My understanding is that current flow is like when you have a garden hose that is already full of water: as soon as you open the tap, water instantly comes out of the other end of the hose.
So when a generator pushes current through a power grid, do the electrons move at the speed of light (as many believe), or is it more a case of them all bumping each other along instantaneously,, as with the molecules of water in the garden hose?
In: Physics
I like to think of it as being more like a tube filled with tennis balls. As has been said, there are a bunch of factors that go together to give you the drift velocity. But this is ELI5, so let’s give you a ballpark figure.
In an electric circuit, the electrons are moving *slowly*. For example, in an average 2mm wire with a current of about 1A, the electrons are moving at about 23μm/s. That’s 23 *micro*meters, or 0.000023m every second. To put that into perspective, it would take about 12 hours to travel 1m at that speed. Or, say there was a wire going straight up, and there was heavy rainfall. The water level could actually rise faster than the electrons in the wire.
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