I live near a huge windfarm, but my electric company doesn’t offer wind power.
How is that windfarm plugged into the grid? Is the electricity market just shares and not about the actual electricity produced and I’m technically using the wind power? Or does the windfarm physically “plug in” somewhere very distant to me? Since the wind is pretty continuously producing electricity will I never be picked to be in a rolling blackout? How do you even have those energy saving planned partial grid blackouts when there’s windpower?
I feel like this post really embodies how a five yr old would ask questions. Any response to any piece of my questions is welcomed! Thank you
In: Technology
The analogy of electricity like water flowing in a pipe is useful in a way to explain the hardware and systems involved in making an electrical grid.
But when we talk about the market for electricity, a clearer analogy is to think of energy like water being held in a lake. Energy producers “make” water and pump it into the lake, and energy users “draw” water from the lake. The producer does not care or know if the energy they are providing to you comes from them. The market is such that the producer is paid for how much water they put in and users pay for how much water they draw out. When a buyer purchases energy from a company, then the company is obligated to put in that amount of energy into the system and gets paid correspondingly.
The planned outages etc are what happens when there are too many users and too few producers (at some point) and the lake level starts to drop. The distributor of energy (usually regulated) has to shut off some users to stop the lake from completely drying out and causing more problems. How they do that is usually based on certain agreed upon procedures – whether or not the producer you’re paying is on or off line doesn’t really matter.
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