A quiet insurgency is rewiring our world. We're hitting a critical moment when the inefficiency of constant AC/DC conversion is becoming too convoluted to ignore, especially as data centers strain capacity, renewable projects multiply, and extreme weather events expose grid vulnerabilities. We've been forcing fundamentally 21st-century DC technologies (like solar panels, EVs, and computing devices) through a 19th-century AC system, and we're long overdue for a change.

Consider the path electricity takes to reach your laptop. In the traditional grid, power from a gas plant is generated as AC (alternating current), travels to your home, and undergoes just one conversion to DC (direct current) in your laptop's power brick. Simple enough.

But with modern solar and home batteries, that journey becomes absurd. DC power from solar panels converts to AC for your home wiring, back to DC for battery storage, to AC again to travel through your house, and finally back to DC at your laptop. Four conversions instead of one, with 5-10% of energy lost as heat at each step — meaning 20-40% of original power could be wasted before it reaches your laptop. Now multiply this inefficiency across billions of DC devices.

This isn’t a new problem — we’ve been here before. In the 1880s, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla fought the original “Current War” over how to electrify America. Edison backed DC, arguing for a simple, direct system. Tesla and Westinghouse championed AC, which could use transformers to transmit power over long distances. AC won decisively — and for good reason. In an era before modern power electronics, there was simply no practical way to transform DC voltage levels for long-distance transmission.

That victory shaped our entire energy infrastructure for over a century. The irony? Nearly everything we plug in today — from smartphones to LEDs to GPUs — runs on DC power. Meanwhile, modern high-voltage DC (HVDC) technology has actually become superior to AC for long-distance power transmission. Plus, most renewable power generation would function much smoother if DC-native. Edison's core insight about DC being the more natural way to generate, store, and use electricity wasn't wrong. It was just 140 years too early.

Now, over a century later, our AC grid is facing unprecedented strain from all directions. Data centers are demanding more power than entire cities, while EV charging stations are multiplying faster than utilities can handle. Add to this the surge in requests from DC-native renewable energy projects trying to come online, and frequent climate events stressing our co-dependent AC infrastructure. The result is multi-year waiting lists for grid connections, billions in AC/DC conversion losses, and a system buckling under its own complexity.

But a new order is taking shape - one where DC power finally comes into its own. This transition will unfold differently across the globe. In China, where the state controls the energy sector, massive HVDC projects are already being mandated from the top down. But in more fragmented energy markets like the US, we can't afford to wait for national infrastructure bills or utility mandates (which have every incentive to maintain the 'current' order).

Instead, DC will emerge through grassroots innovation and localized solutions that offer better reliability, lower conversion losses, and natural integration with renewables. As these DC islands multiply and interconnect, they will collectively lay the groundwork for a more resilient, efficient power system. Eventually, this could lead to a fundamentally different kind of grid — one where power flows more freely across unified transmission systems without the need for complex synchronization required by AC. But this transformation will come from the bottom up, not the top down.

We’re already seeing early pioneers putting this to practice. DC Grid, a startup focused on data centers and fast EV charging stations, is building entirely DC-native microgrids — eliminating the headache of working with utilities and creating a new era of micro utility. We imagine similarly DC-native approaches to new factory construction, housing developments, large electronics like elevators, to specialized data center build outs.

This grassroots movement isn’t about replacing the AC grid overnight. It’s about building a parallel DC infrastructure from the bottom up. This quiet revolution will start on our rooftops and in our garages and spread until, one day, Edison’s core insight that power should be simple and efficient will be realized in a way he never could have imagined.

We’d love to hear from you if you’re a part of this movement.