Direct current (dc) technology has changed significantly over the last 120-plus years since Edison and Westinghouse publicly battled over dc versus ac in the War of Currents. In the 19th century, ac became the dominant power distribution design because transformers cheaply solved the problem of obtaining power more than a kilometer from a centralized power station. Even with more than a century of new technology, we never looked back.
AlLee et al. (2012) studied this question.