My assumption is that electrical providers own their generators. So when they generate electricity, it goes out into this massive repository that is the electrical grid and then all consumers take at will from it.
So how do electrical providers keep track of “their” electricity and who is consuming it? Electrical production has to meet demand in real time so how do providers know who is responsible for generating how much at any given moment?
And how do the companies that own the power lines factor into this? Are they at all related to the power generation companies or are the latter just customers?
In: Engineering
Consumers consume and the power distribution company logs that
Producers produce and the power distribution company logs that
There are going to be a couple fast response plants that are tasked with keeping the grid stable but if you’ve selected a green energy producer then they just produce what they can when they can.
At the end of the month the power distribution company checks the numbers and says “Your customers bought 1.2 MWh of power, you only generated 1.1 MWh, you need to pay another generating company for 0.1 MWh of power”
Its too clunky to attempt in real time especially since you can’t really control how much power you get from your solar panels and wind turbines, so its settled either monthly or quarterly and the production companies have to buy/sell generation credits to make it line up, but since you generally pay a bit more to the green provider, they can buy from the guy running on oil and still make a bit of a profit.
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