– If the electrical grid overproduces on electricity, what happens to that excess?
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Powerplants don’t really produce any significant excess in the first place. They have a lot of data to try to match current demand patterns. Otherwise they’re just running the generators and incurring wear and tear and maintenance costs for nothing. So if demand is low and expected to be low, they dial down some of generators or even turn them off completely. But turning generators off completely has its own set of problems, because generators also take a long time to turn on from a cold start. So you can’t respond easily to a high demand
As each generator is pushing power into the grid, consumers are pulling power out of the grid. So there’s always this balancing act of power in and power out. The rated electrical standard for US is 110v or 220v for Europe. But the actual live voltage always varies up and down a few volts. Sometimes when you have sudden demand, the voltage drops too low, and you get what’s called a brown out. You still have electricity but it’s not enough juice to get high power items going. It might turn on the lights but the washing machine can’t run.
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