I live in a city which has a Coal Power plant. If I wanted to be economical and help “save the planet” I might do something like… turn off my TV (just a very basic example). When I do this I really doubt the power station is thinking “Ah! One less TV, we don’t need this chunk of Coal”. I imagine they will still throw the coal in because they have no idea if I (or my neighbor) might need that power. I understand that on a macro level we can make change by having EVERYONE turn off their TVs the power company will actually use less coal because it had a measurable impact on the grid. But on a micro (one home level) my question is two fold:
1. Assuming everyone else will continue with their normal routines, if I were to flip my home breaker and use 0 power for the next hour or day does that actually do anything for the environment?
2. Like above, say I flip the breaker for 24 hours, the electric company probably still burns the same amount of coal (although I could be wrong…) but I am not being billed for these hours, is the electric company just eating those costs?
Thanks!
In: Engineering
The power plant’s fuel consumption really does go down when you turn your TV off. It’s so small that it’s hard to measure (it’s probably a fraction of a lump of coal) but it’s not zero.
The power plant doesn’t “know” you turned off your TV, it’s just doing whatever it has to to keep the generator spinning at the right speed. You turning off your TV slightly reduces the torque on the generator, which slightly reduces torque on the turbine. The turbine accelerates a tiny bit and the throttle valve on the steam closes a tiny bit to bring the speed back in line. This tiny bit less steam means the boiler pressure goes up a tiny bit and the rate that coal is added to the firebox goes down a tiny bit.
This all happens aggregated over thousands or millions of TVs, but each change really does ripple back through the whole system to actually change the fuel burn.
The power plant really does burn less fuel if only you turn your TV off. In a power plant, there is a large spinning wheel. The engine converts fuel energy to energy stored by the spinning wheel. This energy is then converted to electricity.
When you turn your TV on, the electrical generation instantly increases to compensate. This is a product of physics, and not manually controlled by the power plant. This slows the wheel down ever so slightly, and when the wheel is noticed to have slowed down, the control system burns more fuel to speed it back up.
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