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
There is a little known electricity product that producers get paid for, this is called “ancillary services”. This includes a number of things, but two of them are “frequecy regulation” and “voltage regulation”. This means that some plants get paid to throttle their production up and down in near-real-time to maintain the correct voltage and frequency on all parts of the grid, within small margins.
Also, large capacitors can be used for this function, as they respond almost instantly.
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