How do power plants “know” the exact amount of energy that is in demand at a current moment by the millions of consumers within its distribution network since they must produce near this amount of energy (either too much or too little energy being pumped into the grid in comparison to the energy demand has negative consequences, if I understand correctly?)
Is there some sort of signaling system that can tell how much power is being drawn at a exact moment or will be drawn one second/minute into the future?
What happens if too much energy is produced at a current moment compared to the demand?
In: 12
Power plant doesn’t. System operator does. Each day operator estimates how much energy will be needed tomorrow and plans tomorrow according to that. Asks plants for prices, and builds a portfolio for each hour. Some plants have extra responsibilities called primary and secondary frequency control and they need to respond to commands of system operator. Other plants can spare some production for a different price. This works in both directions, system operator can ask power plants to cut production too.
Operator knows this by monitoring frequency of the system then predicting what will happen in the following minutes.
If a plant doesn’t produce enough, meaning what it promised, or produces more than it supposed to do, system enters into an imbalanced state. This mostly happens with renewables since you don’t really know how much sun or wind you will receive.
There are many ways to overcome this.
I’m a software developer working for a company that helps plants to plan their daily operations and helps with electricity market. My knowledge is not deep so it should make a nice ELI5
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