and down and move voltage around with coils of iron and copper. fair enough — in 1890, that was sorcery. transformers were the only way to change voltage, and the only trick we had was to shake the magnetic field at 60 hz and hope the iron didn’t saturate. but that world’s gone. silicon rules now. wide-bandgap semiconductors — SiC, GaN, etc. — make voltage conversion solid-state. no moving parts, no humming oil tanks. we can step dc up, down, and sideways with converters that waste almost nothing. every load worth caring about — batteries, EVs, LEDs, computers, servers, and modern motor drives — already runs on DC. new generation from solar and wind are also DC — we waste billions flipping it from DC → AC → DC again. moreover, steel-coiled transformers are industrial fossils: 10,000-pound copper monuments with multi-year lead times. they hum because they’re ashamed. if we were building the modern grid from scratch, we’d run it DC from the rooftop to the rack — solid-state all the way down. homes. cars. factories. data centers. ships. bases. no spinning rotors, no reactive power, no harmonic witchcraft. just clean, disciplined electrons flowing in one direction — like God, physics, and Edison intended.
just kidding....unless