During the day the demand of energy for all countries goes up and down but generally speaking the electric power grid is roughly in balance. How is this done in real time? Once they collect the data about the power demand, how do they decide how to match that demand? Some sources of electricity are maybe better than others (EG: renewable energy > gas turbines > coal) and the single power station might be more or less convenient for some reasons On top of that there is also the option to import energy. How do they decided what to do second by second? Is there any human decision or is it all managed by algorithms?
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Second-by-second there’s no conscious manipulation, it’s all handled at the generator level by the generator controllers. The generators are trying to maintain grid frequency; as grid demand changes the generators will initially speed up or slow down due to the changed load (by a *tiny* amount) then the generator controllers will try to adapt.
Minute-by-minute to hour-by-hour there are grid control centers monitoring the load across the grid and the load at individual power plants relative to their capability. They’re the ones with the list of which generator is better/worse than others under what circumstances and they’ll coordinate with the power stations to add/remove capacity from the grid.
Keep in mind that the only real requirement is that the total connected generator capacity be more than total current grid load…there’s no problem with a 100MW generator only putting out 10MW, that’ll happen “automatically”, a generator can only inject as much power into the grid as the grid can accept. The technical problem comes if you try to get 110MW out of a 100MW generator. Running generators at low load isn’t efficient but it’s technically fine, so the art is trying to make sure you have “enough” connected to the grid to cover any peaks until you can get capacity online without having the load be so low that you’re running inefficiently.
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