If electrical providers share the same power lines, how do they know who is consuming whose power?

Question

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

Answer 1

Electricity is “fungible” which means that any given unit of it is indistinguishable from any other. This means that it doesn’t matter. If you take out 15kW from the power grid then your electric provider has, somewhere, put 15kW in.