the things on power lines. we recently had two power outages, and it was because the “transformer blew up”. what does that mean exactly?
In: Engineering
Electricity is the flow of electrons under pressure. If you want more energy, you can use more electrons *or* more pressure. There are upsides and downsides to both.
High pressures (voltages) are way more dangerous, but lose less energy over long distances. More electrons (higher amperages) are safer (and usually easier to use) but lose lots of energy as they travel.
So ideally, we’d have high voltage over long distances but high amperages where we actually *use* the electricity.
To switch between high voltage and high amperage, we use a transformer. It is only a little bit more complicated than a big spiral of wire, but the effect is that high voltage on one side is exchanged for high amperage on the other.
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