Why Power generation in India is at 50Hz while in America
its 60Hz so is there any advantage/Disadvantage of this ??
Answer Posted / mohit yadav
Early in the history or electricity, Thomas Edison's
General Electric
company was distributing DC electricity at 110 volts in the
United States.
Then Nikola Tesla the devised a system of three-phase AC
electricity at
240 volts. Three-phase meant that three alternating
currents slightly out
of phase were combined in order to even out the great
variations in
voltage occurring in AC electricity. He had calculated that
60 cycles per
second or 60Hz was the most effective frequency. Tesla
later compromised
to reduce the voltage to 110 volts for safety reasons.
Europe goes to 50Hz:
With the backing of the Westinghouse Company, Tesla's AC
system became the
standard in the United States. Meanwhile, the German
company AEG started
generating electricity and became a virtual monopoly in
Europe. They
decided to use 50Hz instead of 60Hz to better fit their
metric standards,
but they kept the voltage at 110V.
Unfortunately,
50Hz AC has greater losses and is not as efficient as 60HZ.
Due to the slower speed 50Hz electrical generators are 20%
less effective
than 60Hz generators. Electrical transmission at 50Hz is
about 10-15% less
efficient. 50Hz transformers require larger windings and
50Hz electric
motors are less efficient than those meant to run at 60Hz.
They are more
costly to make to handle the electrical losses and the
extra heat
generated at the lower frequency.
Europe goes to 220V
Europe stayed at 110V AC until the 1950s, just after World
War II. They
then switched over to 220V for better efficiency in
electrical
transmission. Great Britain not only switched to 220V, but
they also
changed from 60Hz to 50Hz to follow the European lead.
Since many people
did not yet have electrical appliances in Europe after the
war, the
change-over was not that expensive for them.
U.S. stays at 110V, 60Hz
The United States also considered converting to 220V for
home use but felt
it would be too costly, due to all the 110V electrical
appliances people
had. A compromise was made in the U.S. in that 220V would
come into the
house where it would be split to 110V to power most
appliances. Certain
household appliances such as the electric stove and
electric clothes dryer
would be powered at 220V.
My opinion on this is that even though high frequency can
save your cost in manufacture, but it also cause
significant loss in power transmission
especially for large scale power systems. So we need trade-
off.
In the debate 50 - 60 Hz, Prof Trevor Blackburn treated the
subject very well in the case of
transformers, cf below reference, appendix I.2. There are
several loss components that actually
increase with higher frequency (some even increase
proportional to the square of the frequency),
such as hysteresis loss, eddy current loss, losses caused
by harmonics and skin effect.
Higher frequencies would limit the size of transmission
lines and power
transmitted on high voltage transmission systems.
@Thuranga: Indian economy will surpass the US economy by
2050.
| Is This Answer Correct ? | 19 Yes | 10 No |
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