What is actually happening inside the generator, and where is it drawing the electrons that make up the current from?
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So basically, there’s copper coil’s around a piece it’s rotating and as it’s rotating around these copper coils, it’s getting electrons from the copper, and turning it into electricity
The rotational force of the turbine is connected to the rotor and stator of a generator. The moving rotor creates an electro-magnetic force (using magnets and coils), which creates electricity.
Essentially, a mechanical force creates an electrical current.
If you take a large coil of wire, and you place it around a spinning magnet, the electrons in the wire get attracted to the magnet. Since the magnet is spinning, the place where the electrons are attracted to keeps moving, so the electrons move back and forth in the wire. The electrons moving back and forth creates what is called “alternating current.”
So to create electricity from rotation, you need to have a coil of wire and a magnet. And you use whatever rotational force you have (steam turbine, windmill, water turbine) to make the magnet turn.
If you spin a magnet next to a loop of copper wire, electrical current will flow around the loop. This happens because a moving magnetic field creates an electric field, and an electric field can push electrons through a circuit. Note that you can spin the magnet next to stationary wire, or spin the wire next to a stationary magnet; the effect is equivalent. If you connect the wire to equipment that uses electricity (such as a lightbulb), then the current generated by the spinning magnet will power the equipment. If you connect a rechargeable battery, the battery can be charged by the spinning magnet. In fact, if you use an external source of voltage to force current through the wire, you can cause the wire to spin the magnet! This is an oversimplification, of course, because many technical details are involved in how to arrange the wire and the connections with respect to the magnet’s orientation.
If you scale this up with big magnets and many loops of copper wire, you can connect to a power grid and supply electricity to buildings. Big magnets need a lot of force to rotate, so usually you need something very strong to turn them. You can use a turbine (basically a fan that gets turned by moving fluid) to get power from air or from water (such as in a dam). You can use big fossil-fuel-burning motors to turn the magnets.
For example, your car has something called an alternator. This is a part of the engine that spins when the engine is running, powered by gasoline combustion. The alternator has a magnet and it has coils of copper wire. The spinning motion of the alternator causes current to flow through the wire, and that current can be used to power electrical components of your car – even recharging the car’s battery.
When a magnet moves past a coil of wire it sort of drags on the electrons in the wire and makes electricity. Simple generators have spinning magnets in the middle and coils of wire in the outside so that lots of magnets move past the coils very fast.
You have a magnetic field in the rotor (either from a permanent magnet or an electromagnet). That magnetic field looks like a paddle and it is rotating around. When it hits the wires on the non rotating winding on the outside the magnetic field wants to push the electrons in the wire. It’s like paddles pumping water. Those electrons then push and generate a current. The electrons push back on the magnetic field (like a magnet push on another magnet without touching) and that’s where the mechanical force on the rotor shows up. You have to keep pushing or the rotor stops rotating.
That effect is used in EVs to brake while generating electricity.
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