Disentangling Facts From Fantasy In the World of Edison and Tesla

But it was legitimately a problem back in the day. The reason was twofold:

1) There's no good way to generate DC using a mechanical system. So while something like a solar cell will generate you DC, a mechanical generator won't, at least not without some fiddling and then not as efficiently as AC. These days, not a big deal, we have good devices to convert from one to the other quite efficiently. However when the current wars were happening, DC generation wasn't as good as AC generation. You see it to this day: Cars use alternators (as in alternating current) to generate power, despite being DC devices. The alternator then has a rectifier bridge to turn it in to (pulsed) DC power, which the battery helps clean up.

2) There was no good way to convert DC voltage. AC is exceedingly easy to convert with simple technology: A transformer. You can step it up or down with some wraps of wire, and it is fairly efficient to boot. No such luck with DC. There just isn't a good way to step it up with the technology they had back then. As such you needed generators close to the home. You couldn't run massive voltages, far too dangerous (and as a practical matter difficult to generate directly) and you couldn't go for long runs because of impedance loss. These days thyristors can do the trick nicely but they are 1950s tech, and the ones that can do HVDC are more recent.

Were we to rebuild the grid these days, DC might well make sense (though it does have some other issues that need to be considered). However during the current wars, Tesla really did have it right. The technology was there to make AC work well, not DC.

Edison really was fighting for DC because of his invested infrastructure, not because it was a superior technology at the time.

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