As far as I know the electric power is produced „fresh“ and transported everywhere via wires. If I turn on a light in my house the demand goes slightly up. Does the power plant then automatically produce more electric power? Or are there huge batteries somewhere that deal with the different demands?
In: Technology
The grid can’t respond instantly to every change in demand. It’s not unusual for the voltage to fluctuate by 10 volts over any given day. So when you turn on the light in your house, everybody else gets a bit less, and their lights dim a bit. You can really notice this as the dryer turns on. When the voltage starts dropping too low, extra power plants will be brought online. Where I live, demand drops in the evening, and you can see every day when one of the plants goes offline and the lights dim at exactly 10pm every night.
Imagine you’re catering for 100 people. You go to serve dinner and, actually, 101 people turn up. It’s fine, as everyone will just get 1% less food, you can make it stretch. Then, the next day, you make enough for 101 people.
That’s the broad idea. You turning on a lightbulb is insignificant for the grid as a whole so
it can cope by just sharing it all out as usual. They monitor everyone’s energy usage and if the demand on the grid increases (i.e more people turn up to eat) they produce more power.
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