how exactly is electricity created and why are there so many ways to do it (ie hydro, coal, nuclear,etc)
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Electricity is just a bunch of electrons moving in the same direction.
There are a bunch of ways to achieve that, but the easiest is wiggling a magnet. When magnets wiggle near electrons, that creates an electromagnetic force, which shoves the electrons along a wire.
This magnet wiggling is how each of the power sources you mentioned works.
Hydro? Get water to spin a magnet near a wire.
Coal? Burn it to boil water to spin a magnet.
Nuclear? Split atoms to heat water to spin a magnet.
There do exist methods (like solar panels) that don’t use spinning magnets. But since spinning magnets is a pretty easy, and surprisingly efficient way of pushing electrons along wires, that’s how most of our generators work.
**Edit:** Just for fun, here’s how a few other methods work.
– Solar panels essentially work from a thing called the photovoltaic effect. Basically, light bonks the electrons off of their atoms and down the wire.
– Batteries work by having atoms that don’t like electrons very much on one side, and atoms that really love electrons on the other side. The atoms that don’t like electrons spit up their electrons, which travel down the wire to the other side where the electron lovers suck them up.
– Thermoelectric generators basically work because the electrons on the hot end are wiggling more than the cold end (because heat is basically just particle wigglyness). The wigglier particles wiggle their way over to the cold side faster than the colds go to the hot, so you end up with electrons moving from the hot side to the cold side overall.
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Lots of electricity production method (coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar thermal, etc.) boil water to use steam power to turn an electrical turbine. They are just heat sources, essentially. These turbine generators use “electromagnetic induction,” which means that when an electromagnetic conductor is moved around in a magnetic field (like being spun around by expanding steam), it creates electricity.
Electricity in powerplants is created by spinning magnets in a coil. The law of induction then forces a current to flow in the coil. A changing magnetic field creates a “whirl” of electrical field.
So that means you can use literally anything that moves to spin the magnet. Burning coal heats water, steam turns turbine. Nuclear decay heats water to make steam. Water or Wind can also drive a turbine.
The only odd one is photovoltaik (wich uses a semiconductor that is set up in a way that light is able to kick an electron over a barrier but it has to take the long way through the consumers to get back) and a few more exotic designs that use similar effects.
I can’t explain everything, but I can simplify one part of your question: basically, all of those work the same way: the water in hydro and the steam in coal and nuclear plants create movement, this movement is changed into electricity.
In a hydro plant, this works like a giant waterwheel that was used to power things like mills and hammers… The water flows down and sets a turbine (or a giant waterwheel) in motion.
Both coal and nuclear power are giant boilers, these create steam and the steam — again — sets a turbine in motion (the white “smoke” that comes out of those big towers (cooling towers) in nuclear plants is steam).
The same goes for a wind turbine, the wind powers a turbine, geothermal energy… As far as I know, solar is the only exception.
Basically, the world is mostly steam-powered. And they say steampunk is unrealistic.
I don’t understand turbines well enough to simplify those, however. They always explained them to us like the dynamo on a bike, that powers the light: the wheel creates movement, this movement somehow creates electricity through a copper coil — I’d appreciate some enlightenment on that as well.
All electric power plants except solar involve spinning a really large magnet inside of a stationary coil of wire. The moving magnetic field induces an electric current in the wire, converting the mechanical energy of the spinning magnet into electrical energy.
So you need to get a really large magnet spinning really fast, and there are a bunch of ways to do that. You can make steam and use the steam to spin a turbine. To do that, you can use a fuel to heat the water (coal, natural gas, nuclear). Or you can use already moving water to spin a turbine directly (hydro). Or you can use wind power to spin the alternator (the magnet and coil of wire) directly.
Solar works totally differently, where a solar panel absorbs photons from the sun, and due to complicated semiconductor physics, causes a voltage to form across the panel modules
Electricity is mostly generated one way.
You turn a crank. Turning the crank is hard (it doesn’t spin freely). It costs energy to turn the crank. Some of the energy spent turning the crank is turned into electricity using magnets and stuff (off topic here).
Question is: how do you turn the crank? Hint: turning it by hand is way too hard.
Wind: you attach the crank to a windmill, and have the wind turn the crank for you.
Water: you attache the crank to a water wheel, and put the water wheel in a water flow. This works poorly. What works better is to build a dam to raise the water lever, then have a pipe running from the top of the dam to the bottom. That pipe will have high pressure water running down it. You put your waterwheel inside that tube. Turns the crank real hard.
Coal: You boil water with some coal. Run the high pressure steam into a pipe. Have a turbine in there (like a windmill, but for pipes. It turns if you blow on it). Attach the crank to the turbine.
You don’t need to use coal to heat up water. It works equally well with natural gas, oil, or a controlled nuclear reaction. Oil, gas and nuclear are just the fuel to boil the water.
Geothermal? You use magma to boil the water. Then, pipe, turbine, crank.
The lights on my bike? The dynamo is just a crank that my wheel rubs against and it forces it to turn.
(Photovoltaic is different. It does quantum shit with electrons. It’s like Power Production 2000. Everything else is totally steampunk).
The reason why we use so many ways to turn a crank is that, some places have a damable river. Some places have a lot of wind. Sometimes you have easy and cheap access to coal and to hell with the poisonous smoke. Sometimes you feel a bit insecure if the entire power production of your nation depends on another country being friendly with you and selling you one fuel or another, so you diversify. Sometimes you need a source of radioactive material to build doomsday devices (Hi France, hi Iran)… So we use plenty of ways to turn that crank and force the magnets to do their things. But it’s all crank-turning really. Except for solar.
Everyone is forgetting about mentioning how smart they are. They have never mentioned generating electricity by rubbing their fuzzy socks on the carpet. I have gone through a lot of socks trying to power my house.
An electric motor uses electrical power to spin a shaft attached to the motor. A room fan is a simple example. You can also generate electricity by instead spinning the shaft of the motor. There’s many ways to spin the shaft with a force. Again with the room fan, you can blow high pressure air across the fan and the motor will generate electricity. Wind power. Or you can spin the fan blades with high pressure water. Hydropower. Or you can use high pressure steam to spin the fan blades (water heated by burning coal or natural gas or using radioactivity). The bigger the fan blades and the motor, the more electrical power you can produce.
Electricity is created by making electrons move back and forth along a wire. The easiest way to do that is to move magnets back and forth against each other.
Outside of solar, all of our electricity generation is *exactly* the same. You have a moving wheel with magnets on the inside, and a stationary wheel of magnets on the outside. You make that inner wheel spin, and as the magnets on it spin against the outer wheel, you generate that electron movement.
The only real difference is how we make that wheel spin. With something like Hydroelectricity, we use water that is stored somewhere high and let it get pulled down by gravity, and we have it run along one side of a wheel that spins the magnets.
With hydro, coal, and other methods, we superheat water and create a lot of steam. That steam tries to rise due to its extreme heat, and spins a wheel as it rises.
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