Since, and unless electricity has properties I’m not aware of, it’s not possible for electric power plants to produce only and EXACTLY the amount of electricity being drawn at an given time, and not having enough electricity for everyone is a VERY bad thing, I’m assuming the power plants produce enough electricity to meet a predicted average need plus a little extra margin. So, if this understanding is correct, where does that little extra margin go? And what kind of margin are we talking about?
In: Engineering
It’s true that the classical grid (ignoring any batteries) produces exactly the amount of power that was being used. So if you imagine one gigawatt nuclear power plant and let’s say it’s running it 700 MW and you turn on 100 W load, then suddenly instantaneously that powerplants can reproducing , one 7,000,000,100 W and there’ll be an instantaneous tiny increase in the amount of torque being delivered to the generator. Impact because the generator armature is generally very massive, with very high rotational, inertia and very high angular momentum, smaller load can be switching and out and not even cause the generator slow down measurably. Now if you switch and say 100 MW load so you turn on a aluminum smelting furnace well the generator is going to be tending to slow down a little bit, but the generator is designed so that if it slows down even slightly, said more steam is applied and the speed is kept constant and the voltage is kept constant. More heat will need to be applied to the boiler by increasing nuclear activity or increasing the amount of oil or coal or gas being burned.
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