Would AC power = VxIxSin Φ be more accurate than Cosine Φ ?

Faraday and Maxwell both agree that voltage must be at right angles to flux/current for real power. 

No, they don't, neither spatially nor temporally. Voltage and current (and their field equivalents E (units volts per metre) and J or D (units of amps passing through a square metre)  will be in phase if energy is not just bouncing about reactively. If by flux you really mean only the magnetic sort, then that is spatially at right angles to current, but temporally in phase with it.

(generally a straight conductor is surrounded by circles magnetic flux, and changing flux will introduce a current flow in any loop of conductor that surrounds it.)

For power to be transmitted without loss, you may have a transverse electromagnetic wave, with E and H at right angles to each other, and also to the direction of energy flow, but they are temporally in phase.  This is storage, not dissipation, and the addition of resistive loss to the transmission line breaks the quadrature.

If you introduce metal wires or plates you can trap the wave between them, and this may be analysed either as a transmission line for a guided wave, or if you prefer may be described by the currents in, and voltages between, the metal wires. 

There are other solutions to Mawell's equations as well, and these explain surface waves, metal waveguides, optic fibres and all kinds of wire and aperture antennas perfectly well. 

I'm unclear what mystery you see in what you title "electromagnetic light" - are you postulating any other kind ?

Mike. 

Thanks Mike,

The problem I am trying to resolve is where do quantum Var's come from? as EM energy is real and needs a 3D volume of something to be absorbed into.

What do you mean by a quantum Var ? EM energy is only finally absorbed when it is converted to heat or mechanical motion on arrival at it destination. (or if some of it is lost on the way getting there, but that is just loss, and can be considered to be a little bit of load smeared out along the transmission path  )

Be aware that the photon model, being the quanta of EM, it unlikely to be helpful for any situation where the frequency is low enough that wavelength of Q cycles is long compared to the size of the experiment, At this point field and potential will be the more concise analysis - .i,e, when the photons probabability density does not have its peak and then fall substantially to zero all well within the volume of interest, you can no longer talk about it being 'in' there. If you like a metaphor, it overhangs at the edges.

The energy of a photon is proportional to the frequency it represents, so the product of physical extent and amplitude is constant. (here we mean energy amplitude, so watts not voltage )  The better the frequency is known, the lower the amplitude and the longer the soliton (burst of wiggles) per photon.

Mike.

A fun calculation is to consider just how far an electron moves at the melting point of copper if one electron per atom does a slight motion in the direction of the current (50Hz..), and compare that to the atomic spacing. 

Photons interact with electrons to do (be part of) the jiggling. More fun to get the numbers to join up for a 'transformer' arrangement (lots of fun when rf folks and photonic folks try explaining stuff)

I think the 'marbles in a tube' view of currents while helpful up to at most perhaps 'A' level, can be very misleading. In practice everything that happens is a very small perturbation compared to the "at rest"  thermal motion.  Folk tend to forget that there are approximately ten atoms to the nanometre in typical metallic solids, and several volts are needed to tug an electron out of orbit from a single nucleus - the sort of forces we can exert from the outside on bulk material are tiny compared to those holding the whole field of classical chemistry together.

Only in carefully treated semiconductors, where the free electron density is 4 to 6 orders of magnitude lower do you get mean free paths that are large numbers of atomic diameters long, and depletion regions up to a few microns.

One needs to be able to see the photonic, electronic, and fields and waves approaches as different  views of the same situation but each approach performing better over different spatial ranges, and at 50Hz in a wire I agree the electron as a localised particle that obeys a ballistic model is not the best choice, thought inside a cathode ray tube with a 50Hz modulation on the beam current perhaps it would be.

Similar issues arise with the atomic behaviour of gasses - looking at any sensible volume of gas we can talk about a pressure on the container walls. However, for any one atom mostly it buzzes about and strikes other gas molecules, and perhaps occasionally, the container sides, while any small enough area of the pressure vessel wall  is not seeing a uniform pressure, but more of an irregular  hailstorm of impacts, that only on average exert a constant pressure.
Mike

If one does the calcs the 'marbles' never leave the atom for a 50Hz rupture current in copper. Partly the calc is to illustrate how we tend to use the visualisations way out of context, and fail to realise how we are 'slaves' to our chosen mathematics (theorem/law) when there are many alternate, equally valid (mathematical duals) approaches. It could be infinite 'fields' and waves all the way, instead of infinitesimal point particles, or even Wavelets .

Likewise we get imaginary particles (holes) that behave quite differently to the missing electrons they represent.

It reminds me of a university seminar question asking how there can be a probability distribution in a band gap [where, surely, probability = 0], and the lecturer being unable to explain the competing concepts and the careful misdirections to avoid awkward questions.

Many of our concepts are part of a circular system (e.g. photons only 'exist' as quanta by interacting with specific atomic phenomena with quantised levels, we can't measure the on-way speed of light, etc. Single photons don't have a blackbody temperature, cf single molecules don't have a temperature/pressure either. )

Getting back to the angle thing, we perhaps aren't as clear as we need to be about which angle is being considered, how we define it (time based oscillatory activity of independent 1d features), and the alternates that may show up to confuse folks in our chosen [clearly stated] representation?

If one does the calcs the 'marbles' never leave the atom for a 50Hz rupture current in copper. Partly the calc is to illustrate how we tend to use the visualisations way out of context, and fail to realise how we are 'slaves' to our chosen mathematics (theorem/law) when there are many alternate, equally valid (mathematical duals) approaches. It could be infinite 'fields' and waves all the way, instead of infinitesimal point particles, or even Wavelets .

Likewise we get imaginary particles (holes) that behave quite differently to the missing electrons they represent.

It reminds me of a university seminar question asking how there can be a probability distribution in a band gap [where, surely, probability = 0], and the lecturer being unable to explain the competing concepts and the careful misdirections to avoid awkward questions.

Many of our concepts are part of a circular system (e.g. photons only 'exist' as quanta by interacting with specific atomic phenomena with quantised levels, we can't measure the on-way speed of light, etc. Single photons don't have a blackbody temperature, cf single molecules don't have a temperature/pressure either. )

Getting back to the angle thing, we perhaps aren't as clear as we need to be about which angle is being considered, how we define it (time based oscillatory activity of independent 1d features), and the alternates that may show up to confuse folks in our chosen [clearly stated] representation?