I know that I could choose to buy electricity from a specific provider. If I wanted clean renewable power I could choose a power company that operates hydro plants and they’d take my money every month.
But there are other users on the grid and power plants from different companies feed the grid as well so everyone actually draws power from power plants that aren’t operated by their suppliers, except their respective suppliers get paid for the energy used. This wouldn’t be a big deal if a power company could supply all of its customers. If my hydroelectric supplier has a capacity of 10000 MW and the company’s customers suddenly turned on all their devices, leading to a demand that would exceed capacity, some of the demand would be drawn from other suppliers due to the fact that they’re on the same grid. I don’t understand how other suppliers prevent this. How do they make sure Company A’s customers do not take more power from the grid than Company A can provide so Company B doesn’t inadvertently supply Company A’s customers without getting paid?
In: Economics
They do not care who gets who’s power. When you buy power from a certain provider, they have an obligation to produce enough power for you and their customers but that power could be used by anyone. What matters is that buying from them means that *they will produce it*. The system simply keeps track of whether everyone produced what they promised they would. They cannot promise more power than they can make without fines.
Oh, you can’t.
I mean, the energy you are using is energy. The grid can’t differentiate your green electricity from a coal electricity.
Try to imagine it like this, there are 2 water sources that go in the same river.
When you take water from the river you can’t say for sure whose water you are taking.
BUT if you pay the water to supplier A, then supplier A will be required to augment his production capabilities, to meet all the demands that require “Supplier A” water.
The same applies to green electricity. If supplier G (for green) sells 1 MWh of certified green electricity it means that he has enough renewable production to ensure 1MWh of electrical production.
If many users decide that they want to buy their electricity from Supplier G, he will now sell 2MWh, so he will have to increase his certified electrical production accordingly.
This means he will have to buy more PV plants or more wind turbines until he can certify that he is producing more energy that the one needed by his customers.
Edit: since electricity can’t be easily stored. Right now the grid does this calculation year round.
>How do they make sure Company A’s customers do not take more power from the grid than Company A can provide so Company B doesn’t inadvertently supply Company A’s customers without getting paid?
They sort it out at the end of the month
When you select Company A you pay slightly more for the generation of your electricity than when you were just in the general pool. At the end of the month if customers of Company A paid for 100 MWh but used 120 MWh then Company A will take those funds and then buy 20 MWh from another company that generated power for the general pool, they get to keep the extra premium that you paid over what it would cost to just buy power from Company B to start with which lets them generate a profit to expand their generation overtime.
Its impossible to route actual generation capacity on the grid, and it would get really pesky with the variability of wind and solar so they just square up every X amount of time
Looks like others have answered your main question but here –
> If my hydroelectric supplier has a capacity of 10000 MW and the company’s customers suddenly turned on all their devices, leading to a demand that would exceed capacity, some of the demand would be drawn from other suppliers due to the fact that they’re on the same grid. I don’t understand how other suppliers prevent this.
So others have established that each supplier should have enough generation to match load. Part of that requirement takes into account your peak load. That is the highest load requirement on record for your service area. Additionally, suppliers will have reserve overhead.
In addition to your own reserves – there exists a Reliability Coordinator whose sole job is to make sure that every supplier is meeting their load requirements from a bulk electric grid perspective. They run a marketplace for suppliers to purchase energy in real time (updated every 5 minutes) should they require more.
In some cases, it’s actually cheaper for these suppliers to purchase other people’s energy than generate their own. All sorts of things factor into that but it’s not uncommon for your local load profile to purchase energy in unique combinations from day to day.
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