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
Some power plants have resistor banks so they can burn off a few MW of excess energy as heat. But almost all grids have one throttle-able plant of some kind which they will throttle down and up as needed. It is only if these plants run out of control authority that they might pull such tricks. There are also dispatchable loads such as pumping water up hill than they can switch on.
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