The operation of an electrical grid is a balancing act – you have to produce *exactly* the same amount of energy as is needed, otherwise bad things happen. I don’t understand how does this rule apply on anything other than the largest scale of things.
I understand that *in general* you can predict a higher load on the grid during Monday evening when everyone is at home, and plan your energy production accordingly. But a power station can’t predict smaller load fluctuations like if I decide to turn on or off my TV at this very moment.
So, how does the electrical grid cope with unpredictable load that differs from the planned & expected one?
In: Engineering
Size:
When you start your car engine, the battery can’t feed the lamps or radio. Now, connect 1000 cars in parallel and every car can now start and stop the engine randomly and the load per battery stays more or less the same.
Imagine every electric plant is a car, and every engine starter is a factory. To achieve the 1000 cars effect, you need a big grid with 100s plants. You don’t rely onto your own region or even nation. The entire Europe is cross-connected so the entire continent averages out. It even benefit of 5 time zones, so even the day-night cycle is averaged.
Last: each plant is sized to be efficient at 75% output. If the average request goes up, you just throttle some plants to 100%, you waste some efficiency but the grid will hold.
Very last: old plants are kept in “reserve”, almost shut, but ready to go if an emergency arise.
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