I know it’s sometimes made via kinetic energy rotating magnets but that might be to complicated an explanation. Trying to figure out an easy way to explain the generation part to some kids!
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Electricity is moving electrons in a wire.
There are many ways to generate electricity. All of them, simply put, push electrons. Moving a magnet near a wire pushes the electrons in the wire. Doing so quickly, over and over again, is more or less how our power plants make electricity.
Solar panels use very thin layers of materials, arranged in just the right way to allow electrons to get knocked between layers by light. This causes light to knock electrons from one layer to another, moving them.
Certain chemical reactions can carry electrons from one wire to another. This is how batteries work.
The original electrical generators would physically move electrons. For instance, the van de graaf generator (google it – you’ve seen one) uses a conveyor belt to physically pull electrons from one wire to the other.
There are some less common ways of making electricity, but these are the two biggest ones.
Electricity and magnetism are related forces.
If you take a conductor, and a changing magnetic field, it will produce current in the conductor through a process called electromagnetic induction. Essentially what happens is that the electrons are attracted to the magnetic field, and that causes them to move – and current is just moving electrons. So if you take a bunch of wire and subject it to a changing magnetic field, you get electricity.
The simplest generators are a static loop of wire with a rotating magnet inside of them. All you need to do is provide some sort of energy to make the magnet rotate – like a human turning a crank.
Kid-friendly explanation: if you move electrons near a magnet, the electons get a push. If the electrons are free to move, the push gets them moving and moving electrons is electricity.
Easy source of electrons that can move: a wire. Metal has lots of electrons that are pretty easy to move around. If you hold a wire and wave it past a magnet you get electricity in the wire. Give a kid a coat hanger and a bar magnet and have them go to town, they’re making electricity.
A conventional power generator is just a way of moving a *lot* of wire past a *lot* of magnets, but the physics is exactly the same.
At the simplest possible level, electrical generators are just *pumps* for electricity.
A normal pump takes in electrical energy to push something else, a generator just reverses that process, it is pushed by some outside source of energy, be it high pressure steam or falling water or wind, and then uses that to push electricity around. You take the energy from outside sources, and then put it into the electrical system.
Copper is a dense, soft metal with a lot of tiny, energetic electrons in it. If you bundle a lot of copper together in wires and wrap them around a magnet, then spin the magnet the quick positive/negative change of the magnet makes the tiny electrons ‘jiggle’ about. They can ‘jiggle’ more easily on the surface of the copper, which is why we use copper wires, not a big solid block of copper. The jiggly electrons near the magnets pass on their energy to the electrons further away and so on, along the copper wires to something like a lightbulb. There, they make the tiny electrons in the filament of the bulb jiggle too, making them very hot. They get so hot that they ‘incandesce’ or glow brightly. The bulb filament releases clumps of electrons which are called ‘photons’ which is light.
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